5) Is there an opt in or opt out clause for data collection?
Users will be allowed to opt-out of Mass Effect 3 data collection from inside the game.

For those who are not familiar, the Mass Effect games are role playing action adventures where the story changes and unfolds based on the various choices the player makes along the way. The data collection being referred to here involves the player’s PC/console sending anonymous statistics back to EA (the publisher) and Bioware (the developer). I find it a little bizarre – although not un-expected – that there are people who complained about this enough that the newest game now has the option to turn it off. Apparently people are complaining so much so that in a list of only eight “commonly asked questions” this one makes the list.

Why?

Seriously… why?

These aren’t the tinfoil hat crowd of videogame conspiracy theorists, but rather most of them are generally thinking people who I assume to have a generally reasonable view of the world. If I give them the raw benefit of the doubt I hope that their argument is more existential than paranoid. I hope their concern is, “If we let you report statistics about how we play your game, it’s a slippery slope to letting companies collect more personal information about our non-gaming lives.” I hope their concern is, “You say you are only reporting anonymous gameplay statistics, but how can we be sure that’s true?” The concern of having your personal computer secretly logging and sending information about you to some corporate datastore is valid… but only to a point. I mean, if you are paranoid enough to not believe Bioware’s claims about the data they are collecting then why would you believe that changing the in-game option to “off” would actually turn anything off?

I find it regularly hilarious how delusional most people seem to be about their current level of privacy. I posted a link on Facebook a short while back (that I can’t find right now) about people complaining that software on their new iPhones kept a log of their text messages and phone usage, which could then be ostensibly reported back to their carriers. Of course I found this hilarious. Do people actually, honestly believe that their cell phone carriers don’t already have access to that information? Do you think that your cell phone company doesn’t have the ability to read every one of your text messages or listen in on every one of your phone calls? It’s like being shocked that your mailman has the ability to read all of your mail. He (probably) doesn’t read your mail, and neither does your cell phone company, but of course they could.

Spoiler alert! – you probably have a GPS system inside your cell phone that allows them to track you to within one meter.

Spoiler alert! – even without GPS your cell phone’s location can be triangulated using nearby cell towers to within about 50 meters.

Aside from criminals on the run, who honestly cares?

The technology that allows Big Brother to find you with your cell phone is the same technology that lets you find the nearest Starbucks (or in my case, allows me to find my phone when it gets lost). The technology that lets Verizon listen to your calls is the same one that lets YOU listen to your calls. The satellite uplink in your car that allows Ford (theoretically) to track where and how frequently you drive is the same system that allows them to send you an ambulance when you get in a car crash.

This is the world you live in. Deal with it.

Data collection exists everywhere all the time in everything you do, and this data aggregation will always have a fringe case where someone can reasonably ask “what if the terrorists/Big Brother/illuminati use that data for evil?!”

My response is usually, “yeah, i guess… whatever.”

• Google knows the history of what I have searched for.
• My bank knows how much money I have.
• My credit card company knows how often I go to Taco Bell.

I just don’t really care. I don’t consider that an invasion of my privacy. I realize that some people do. These are the people who run their internet connections through proxy DNS routers, keep their cash under their mattress, and wouldn’t ever dream of having a credit card in their real name. I wish those people nothing but happiness, but I am content to live in the normal world. The normal world allows for endless convenience and entertainment, but it also requires that you accept certain realities.

When I go to the grocery store I always use my store membership card. I would argue that it’s stupid not to, and I think most people would agree with me. Have you ever stopped to wonder why stores are willing to give such widespread discounts to people who sign up for and use those membership/savings cards? I could be wildly wrong – having never studied grocery store marketing – but I see two obvious answers that make sense.

1. Presumed customer loyalty.
2. Data aggregation.

Number one is obvious. If you bother to get a card you are theoretically much more likely to shop at that particular store again instead of using their competitor across the street. However, because the practice is now universal to all major stores – and access to these cards is free, fast, and easy – I expect this reason to be decreasingly worthwhile. If anything, NOT offering a savings card is more likely to cause people to NOT shop at your store, rather than the original intent of the opposite.

