Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

Yeah yeah, call me indecisive. Now that I’m officially a manager within a global, public corporation… I think having a blog titled “O RLY, YA RLY, NO WAIH” isn’t very professional. I’ll still keep the blog’s original intention in place, this is my mental break place where I collect my thoughts. It will continue to be witty, crazy, and filled with gaming stuff. I just wanted to maintain a pseudo professional ring to it.

I saw this on Kerrie’s Blog and had to do it.

(click photo for credits)

The instructions to create the mosaic are:
Type your answers to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
Using only the first page, pick an image
Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

I’ve been blogging since 2005. Over the years I’ve run a personal blog, a professional blog, and some gaming blogs. I got tired of blogging in so many places that if you are a reader of my blog you know that about a month ago I merged everything “under one roof” so to speak. Now that I’ve merged so many of my different blogs into one place, I am now forced to ask myself… do I have an audience? Has the merging of my content into one blog helped or hurt my ability to advertise and get comments on some of the things I blog about?

I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed. Do people care about the things I’m blogging about? I’m sure my guild cares about some of the guild blogging I do, but does the general public care about some of the leadership blogging that I do or general gaming blogging. Should I blog about game reviews more? I’m not sure anymore.

So in an effort to answer the question “Do people care?”, I head out to WarhammerAlliance.Com to ask the writers out there for feedback. Maybe people do care and I just haven’t ever bothered to advertise my blog. Maybe I should. I await their comments.

So if you’re reading this. What’s your opinion of my blog and should I bother advertising it?

 - Degree in Information Systems or related field; three to five years demonstrated experience in project management and leadership with business analysis, process modeling and application design, or the equivalent combination of education and/or relevant experience.
- Strong customer service attitude and ambition to continually improve customer service levels.
- Strong intuitive and analytical problem solving skills.
- Work well under pressure with tight deadlines and manages multiple concurrent projects; organize workload of self and team to meet changing priorities and deadlines.
- Express ideas clearly to a broad audience in both written and oral communications, including group presentations regarding product and technical information.
- Handle multiple, concurrent, complex tasks.
- Make excellent technical recommendations in the context of company business directions.
- Perform on-call and weekend support as needed.
- Advanced working knowledge of technical support, testing, systems analysis techniques and tools; IT technical environment (applications, Web, platforms, interfaces, data structures, applications, queries, and programming languages).

Sound like me? Except for the fact that I don’t have my degree QUITE yet, but will next summer? Yeah it sounds like me alright, to quote a friend, “That sounds exactly like you. You’re the poster boy for that job. :P”

/sigh…  I don’t know where I am or where I’m going anymore.

I’ve been busy the last few months. This little bit of self reflection will give you some insight into what I’ve been going through with recently, particularly within the last few weeks.

My journey into leadership began many years ago when I was the sole IT manager and programmer at a small commercial real-estate management firm. I was coached by the President on ways to improve myself as a leader. I was challenged to find better ways of doing business and how to communicate those changes to others. This journey expanded when I was encourage to pick up the leadership torch as a volunteer leadership position in an online community of over 100 individuals. This expanded later when I left that community and again was pulled (almost reluctantly) into another organization which is now around those same numbers. Right now I hold a second volunteer position that involves leading communications and facilitating change goals for a community of thousands of people, compiling feedback, and delivering reports to key players in a much larger organization. Over the years people have described my leadership style as democratic, pragmatic, and visionary. How did I develop such strong leadership skills in such a small amount of time?

The key factor that has been advantageous to my journey has been RAPIDLY growing environments. The real-estate management firm was constantly in a state of change. During my time with them they grew to a handful of people to over 65 people. In all of my volunteer leadership positions, they have taken place in an even more rapidly changing environment growing from a handful of people to well over 100. My exposure to rapidly changing environments has allowed me to learn how to properly lead change. Furthermore, I’ve had the power to experiment with various techniques of leadership (learned through formal education as well as self study) with little to no fear of “ruining a good thing”, especially with my volunteer leadership positions.

The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that the average person doesn’t understand the difference between management and leadership. The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that this is a product of history and the way individuals in business were trained to manage, and how individuals have learned what “managers” are like. When two organizations come together, one who understands management and the other than understands leadership, a serious challenge presents itself. This challenge is one that we will face going forward. 

P.S. Yes, I fell off my wight loss plan. I’m still struggling with a lack of a real schedule in my life.

Volunteer organizations exist in all shapes and sizes. Team based sports are a type of volunteer organization that most people are familiar with, but a specific kind of team based sport most are not familiar with is a guild in an online game. Guilds can be defined simply as a group of players, ranging in numbers of a few dozen to several hundred, who play an online game together regularly under the leadership of a single or multiple other players. A guild leader faces the same organizational challenges that a coach faces when organizing a purely volunteer baseball team. Through proper planning, anyone with the aptitude for leadership can create and maintain a richly rewarding guild that will hold up to the test of time.

Individuals contribute time, effort, and in some cases money to participate in organizations they want to be a part of or believe in. Unfortunately, the definition of participation is different for everyone. Some people believe that simply being associated with the organization is enough; while others will give their all to make sure the goals of the organization is achieved. Deciding on what level of participate that is wanted from people in a guild can be difficult. Online organizations also face unique challenges which include geographical differences, ever changing personal schedules, and the barriers of online communication. All of these issues play a role in not only acquiring the right people, but keeping those individuals who will define your organization over time.

