DonPerrin.Com

Tank and armored fighting vehicle design has always been an interest of mine. I served in the Canadian Army in the branch that maintains these sorts of vehicles, and even worked in a rebuild and overhaul facility in Montreal for Leopard tanks and other large military armored vehicles. It was a fun time!

At the time, the tanks being rebuilt were the Leopard C1 (a Canadian variant of the German Leopard 1). Many revered to it as the “Panzer VII”, as it was Germany’s first tank design since World War II. It intrigued me enough to see what they’d done differently from their World War II tanks that I began to dig. I found an interesting watershed in design theory half-way through the war. Germany started with the PzKw I and II (PzKw stands for Panzer Kampfwagen, or simply Panzer, and the number refers to the model number of the tank design). These were training tanks that were pressed into service because newer tanks were not availble in greater numbers. The PzKw III was the main maneuver tank and the PzKw IV was the heavier infantry-support tank. The PzKw I was quickly ditched as obsolete, and the PzKw II was used for reconnaissance only as the war progressed. Everything changed in 1943, when Germany introduced the PzKw VI Tiger I tank. It was a huge beast of a vehicle, with a gun that could kill any armored vehicle in the known world. The PzKw V Panther tank (don’t ask me why they’re out of order) came shortly after, with another excellent gun and huge amounts of armor.

So the design philosophy had switched from maneuver tanks that favored the attack to battlefield dominance tanks that could rely on their armor for protection and dominate an area with a very big gun. What was the watershed that changed the philosophy? Many say it was Germany’s encounters with the new Soviet tank, the T-34. It was certainly a shock, and probably the design impetus for the Panther, but the Tiger was planned and was nearly in the field before the Germans became aware of the T-34. So what made them go from the maneuver tank of the PzKw I, II, III and IV to the behemoth of the Pzkw VI Tiger I. It’s something that makes me go “hmmmmmm….” I’d love to hear from anyone out there with ideas on why this occurred. Was it a change at the head of the Tank Design authority in OKW (army headquarters)?

As to the PzKw VII (it’s not really labeled that, but it feels like a natural extension from the Panther and Tiger) Leopard had some fantastic innovations. It sipped gasoline compared to the previous monsters, and it flew across the battlefield. An experienced maintenance crew, with the assistance of the tank crew, could change the engine, complete, and get the tank back on the road in a matter of 30 minutes. No kidding. 30 minutes to disconnect, remove the old engine, put in the new engine, reconnect it and drive off. Truly amazing. It had one of the first computers for stabilizing the gun while the tank moved (an analog computer, at that!) It was quite a tank, but it eventually became obsolete. Still, it gives insight into the minds of the philosophy makers in the German army. It seems that they went back to maneuver over protection in this design.

So there you have it. Why the big change half-way through WWII for the German tank design philosophy. Inquiring minds want to know!

The Fax is dead. Well, it’s not really, but it should be. I hate faxes. They hate me. It’s a mutual thing.

Truth be told, I work as a computer contractor in the contruction industry, and the fax is king here. I want it to die,  but I’m a peon and the fax is king. What can the fax do? It can capture a signature. That’s it. It’s the only useful thing that a fax can do. If you print a document, then sign it, then fax it, then the receiver will have the document with the signature. Because of this, most documents are faxed. Why, because it captures a signature, I told you! But what if the document doesn’t have a signature? Fax it anyways. It’s what we do.

Emailing a PDF document to the recipients is faster, cleaner, and more likely to arrive. It comes in a format that can be reused (as in, you can reuse the words and images in a PDF file in other files, but not if they come from a fax). You can scan your signature and reuse it over and over again on Word documents, then save as a PDF and send that. What’s the big deal? I guess what I just wrote there is black magic to some. Creating a PDF? From a Word document? Whaaaaat? Yes, it can be done (it’s standard in Word 2010 and a free download add-on can make it easy in Word 2007). Simply “Save As” the document as a PDF.

Yeah, but how do I get my signature in the first place? Scan your signature and save it as a PDF (pretty standard with most scanners). Open the PDF file in Adobe PDF Reader. Go to the scan of your signature. Go to the Tools menu, select  Select & Zoom, and choose the  Snapshot Tool. The cursor will change to a “cross”. Marquis (or drag and select) the area that you want to capture (in this case, the scanned signature). Once you let go of the mouse button, the area selected is copied to the computer’s clipboard. A message will display that “The Selected Area Has Been Copied”.

To place the captured image into the word document, place the cursor in the word document at the place you want the signature to appear, and select Paste (or <CTRL> V) to paste the image in place. You can resize the signature image in the Word document by dragging the lower right corner of the image in to make smaller, or out to make larger. Save this file for later use. You can open it later, select the signature image, copy it, then paste it into new documents. Easy as pie.

Apparently pie isn’t that easy, as we still have to fax things. Faxes arrive dead. PDFs arrive, ready to go to work for the recipient. Still, fax is king and I am a  peon. Life in the contruction industry goes on.