Number two strikes me as the real value to the store. Hopefully this isn’t news to any of you, but when you use your savings card the store logs the quantity and cost of every item that you purchase. Over time the stores will have the ability to build a very accurate model of everything that you buy, how much you spend, and when. The store can know how much you are willing to pay for something. The store can identify your preferred brands. The store can accurately measure whether a particular sale or promotion has an effect on your shopping habits.

If you think that data set isn’t worth the fifty cents you just saved on butter, well, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re delusional.

And still I say, “so what?” I recognize that my local Vons store has the ability to look up how much cat food I buy (a lot), but I also don’t care if they have that information. It isn’t an invasion of my privacy for them to know that my cats like their Fancy Feast grilled instead of sliced. It actually makes me happy, because I am directly helping ensure that Vons keeps selling the grilled cans.

I am happy to report usage statistics to Verizon because it shows them where they need to increase their coverage or add more bandwidth. I don’t mind reporting my driving habits to Ford because it helps them build safer, more reliable, and more efficient cars. I don’t mind my bank knowing when and where I am withdrawing money because it tells them where they need to put (or keep) ATMs.

And as for this manufactured Mass Effect 3 controversy, I don’t mind Bioware collecting data about the choices I make in their game. I know for demonstrable fact that they use that data to make better games. There is a ton of crazy shit you can learn from their Mass Effect 2 data. I can understand the fear about secret software running on your computer, but we all need to at least start the conversation from a different place. We can’t start from zero. We have to accept that data aggregation and tracking has become an intrinsic part of the common first world experience.

Privacy is a very real issue with very serious implications. Bioware and EA/Origin is almost laughably silly to be considered a serious part of that conversation.

My Friday was a little bit frustrating. No, it was a good deal more than “a little bit” frustrating, to be honest. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go into any real detail about the day’s events though; in fact I may make a few people upset by writing this post at all.

While keeping things vague I will say that I spent a lot of time over the past week modifying my company’s existing systems to build out a custom solution for one of our new clients. We had scheduled a meeting with the client for Friday, and so it seemed like an obvious opportunity to impress this client by racing to finish their large project much sooner than they expected. And so it was that I spent another series of full days and nights pounding away upon my laptop. Thursday in particular was pretty rough, but at 7am Friday morning I finished rolling out my code… only a few brief hours before the scheduled meeting.

And with that, exhausted, I passed out.

I awoke five hours later, my head still groggy, and jumped onto Skype to have a conference call and see how everything had gone.

“It was great. They loved it. You did a really impressive job.”

I was too tired to truly enjoy the compliments, but it still felt nice. All my hard work had paid off and…

“…but I just got off the phone with <CLIENT NAME REDACTED>. They are no longer going to be doing business with us. That’s <REDACTED LARGE NUMBER> dollars of business that we just lost.”

fuck

I am not going to get into the who, what, or why but it basically sorta sucks. Our company isn’t going out of business or anything, but it was definitely not good news. I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. I still do.

* On the one hand I felt proud of what I had done for Client A. On the other hand we just lost Client B.

* On the one hand losing Client B wasn’t my fault at all. On the other hand, I hadn’t done anything to not lose Client B.

* On the one hand I was a little upset with my co-workers since client relations is their job. On the other hand, it actually wasn’t their fault. We all knew Client B, in particular, had a rapidly expiring shelf life. It was inevitable.

The loss of a major client is bad on the surface, but having now digested the situation for a short while, I wonder if it isn’t actually a good thing. And I don’t mean that in the sense of a “look on the bright side” forced optimism. I mean it for a very specific, very personal reason: it has started the countdown on my employment with this company and catalyzed my degree of participation in the company’s operations. Both are critically important, and until Friday morning both were critically absent.

