Obtuse

Hello General Discussion dudes and dudettes, and to anyone else who might have wandered past, and welcome to the seventh in the series of The Moderator Interviews. These interviews, the remainder of which can be found in my forum signature at the bottom of the post, are designed to help the members of this fine forum known as Relic News get to know their staff, moderators and otherwise, just that little bit better.

Today we're interviewing deadguy, who describes himself as "a skeleton with the power to set people on fire WITH HIS MIND!" (Happy, Riess?!) the first occurance of the claimage of these powers being here: http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=92735 see? Don't say I don't do research! Or at least get deadguy to. *cough*

His yearbook entry can be found at the following location:

http://relicnews.com/yearbook/2006/478/

If you have any points for the next interview that I could improve on, (making sense, for example), feel free to post, or just post to say how much you think deadguy rocks. C'mon, he needs it, I mean - look at his little beard!

And so, without further attempts to get me banned, on to the interview!


Obtuse: Okay, obligitary bio if you please, Mr. Deadguy.

deadguy: I'm deadguy, and you are on my server. I'm 30, and a computer tech in Salt Lake City, UT

Obtuse: Would you mind revealing your given name? :o

deadguy: Alex Calara. If you search for it, I'm female, run marathons in San Francisco, and I recently got married to a man named Scott in Gibraltar. You might also find my blog, apparently. It seems Google has improved somewhat


Obtuse: Fair enough. Can you tell me how you got the deadguy name?

deadguy: Ah deadguy. Yes, it's rather anticlimactic. When Quake 2 came out, my coworkers and I would play it all the time (I worked in a college computer lab). We got to be what we considered pretty good. Then we tried multiplayer against folk on the net. A lot of the "cool" names were taken, and after dying multiple times in a handful of minutes, I decided that I needed an anticool name. It was only fitting.

Obtuse: So have you improved at all since then, or does the name still fit?

deadguy: Oh no, it definitely still fits. After being crippled by dial-up for so long, it's really hard to catch up to the level of people that game nonstop.


Obtuse: So, what do you spend your time doing, when you're not running marathons?

deadguy: Hah, well, since the other Alex is off running marathons and getting married, I get a lot of time to ride the bus to work, work, idle in IRC, dawdle on the internet, and hang out with my girlfriend. Work at an ISP can be such a killer.

Obtuse: What do you do at the ISP, exactly?

deadguy: I'm a lowly phone technician. I'm also their webmaster. A little more one than the other most days. However, even us techs are tagged for a lot of other tasks, so every day is a little bit different. Datacenter build-outs, DSL reconfigs, server reconfigs, etc.

Obtuse: So is this a field you're hoping to claw your way up in, or do you have any other plans for the 'deadguy millenium'? :o

deadguy: Good lord, no, tech support is something I fell into. I got offered work at the college because I had been just solving problems for the people nearby, and the manager asked if I wanted work. Here I am, 10 years later, at the third iteration of "oh look, an easy paycheck". I'm getting pretty tired of it, but it does pay the bills. No, I want to get into Human Interface and Industrial Design. I like the idea of making things more intuitive or useful for people - spot the problems people have with an object they use every day and solve the problem by realigning their interface to it. Also, I seem to have mixed a superb rum and coke.

Obtuse: Could you give me an example of what that might involve? Possibly something you might have done yourself?

deadguy: Well, take the old pushbar doors you see at schools and virtually every other large building. The original bars were just that: a bar attached to two individual levers, one of which opens the latch, but because the door opens outwards, there's virtually no indication as to which side the hinges are on, and therefore which side one ought to push on. There are several redsigns, but the most effective so far is, I think, the large silver box with an offset panel that you push on to open the latch. It's offset, so regardless of which side of the panel you push, you're naturally pushing on the side away from the hinges, and the door swings open.