It turns out we want less boxes that do more things. I heard someone say that young people don’t wear watches any more because they only do one thing: tell time. Cell phones that are just phones are few and far between, and seem to be becoming dinosaurs. Despite keeping and wearing a watch, I am liking the trend.

I have a ReplayTV digital video recorder (DVR) from 2004. It works and it was cheap, although it still costs $10 a month for a subscription to keep it going. It records up to 36 hours of standard TV, and since I have basic cable and a tube TV that is still nice, I don’t need better. Still, the latest offering from TIVO is tempting me. Exciting me, even. The TIVO Premiere offers a high-def DVR with 45 hours of recording. At first glance, that’s only slightly better than my 36 hours, but that’s 45 hours of HD recording, or 400 hours of standard recording (and that’s a little better than what I’ve got!) It records TV shows, exactly like you’d want, but it also allows you to surf the web and play online content (like YouTube or other movies). You won’t need a cable box for digital cable, as it does that for you. It has USB ports, so you can put in an external hard drive with recorded movies and you can watch those, too. Finally, it has the ability to stream Netflix movies (something we now do through a PS3) and anything from your iTunes account. It sounds like this will be a good convergence for me. It’s $299.00 list, but another $200 to get a lifetime subscription (to avoid the $10 per month). I’m interested, and sorely tempted.

Update: I didn’t in fact go with the Tivo Premiere. It did everything I wanted, except that it was incompatible with my cable company’s On-Demand service. Instead, I went with the cable company’s DVR. All the other functions that I laud Tivo Premiere for have been met by a new AppleTV. I’ll update again once I’ve used the whole shebang for a month or two.

The Peace Operations Training Simulator seemed like a good idea at the time. Militaries everywhere use simulators to aid in training for war situations. In the modern era, however, most militaries are finding themselves in, as the US calls it, Operations Other Than War (OOTW). Way back, the term was Police Action, but Korea kind of wrecked that term for us. Simulators for war are quite mature, and can model all sorts of infantry, armor, artillery, air support or other combat operations. What they don’t handle well are civilians and what they do. Several even model civilians as soldiers with no firepower that wander around and get in the way. A Peace Operations Training Simulator would model civilian displaced persons, refugees, aid organizations, camps, collection points, food and water distribution centers, and the whole gamut of criminal and justice actions and reactions that happen throughout the operational area.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In 2005, Dr. Ken Eyre and Peter Dawson of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, then of Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, Canada, were putting together a proposal for such a simulator. The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre is a center of excellence for Peace Operations training, recognized world-wide. Dr. Eyre and Mr. Dawson are two of the finest minds in simulators, having designed combat simulators for several first-world militaries, and were also early members of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, become world experts in training for failed state operations. I was asked to be the technical/engineering lead on the team. It was fascinating work. Unfortunately, it went nowhere.

Governments seem to have a hard time training soldiers in other than war. They understand war, and they can get good at it. Understanding peace, and fragile peace in a failed state is a very tricky thing. Ask any Peacekeeper, or any NGO or Aid worker. Just because the war’s over doesn’t mean the killing has stopped, or that things are improving. The idea of training with a simulator to improve that training sounds like a fantastic idea, until the “how” comes up. As far as I can tell, governments keep going to their military simulator guys, but keep treating civilians as targets, not as agents in both the problems and the solutions. We’re long past time for a change.

Microsoft Word is not a layout program. It would like you to think that it is, and it has a myriad of features to try to do just that, but the fact is, Word is not a layout program. Sadly, most people must use Word to do page layout, as they have no other tool to do what they need. It’s a frustrating experience for many, as columns refuse to line up, tabbed and spaced paragraphs look inconsistent, and line spacing has a mind of its own.

Still, Microsoft Word can be used to make your documents look quite professional with a few hints. The easiest hard way to make your documents look good is to learn how to use Paragraph Styles. You’ve seen the drop down menu for font family and font size, but there are all those boxes called Normal, No Spacing, Heading1, etc. up there on the menu bar. Highlighting text and clicking one of these makes the whole paragraph look like that style. Set up styles for your body text, headers, call-outs, and quotations, and your documents will start by looking consistent, and will easily improve. Once you’ve made your whole document with Paragraph Styles, you can modify them and make the changes instantly across the whole document. For example, change the body text typeface from Times New Roman to Palatino, and it happens everywhere the style is registered in your document. Not such a big deal in a small document, but fantastic in a long one.

The other advantage of Paragraph Styles is that your documents will begin to look consistent. Write a document one day with the styles, and another the next day, and they should be consistent. That’s a long way to making yourself look professional.

I’ll write more on tricks to make Microsoft Word make you look good in the following months. Keep at it with Word, as it’s the most used tool in the electronic toolbox for most professionals. No matter where you go, Word will find you there, and the better you are at using it, the smarter you look!

To me, the best role playing experiences in my “gaming” career have all been with top-notch game masters. My good friend Rick Dhur was our GM in college, and that campaign continued on for years afterwards. Another great friend, Lester Smith, had a campaign that I would rate as legendary.