The rebuild of my company began a little over a year ago, and in that time I have defined my participation in a very narrow way. Essentially, my philosophy has been, “I will write the code and handle the technology… you guys can deal with everything else.” I didn’t want to talk to clients. I didn’t want to answer phone calls from customers. I didn’t want to be consulted about revenue, expenses, salaries, investors, or anything else that didn’t live specifically within my databases or code repositories. I never even bothered to make a business card because I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might ask me for one anyways. I really just didn’t care at all about our business as a business, and I regarded our company as an ultimately doomed venture whose only curiosity to me lay in how long the other people I worked with could keep it from going bankrupt.

Yeah, that makes me sound like a huge asshole. I probably am one.

When asked for my opinion about the occasional business decision my answers were always honest but always apathetic. The only times I ever spoke up with any passion were when an idea struck me as egregiously bad. As generally ambivalent and occasionally venomously negative, there were a lot of hurt feelings over the past year. With time I came to realize that my “critiques” were mostly causing problems. Rather than try to be positive and productive, I took the second of two clear options and withdrew my level of participation even farther. If you can’t say anything nice…

To fully understand my ambivalence you should probably go back and read every post I have ever written on this blog. Start in 2004. The answer is too complicated to contain within one post (or probably any number of them). The best way that I can remember having explained it here was in one half of one paragraph of one post from 2008.

As a perhaps unfair analogy, it felt as if I worked at a grocery store. Sure our store made money – maybe because we specialized in organic foods or had stumbled upon a good location – but there is nothing special about selling groceries. If I did my job really well we might be able to sell a lot of groceries, or maybe someday open a bigger store, but at the end of the day – at the end of my career – I would still be selling groceries.

I guess you either understand me from that… or you don’t.

My company is not special. What we do is not special. The way we do it is not special. The people who work there are not special (other than that one of them is me). We could become the most outrageously successful version of our company that the world will ever know, and it still will not be special. I can sell the largest amount of the highest priced, most delicious groceries on earth… but I am still just a grocery store. For most people – from my life-to-date’s acquired understanding of “most people” – selling a shit-ton of groceries would be awesome. For me, I don’t think I could ever be proud of myself for that.

And if the most extravagantly successful version of our company still makes me think, “so what?” then why should I waste my time struggling to accomplish some fraction of that success?

That has been my mindset. At least until the past month. And most specifically, until Friday.

I still don’t give a shit about what my company does or how it does it. We do not make the world better in any way, and that isn’t going to change. I have been thinking a lot about it, however, and am beginning to recognize that there is inherent value in attaining success. And by value I don’t mean money; financial statements are just the scoreboard.

Of all places, this is where I found my epiphany:

Burnt out from my all-nighter and bummed out from my conference call, I spent Friday afternoon playing Skyrim. After 60+ hours of playtime my character is an un-killable badass archmage at this point, with effectively maxed-out stats, spells, and equipment. As I walked into a newly discovered town an NPC ran up to me and told me a story about a demon who had taken over a nearby cave and blah blah blah could I please help? I happily accepted his quest and set off to kill the demon and save the town.

But why do any of that? The town was small, the quest was unrelated to the game’s main story line, the demon could almost certainly not even hurt me (let alone kill me), and there was no item it could drop that would be better than what I already had. There was literally no direct benefit to me killing the demon. And so of course that’s what I spent the next half hour doing.

While crawling the dungeon I wondered to myself why I felt compelled to be doing it. OCD completionism is one easy answer, but there is another.

It felt important to me because success has inherent value. I could try something and accomplish it. And totally regardless of difficulty, effort, or reward the accomplishment of my goal has value to me. You climb the mountain because it’s there. You kill the demon because you can. You make your business a successful business because that’s what businesses are for.

It’s probably dumb to explain a change in my mindset about my company by way of explaining my mindset while playing a videogame, but whatever… maybe that analogy will resonate with somebody.

