VMworld 2013 - Excitement and Terror!

So yesterday I found out that thanks to one of my company's partners that I will have the opportunity to attend VMWorld 2013 in San Francisco coming up in just a few weeks. This will be a large number of firsts for me: First time at VMWorld, first time at any kind of conference of this size, first time in the state of California, first time travelling a LONG way from home on my own (No co-workers are able to join me sadly) and the list probably goes on and on. I have lots of feelings about all of this but the primary two are the ones in the title: Excitement and Terror.

Excitement! I've heard lots of great things about the VMWorld experience and all that comes along with it. Learning about what's new from VMware and what will be coming soon, getting to hear from lots of industry experts about topics that I am interested in (PowerCLI / BC + DR / EUC here I come!) sounds just great.

Terror! I don't want to make excuses but I have a pretty big problem with social anxiety and the thought of being on my own at a big conference away from my home is terrifying. I do know one or two folks personally that will also be attending but for the most part I'm going to be on my own and this is pretty scary. I know that in order to continue to grow as a person/professional that I have to step outside my comfort zone a little bit and do things like this, but it's very challenging and has given me a lot to think about. Or perhaps uncomfortably dwell on is a better way to put it.

Regardless of the second one there I am really looking forward to VMWorld and I think that once I get there and start to get in the swing of things it hopefully will be a great experience. I look forward to awkwardly meeting some other IT pros out there and stumbling through some conversations! If anyone happens to read this prior to the show and is in a similar predicament to me feel free to reach out to me here or on twitter or whatever and perhaps we can meet up during the show and help break the ice and such.

See everyone at VMWorld 2013!

Steam Summer Sale 2013

We're well into the summer season right now which means amongst the humidity and high temperatures it's also time for all gamers to get out their wallets and proclaim to Valve:

In a gaming world where DRM remains a hot topic I do find it interesting that so many people are willing to spend so much in these sales but it's hard to beat the value that is offered and the sheer amount of titles available to you is something hard to ignore. I like what the guys over at GOG.com are doing with their no-nonsense (and also no-DRM) approach but they certainly do not have the user base nor the momentum that the Steam platform has as of yet. Valve has these sales figured out pretty well where they spread things out far enough and reduce the price low enough to where it feels like you don't spend a lot of money, but over the course of the entire sale you've probably spent a decent bit more than you might realize.

Barring any last minute flash deals or must haves, my breakdown for this sale is as follows:

• Total Games Purchased: 25
• Total Spent: $79.89
• Avg. Spend per Game: $3.20
• Total Transactions: 9

I'm somewhat surprised that my credit card company didn't freeze my account and call to find out if I had indeed authorized all these transactions but considering how much I've spent with them over the years I guess it's really not all that surprising. Sometimes I think about why the publishers/developers of these games are willing to sell them at such a steep discount and if it really works out better for them in the long run. My guess is if you could calculate the ratio of (Total Purchases of Game X During the Sale / Total of people that finish the game or spend any considerable time with it) the number would probably be pretty low. Think about it - how many games have you purchased in a Steam sale and then never touched or only played for maybe half an hour? I went through my Steam library as it stands now and did an honest breakdown and I came up with the following:

• Total Steam Games: 125
• Number of Games Completed: 15
• Number of Games Never Played: 57

So if you do the math that means I have completed approx. 12% of my Steam library and I have not even played about 45.6% of my library. Nearly half of the games I have purchased I haven't spent any time with whatsoever. So think about it from the dev/pub's perspective - under normal pricing I might have never even thought about buying their game but if they bring the price low enough I start to think to myself "Well hell I might want to try it at some point" so I buy it. They got less money then they might have wanted from me, but it's better than getting nothing at all.

I don't think I'm throwing out any unknown wisdom here but sitting back and really thinking through the mechanics of these sales is interesting. To me, at least.

The Ouya: First Thoughts and Initial Tinkering

One of the things that I thought was a pretty neat idea in the world of gaming was Ouya so I backed them on Kickstarter last year and it just recently arrived at my door. Aside from the well known shipping delays for kickstarter backers and lack of a decent games library yet they have a very interesting little device here. Since it's an Android platform I immediately decided to start screwing around with it to see what I could do with it. To very little surprise it's quite easy to side-load APKs on there but the Ouya controller is clumsy and dealing with the integrated browser is not fun without using a mouse/keyboard which I do not regularly keep in my living room.

So I decided to figure out what would be the best option to quickly get files and apps loaded onto my Ouya without needing to rely on USB sticks or busting out a mouse and keyboard all the time. Some folks have well documented methods utilizing Dropbox which is a pretty clever way to go about it, but I'm not a big fan of using cloud syncing services for things like this. Since I have a Synology NAS in my house that I use for file storage I had a feeling I could utilize this somehow and sure enough I was able to come up with a solution fairly easily. Here's what I did:

1. Side-load the ES File Manager (my file/app manager of choice for Android) onto the Ouya via the integrated browser. This can be easily obtained from here.

2. Inside ES I created a connection to the CIFS share on my Synology NAS by going to the LAN section and adding a new server connection. Enter in the IP address of your system and the path to the share along with your credentials if that is necessary.

3. Profit. Now I can get files to my Ouya by pulling them down from my desktop/laptop/tablet/whatever and dropping it into the CIFS share. Fire up ES on my Ouya and copy the files to the local storage.

Obviously there are many ways that you can get files onto the Ouya and this method may not be ideal for everyone but it works well for me. The Ouya is a neat distraction for the time being and they still have some problems to work out but I really am rooting for them. I backed them not just to get a console - I like their philosophy and I want a platform like this to do well and flourish. We will have to wait and see how things develop and if gamers embrace the concept - I hope they do!