As games move forward, however, we’re seeing more and more automated game masters. Massively Multiplayer Online games like EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online all have “canned” adventures (or missions) that the player can participate in. Universally, players find these good, but not great. There’s no real spark of ingenuity in the encounters. They almost always feel like “get the mission, kill the monster, go back and claim reward” type adventures. The adventures are done this way because there are hundreds of thousands of players playing, and that can be at any one time! A game master can’t run a hundred thousand players in one group. An automated system can.

So how will that work in the future? Is there a way to put the human game master back in the loop, while games are going more and more electronic? Games like Skotos’ Lovecraft Country have rudimentary rules and environments, and a high requirement for game masters. The staff there, however, find that they get players only, and no one wants to step up and run an adventure for others.

I think that games will become more distributed than they are now. We started with game groups everywhere. Now we have everyone on huge servers for MMOs. In the future, I can see distributed games, perhaps something like World of Warcraft for 100 players at a time. Call them private servers. In those cases, a game master could actually make a difference in game play. The problem of getting the game masters to step up may still be a problem, though. What’s in it for them? Maybe part of the game’s fees go to pay these people, with a weighted pay scale based on user ratings.

If it were to work like that, I think I’d be very happy. I’d prefer to play with my friends. That’s what my (gaming) life is all about!

Years ago, my friend Lester Smith was so taken by the book Building a New Civilization: the Politics of the Third Wave by Alvin and Heidi Toffler that he bought copies for everyone who wanted one in our Alliterates writing group. It was a wonderful thing for him to do, and it changed my outlook on life from that point forward. You could call me a disciple of the Tofflers after reading the book.

Essentially, the Tofflers argue in their book that we’re entering the Third Wave. It’s not so much an era, but a wave of changes that flows over society, with parts adopting the new ways earlier than others. We’re entering the information wave. Rules that worked in the industrial wave are starting to fail (or have failed completely) in the information wave, and we’re just starting to discover what the rules of the information wave are. Those that stick to the rules of the old wave are doomed to failure. Those that can discern truths about the new wave and act upon them will do quite well for themselves.

Here’s an example. In the industrial wave, it made sense to make widgets as one-size-fits-all  items. The more you produce, the cheaper the product becomes, and the greater the chance of profit. We’ve all heard of “economies of scale”. That’s what we’re talking about. Now, in 2010, making mass anything is usually a disaster. Ford doesn’t make the Model T any more, in one color, one configuration. Ford makes all sorts of cars in all sorts of trims, with all sorts of packages, all on the same production lines. The parts for those cars arrive at the assembly point seconds before they go onto the vehicle on the line. The right part at the right time for the right car. That’s information. Wrapping your head around this new form of thinking is critical to moving forward and being a success.

As we move forward, less and less people are in the actual job of making food. In the industrialized world, less and less people are in the actual job of making things, too. So what do the rest of us do? For the great majority of us, we have jobs that shuffle information. We take orders, we provide customer service, we maintain equipment using information technology, we teach, we research, we create content and we organize.  There are a few of us that put out fires, protect us from bad guys, play sports for a living, move people, move stuff or build stuff. Even these people, if not solely information shufflers, use information to a far greater extent to any time in history.

So as we move forward, what do I see happening? I think that those that think manufacturing is the key are on the wrong side of the equation. I think that those that see how to specialize and provide information and service are on the right side of the equation. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have many of the answers. In fact, I don’t even know if I have one answer! I do know that I’m beginning to ask the right questions, though.

To me, that’s exciting.

Twitter is a great social media tool for keeping friends and family up to date on what you’re doing. It’s a micro-blog, meaning that you have a very small amount of text for each entry. It’s difficult to come to grips with a relevent idea or solid concept, because of the size of each blog post (or tweet). So how could this be useful for a job search?

There are actually several ways. First, remember that Twitter goes both ways. You can write, and those following you will see what you’ve written, but there’s the receive side, too. If you have several companies that you’re interested in, start following them on Twitter. The whole purpose for companies to be on Twitter is to keep the public informed on what they’re doing. If they have a job opening, you may be very early on the list learning about it, as you saw it on Twitter. They may fill the job (a likelihood in this job market) before they ever get the job to Monster.Com or the paper. See your dream job? Jump on it!

Next, use those that follow you. Let them know that you’re looking, and have a place to put your resume that they can get to or have it available as an electronic document (word or PDF file) to send it to them via email. Word of mouth is always the best way to get a job. Have you ever been frustrated by people getting jobs just because they knew somebody, and you didn’t? Turn the tables. Put your friends and followers to work. They don’t know you’re looking for a job if you haven’t told them, so write a tweet! Next, ensure that your contact info (email is best) is available and tell anyone who’s interested that you can send an email with an attached resume whenever someone needs it. Who knows what your friends will be able to do for you. They may not have contacts, but their friends might. Use the power of information cascading through the “Twittersphere” to help you.

To sign up for Twitter, go to Twitter.com. If you need a tutorial on how to use twitter, go to this site and watch the movie there. Search Google to find tons of sites that can help you use Twitter well. Best of luck with the job search!