Yes, we lost Client B on Friday. But I also impressed Client A. Maybe I could have impressed Client B too if I had ever bothered to try. In Skyrim I don’t accept the townspeople’s quest, walk into the cave, and then take my hands off the keyboard and watch my character die. If I am going to accept the quest, I am going to complete the quest. I walk into that cave and start slinging some motherfucking fireballs. It should be the same in real life. If I am going to bother spending part of my life working for this company, I should spend that time doing the best and most I can. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t actually care about the townspeople, the demon’s treasure, or the metaphysical value my company provides to the world at large. I lost a client on Friday, start business school on Tuesday, and between the two I realized that somewhere inside of me is an un-killable badass archmage with a quest that he accepted.

I’m sorry it took me this long to start slinging fireballs.

With that said, I had a pretty good year of fantasy sports in 2011.

Back to back league champion, and a perfect, undefeated season too. I’ve played in this league for five seasons, and have two firsts and a second. Those other two years… well, we don’t need to talk about it.

In 2011 I played in a total of four leagues, two for baseball and two for football.

Baseball League #1 – 1st place in 14-team league. Paid $1135 (150 buy-in, split with lukas)
Baseball League #2 – 3rd place in 11-team league. Paid $224 (150 buy-in)
Football League #1 – 1st place in 10-team league. Paid $470 (100 buy-in)
Football League #2 – 3rd place in 12-team league. Paid $525 (150 buy-in)

Overall, that’s a pure profit of $1311.

Or, considering the time that I put into it, roughly fifty cents per hour.

(thinking about my recent purchases these recommendations are embarrassingly not wrong… *sigh*)

This was page one.

Page two was the announcement of the PC launch for Assassin’s Creed.

And this was page three… the last page, and two clicks in.

It’s not a big deal or anything, but your credit card and personal information may have been captured by an unknown group of hackers. But on the bright side, if your cards still work and your identity hasn’t been stolen, you can save big on Sniper: Ghost Warrior!

That’s not entirely true, of course. Some people came – enough of them to recoup our costs – but it was nowhere near the amount of traffic we expected. After another six months of break-even operation, problems in our separate personal lives forced us both to abandon our project and seek refuge in the steady paychecks of otherwise normal day-jobs. Our failure came to us both as a shock. Clearly we were too idealistic, but I had a hard time coming to terms with the realities of business. It just didn’t make sense to me. We had created a quality product that would be very useful to a large number of people. Shouldn’t that be enough?

That was the first time that I ever seriously considered going to business school.

If you were to ask all the people who know me, I doubt any of them could give you a good answer as to why I would want to go to business school. The majority of people – those who know me only casually – would expect me to eventually earn a post-graduate degree, though most would probably guess it to be a PhD and not an MBA. To them I am the smart, quiet kid who did well in school and for some unknown reason seemed to enjoy it. Those people long ago came to assume that I would end up with a high paying job doing something that they’d never heard of and probably wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain it. They would think of me as the sort of person who spends his time doing research on the high-level, abstract theories that are ultimately important to the world, but never practical to their own lives. Business school, with its emphasis on “real world” education, would seem only slightly out of place in their view of my life, but ultimately none of them would be surprised to learn I had an MBA.

Meanwhile, the few people who know me well would probably never imagine me going to business school at all… ever. I am nowhere close to the popular image of the “corporate type.” To them – and admittedly, even me – MBAs are stereotypically for lawyers and finance-types. Most people seem to get an MBA to help them get a better job with a better sounding title and a higher salary. The people who know me best know that none of those things matter to me. To my close friends I am generally regarded as the highly independent kid who likes to figure things out on his own. I am the sort of person who gets restless when he’s not moving, who can’t do the same thing for too long, and who could not survive long within the rigid structure of a typical corporate environment.

In truth, both groups of people are probably right about me; just as both groups are certainly also wrong. Overall, I think that is what makes me a great fit for your business school.