Obtuse: Sounds like a good plan. Are there any widely-used things you have seen around that you have thought of significant improvements for that haven't yet been thought about?

deadguy: Yes. The Internet, but I haven't solved that one yet. Actually, I think there's an awful lot of technology in general that needs some serious thought (or hell, research) into how people actually use something. But even primitive tools need a little reinventing sometimes: take the hammer. since most peofessional builders use nailguns now, the hammer has become a tool mostly used for tearing down a room. Stanley Tools figured that out and redesigned the hammer to a more destruction-suited tool, with a jaw designed for ripping out studs, and a wider head for breaking through drywall - even a prybar at the other end. They call it the Fubar, the "Functional Utility Bar" - http://www.stanleytools.com/catalog...099_mid_res.jpg

Obtuse: Nice, it kinda looks like it's snarling. Have you done anything along these lines to make life easier in your place of work or home?

deadguy: At work, I frequently am asked to redesign workflow for internal tools and pages. I'm working on convincing them they need to let me do it for customers, who are almost always less tech-savvy than most of the developers assume. At home, there's not a lot I have that I didn't choose because it was the better design for the way I work, so I have very few workarounds/fixes, other than buying a Mac for a lot of my productivity work.



Obtuse: Just in order to try and aggravate PC users and to inform me, who's somewhat ignorant of such things, what makes a Mac better for your kind of work?

deadguy: Hehe - I was a longtime Amiga user, because it had more power than the PCs of its era. I liked it because it had a very linear learning curve; if you wanted to dig around and learn more, you could, and the machine was forgiving. After that fetish faded, I stopped using my Amiga and started using my PC more (I've always had at least two computers). I would have never considered using a Mac - I'd used them earlier on, and found them troublesome.

Then, Apple came out with OS X - based on BSD (a very stable and mature platform) it promised better stability and productivity. I stuck with my PC. I dealt with my PC. I was familiar with my PC. I knew 3.11, 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, and finally XP intimately. Their foibles were the price I paid to use a computer. Then one day, I need a laptop. I compared dozens of manufacturers and configurations, and realized that the old idea of "Macs are expensive" had gone out the window - a similarly configured PC was within $300 on either side of the Mac, and the Mac had had several years to mature its OS. Stable, and reliable, and just as much as a PC, and I had found my laptop. And I don't know that I would prefer it any other way. If I'm on the road, I bring my laptop. I don't have time to troubleshoot, I just need to work. And the Mac does.

Obtuse: So do you still have the PC for a gaming machine?

deadguy: Oh yes. I am a real technophile, so I love buying and building machines - it's fun to get the boxes and unpack and assemble. That was one of the things I liked about the Amiga - even though upgrading the bits and pieces of hardware was expensive, the OS had a lot of replacement functions and modules written by better and better programmers. In fact, I think they had to become better programmers because the hardware was slow to change, unlike the PC market.

Obtuse: I had an Amiga 500 and I don't remember any of these things, which model were you using?

deadguy: I had a 500 and a 2000 and a 4000. All of them had the capability for upgrades in the operating system, since all the OS hooks were well documented.

Obtuse: Neat, well, before this strays off into recollections of my misspent youth let's get back on track. Ok, so Relic and you, where did the connection start?


deadguy: Half-Life.

Obtuse: Could you go into some more detail? o.O

deadguy: Half-Life had a video on the CD. This was for something fantastic. Something I'd never seen before. And that was the promo video for Homeworld. That was it, and I joined the forums in November 1999.

Obtuse: OK, so how did you come to be the owner of the place that can withstand the full fury of #homeworld?

deadguy: Well, a couple years ago, I think back in '03, Xypher started a thread inquiring about the viablility of a plan for the community to own a server of their own. AustNet was always crashing on us, IRC was unstable, etc. and pretty quickly people jumped on the idea. The original plan was to have Xypher host it at his work, but as usual, life (and bosses) intervened. Working at an ISP as liberal as my work, we get colocation space, and I volunteered to take over the whole affair, as Xypher had grown pretty tired of the whole ordeal. After a sort of fitful start, I learned a lot about using and administrating a linux server, even how to properly panic when it all goes horribly wrong.