When creating a guild, the first step should be to take the time to define it. This process should include not only defining policy and procedures of how the guild should operate, but also clearly state the feeling of the guild. Some guild leaders create a militaristic style guild with hyper focused goals while others might choose a laid back structure which promotes a family style atmosphere. Regardless of how one defines the feeling of a guild, clearly defining it ensures that the people who are recruited into the guild feel the same as the person who formed it. There also needs to be clearly written policies including a code of conduct, disciplinary steps, and some kind of recruitment or evaluation process. All these policies should give structure and support the written vision of the guild. These steps are no different than those a corporation takes to define a mission statement and write an employee handbook. Every document written in these early days of a clan, builds a solid foundation for the creation that is being built.

No organization of significant size can be lead by a single person. Choosing the correct people as officers of a guild can be one of the single actions that can result in the failure of even the best planned guild. Thankfully if the guild is clearly defined, attracting the correct people to help lead an organization will come with time. While previous leadership or managerial experience is helpful, having motivation for leadership and having a high belief mission of the guild result in stronger officers. Strong officers will help lower the stress and responsibilities of a guild leader, allowing the leader to focus on maintaining direction and guiding the guild, not running it.

Creating and leading a guild can be a daunting process, but if a guild leader follows the appropriate steps during creation it highly increases the success rate of a guild. Many guilds don’t plan correctly in the beginning, inevitably resulting in the failure of the guild after only a few months. The investment of a few days of planning can increase the longevity of a guild from a few months to several years.

Now with 12 classes, 41 credits, and still a 4.0 average. Currently I’m in the middle of changing my degree program from GSP to CIS so my “standing” academically is still “Freshman” although with all honesty after completing 2 1/2 semesters and 32.5% of my total credits needed for graduation, I should technically be a “Sophomore”, but heck who’s counting. I still know when I’m scheduling myself for graduation.

Had a GREAT winter break and through completing 3 finals in under 24 hours was stressful, the cruise was fantastic combined with a sneezy but fun 4 day new years vacation. I’m looking forward to this coming year. It’s the end of the reign of the Bushes, my car will be paid off soon, I will start saving tons of money for my house, and at some point toward the end of the year I will move in with Kerrie. If all goes well it’ll be a nice prep for 2009 when I graduate and much, much more.

Now that I’m not even REMOTELY as stressed as I used to be, it seems like my brain doesn’t need NEARLY as much sleep as it used to. Although now that my brain is rested, it seems like my body is starting to want more sleep. The problem is that now that the two aren’t in sync I can’t sleep even if my body wants to goto bed at 11:00, my mind is awake. I think it’s all starting to adjust but it’s interesting the toll of stress and with it gone how my body and mind are adjusting.

An interview that Kevin Flick of Microsoft (aka Fhearl of HILYMI), conducted with me a few weeks back. He’s going to conduct a series of interviews with gamers for his blog with the sneaky and underhanded goal of helping to demonstrate that gaming is just like any other hobby we may engage in. The interview of me was the first of the series of interviews. He’s not to great with post production work, but it’s a greater interview. http://blogs.technet.com/immerse/archive/2007/10/19/gamer-interview-1-victor-f-laurence-aka-livistos-aka-soriathus.aspx

The interview itself covers my history in gaming and about half of it covers my leadership of the guild Hit it like you mean it. We really went into a lot of high level philosophical stuff in there and really put somethings I do for the guild in perspective. Sometimes I’m too humble about all the work I do.

My brain is out of control. I don’t know what I’m doing. I think the root of it all is my health. I think deep down I have no real control over my illness, so I’m trying to make everything right. I’m trying to make everything perfect and complete because this is one aspect of myself that I can’t fix myself, not directly so I feel out of control and I’m trying to medicate myself by making everything else perfect. When those things don’t go as planned I take it extra hard.

Is this what depression is like? Feeling out of control and redirecting my own misunderstood emotions onto other things? I’m used to maybe obsessing a little bit about WoW, but not to the degree I have been. I am getting depressed over the lack of coordination and getting upset at raids for no decent reason. This isn’t like me. I’m obssessing over things that normally I don’t care about, or if I do, it’s not to this degree. My brain is so scrabled now that I can’t focus on school, as a result I’m WAY behind on my math class (which is self-paced). I’m obssessing over my financials. I’m obssessing over a my house plans. I’m obsessing about Kerrie, about “us”. I’m obssessed with helping Kerrie with her business. I want to help her launch her website and get wrapped up in making her business launch “perfect”. I’ve started obssessing about my weight. What ever random thought enters my brain I start obssessing about it and I can’t stop until I redirect my attention to something else.

I’m not acting like myself and I think my parents are seeing it and being all worried. My dad brought me coffee yesterday, in the middle of the evening, which is not… normal. How do I break this cycle. Do I shut everything off? Do I shut half the things off in my life right now? Do I need to spend a night just lost in my own self thought? Am I going crazy? I’m sneezing again (my weird self defense mechanism), this tells me how worried I am about this subject. Sigh… I’m confused.