From what I understand of business school – UNLV and Las Vegas in particular – I am not going to be your typical applicant. What’s more, once accepted I don’t plan on being your typical student. I will bring to your school a skill set, point of view, and method of thinking that I would not expect your typical MBA candidate to have. My particular combination of technical knowledge, industry experience, and personal ambition will hopefully be considered as much an asset to you as your school’s program will be to me.

To more clearly understand what I want from a business degree you need to understand, if only briefly, how I got here. What happened along the way that suddenly turned me into an MBA hopeful?

While in college I devoted a huge amount of my attention to the theoretical. Northwestern is a research university, sure, but more and more I found myself ignoring the general concept courses and burying myself instead in the more ethereal aspects of academia. But after spending so much time worrying about high level theory I increasingly came to feel like something was missing. I didn’t want to spend my life writing papers about my ideas; I wanted to take those ideas and actually build something that normal, everyday people could use.

So instead of going to graduate school I took an internship with NASA and spent a summer working for their education department. We built fun programs that were given away to schools to help kids better learn about the Earth and universe. I worked for free, gave away everything that I made, and watched the bizarre bureaucracy of government first-hand. It was amazing, but only temporary. Unpaid jobs don’t make for great long-term careers.

Eventually I found my way into a tiny internet startup, earning only slight more than the nothing that NASA had paid. While there I got a front row seat to the struggles of a small business, particularly the challenges of relying entirely on the internet for survival. Eventually I left the tiny team of the startup to join the huge workforce at a corporate coding warehouse. I didn’t last long there. I hated being anonymous as just another faceless employee. But more than that, I hated that my work was anonymous too. I wanted what I did to actually matter to people. And so, after a stint working as an independent contractor, I took a job at a non-profit cancer research hospital.

Somewhere along the way my friend and I embarked on our failed attempt at starting our own business. Each of my different jobs had taught me something else about myself, and starting a business brought that all together. I wanted to work for a small company where I could be an active participant in what we made and did. I wanted to create something useful for people; something that improved their lives in some way. I wanted to push myself intellectually. I wanted to struggle at finding the answer to a new problem, not merely repackaging someone else’s solution to an old one. And obviously, I wanted to be able to make a living doing it.

It turns out that the last item on my list was the most difficult to achieve. We made something good and useful, but nobody seemed to want it. Back in school what we had created would have been a terrific success. We had identified a problem and created a solution. It was theoretically perfect. Sadly, the real world didn’t care. I eventually came to understand what I am sure a lot of other people already know: being good is not enough.

So what exactly do I want from business school? Unlike most applicants, it isn’t a better job. I don’t want a more impressive sounding title or a higher annual salary. I don’t care about diplomas, degrees, or initials after my name on a resume. In three years, after graduating from your program, I want to be right back where I am right now.

And then I will try again.

I want to start my own business, create a great and useful product, and have another go of it. Next time, though, I want to be better prepared than I was before. I want to create a product that is not only good, but also a success.

There is a tremendous difference between creating a good product and creating a successful product. I recognize that now. I probably should have recognized it long ago. All my past education and experience has been focused on creating a good product. I want business school to help me understand how to create a successful one.

What I can offer to your school, more than just tuition and a higher average GMAT, is my ambition. I bring with me a technical skill set and wide-ranging work experience, but hopefully I can also provide a slightly different world perspective. I have been a part of the academic and the practical, the startup and the corporate, the public and the private. I have worked for two non-profit companies, one of which was non-profit on purpose. I have been witness to both success and failure, and, with your help, I am eager to better learn what separates the two.

Not including Gears of War 3, which I am already playing through, here is what I will be watching for:

Might & Magic Heroes IV (PC) – Oct 11

Batman: Arkham City (360) – Oct 18

Battlefield 3 (PC) – Oct 25

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (PS3) – Nov 1

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC) – Nov 11

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (360) – Nov 15

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (360) – Nov 15

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) – Nov 20

Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC) – Dec 20

And then, in the first quarter of 2012 we will be seeing things like Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3, Bioshock Infinite, Diablo III, and the new Twisted Metal. Good thing I have unlimited time and money.