The text of Rob Pardo’s keynote from the Austin Game Conference got me thinking about core values and product teams. Rob is the lead designer at Blizzard, and is responsible for World of Warcraft’s experience, which is fantastic. The simple details that they got right make this game compelling, and frankly have also made it difficult for me to latch on to any other game recently. I’ve tried playing a bunch, including Saint’s Row and Dead Rising, and there always seems to be some simple detail that drives me nuts.

To get back to the matter at hand, as the head of a team of developers, and that team being as large as the largest one I have ever led, I started asking myself what our core values are. These wouldn't map directly to Rob's as "concentrated coolness" doesn't really apply to Java code. I can't decide whether these kind of core values are best left to organically develop or whether they should be something that I decide on and then attempt to instill into our efforts. It seems like they would be truer if I let them develop, then codify them. Regardless, I think this keynote text is something everyone should read, whether interested in things World of Warcraft or not.

Just a note from your blog curator to say that I haven’t abandoned you. Rest assured I am very busy, and learning a lot, and also working very very hard. I want to get back to daily updates, and hopefully that will become more reasonable and possible soon. Until then, I say, cheers.

Metallica Capitulates to iTunes. “Metallica has decided to compromise the artistic integrity of its albums in return for materialistic gain from digital sales of its singles.” Well, hahahahaha. P.S. haha.

Update: The live tracks are only available if you buy the whole album, which you undoubtedly already have. Asshattery continues.

This video is just insane.  Plenty more of Birdy Nam Nam over at YouTube.  They also have some video content over at their pretty cool site. Anyone know where I can buy their stuff stateside?

Apple releases the MacBook. Anyone want to buy a 15" Macbook Pro?

Well, I've been working on this new project, that I can't really talk about too much here, for about six months now.  I will say, however, that I very much believe that, on any Web project, you should be able to get some kind of release out the door in six months.  That kind of thinking, however, doesn't take into account the manner in which large corporations go about making decisions and executing on those decisions. It does frustrate me that we are still pretty far from having some sort of public version of this project, but I understand the world I am living in at work.

Having said that, we are now getting into the building stage, and I am looking for people who want to work on something webby. I need skilled Web Developers who have solid J2EE experience, preferably with some JSP experience. We are working on something that is really cool, and the team and environment is unique and fun. Get in touch with me if this sounds like something you would be interested in.

Our team moved over to Williams Street today. I have to say, it is a very different, and much cooler environment than the two cube farms I lived in before this. I am so happy.

From Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, Consensus Web Filters. In addition to an excellent write up on the emergence of this category of Web site, it includes a pretty comprehensive list of sites that fit into this category. One great filter, which I have sort of become addicted to, but which is not mentioned in his piece, is TailRank. TailRank has gone from being a site I was not familiar with to one of my ten most visited sites in less than a month.

For me, the purpose of these sites is not the "surf by proxy" filtering that most people seem to use them for. I like the daily scour for information that I currently pursue. These sites give me ancillary links and perspective from the community that surfing alone could never get me. Considering how smart this community seems to be in most cases, it would be foolish of me not to ingest the community's perspectives and additional datapoints that folks provide.

Ma.gnolia extends social bookmarking to groups and contacts, with basic social network functionality. I like it. Some of the design choices, like the way they chose to display groups in group listing pages, annoyed me a little. Having said that, I’m all over this, imported my delicious bookmarks, and am going to rip it up over there for a few days and see how it fits. Oh yeah, and ajax stuff and blah blah blah.

“We have upgraded your MacBook Pro from a 1.83GHz processor to a 2.0GHz processor at no additional cost!” Thanks Apple!!

Slanket. Arriving at the Occhialini Atlanta base of operations in 10 days to 3 weeks.

Fox to Release High-Def Movie DVDs 60 Days after Theater Release. It seems like, over time, the movie industry is getting around to dealing with the issues that I raised in this post two years ago. Good for them.

Extra Tasty is a social network enabled drink recipe site. I like the feature where you can enter the items you have in your bar, and it shows you the drinks you can make from them. Another great idea from our friends at skinnyCorp.

Blizzard released patch 1.9 for World of Warcraft yesterday. Something Awful has great, and funny patch notes commentary. My guild went into ZG, one of the mid-level endgame instances, last night, and discovered that the patch introduced some new bugs. These large trash mobs, Beserkers, fear after a certain amount of time into the encounter. Last night, this fear caused some large percentage of the party to crash, which was annoying and caused one wipe. Additionally, it seemed that a couple of the ZG bosses were buffed while others were made easier. (Tiger Boss for one.) Finally, Hakkar, the end boss, which was a pretty easy encounter for us previously, proved to be very difficult. I am not sure if this was a bug of some sort, or he was buffed. Overall, my patch experience was a negative one, which has pretty much been the norm with Blizzard. I hate that all my UI add ons stop working too, and I wish they would foster a better relationship with add on developers.

I’ve been pretty quiet here the last few months. I think this hiatus of sorts is over now, for a variety of reasons. One of them, however, is that I have accepted a new position working on a new project within Turner. I am no longer the lead technologist for PGA.com. The new position is exciting, and a bit scary in its proportions, but I am not allowed to discuss it in this forum. PGA.com was a great experience for me, three years filled with challenges, working with and for some great people, and learning a whole lot about golf and golf scoring. I think my final count was seven different golf scoring systems written from scratch. When the Masters approaches this Spring, I will feel a tinge of nostalgia.

Here’s wishing everyone, and their loved ones, a very happy and healthy New Year.

Swedish Campground

The new X-Men trailer makes me believe that this series of films is beginning to truly approach the embodiment of the comic series in the manner I had hoped for all along.

CoverBuddy lets you use your PSP as an iTunes remote over WiFi.