Obtuse: What tends to go wrong?

deadguy: There was a point last year when I upgraded the system (it was using Debian), and the distribution source list had one line that was wrong, but right at the same time. You see, Debian has several revisions at any given time, and each revision has two names. Last year, all the configs retrieved from the "Warty Warthog" (yeah, I don't know) distro they moved it up to Sarge (stable) and one of the lines was still referring to sid directly, instead of Warty Warthog. That meant, I had a bunch of stable files and a fistful of fresh, untested files this spelled disaster. and thus the second birth of the server

Obtuse: Well, I didn't understand that at all, but it sounded funky Excuse my complete ignorance, but do you have a role on the forums as well as being the godfather of IRC?


deadguy: Haha - yeah, that was sort of technical, sorry.

Yes, after being a participant in the gallery (which is now The Studio), I was promoted to moderator of that section. I had to take a little break from the forums entirely recently, and turned that responsibility over to Riess. Ion asked me back when Squid left us for that brief time to go terrorize the e-countryside, and so now I'm a co-super-moderator over the community section, which encapsulates Newcomers, General Discussions, The Studio, The Workshop, and Tabletop.

Obtuse: Wow, that's a pretty big area of responsibility, what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?

deadguy: Since most of those areas are staffed by a group of bright moderators who know what they're doing, then I answer any questions about what should be done in the case of fire.

Obtuse: Are there many 'fires'?

deadguy: Well, when there's a problematic thread or poster, moderators sometimes have to intervene. Occasionally, the actual action taken may be in question, and so the moderator comes to Squid or I to get a final verdict. We also provide direct intervention at a higher level and act as an interface with Fleet Command for the category moderators if there's a problem that needs escalation (e.g. spam bots)

Obtuse: Has there been anything interesting recently that's happened in that department?

deadguy: Not really. All the "interesting" cases seem to end up in Forum Issues.

Obtuse: Have you been to any of the forum meetups? How well do you know your fellow staff members?

deadguy: I went up to Vancouver a couple years back, and met UberJumper, Pike, and IgnusDei. I also transposed two numbers in Soul's phone number, and therefore didn't get a chance to meet him in person. I know most of the old-school moderators better than many of the newer ones, but I feel like I'd get along with pretty much any one of them. That helps, being a moderator, since not only are there people to back you up, but people you trust when they're correcting your perspective.

Obtuse: Do you have any advice for the newer moderators coming in from your experience?

deadguy: Don't take anything personally. You're not getting paid to take things personally. Heck, you're not getting paid at all.

Obtuse: So how do you view the forums nowadays? What do you think has changed since you joined?

deadguy: Well, with Relic putting out some really successful games, we've had a lot more members join. A lot of them are a younger group than I think we initially had, and as a function of their enthusiasm, we've definitely grown a ton. We've obviously had to get a larger group of moderators who are pulled from the forums we have them moderate, and that helps things a lot - a lot of the senior moderators participate in diverse areas, but having specialists who know their territory is good.

The rules haven't changed a whole lot, nor have they needed to, which I think is a testament to their basic value in keeping these forums a fun place to be.

Obtuse: If there was one thing about the forums that you would like to change, if there is one, what would it be?

deadguy: I would like to have more artists and writers back in the Studio - we used to have so much good fiction and art that we had to separate them. The Officer's Lounge (where we kept fiction) languished after several writers departed, and we decided to merge them. After DoW, things picked back up, but we seem to have a lot of space marines and orks in both the art and fiction. I miss the variety we used to have.

Obtuse: Riess said much the same kind of thing. Do you have any ideas on how that might be accomplished?

deadguy: I'm not really even sure many of the members venture into the Studio. And in that manner it's sort of a self-perpetuating problem - if no-one goes there, no artists or writers go there, so there's nothing to see, and so no-one goes there. I think that if we could promote the studio as *the* place for the creative person to be seen, then we might solve one edge of that problem.

Obtuse: Hmm, do you think perhaps a Buggo-created writing/drawing competition might help? Have a Warahmmer related art and writing and a non-warhammer related art and writing competitions, for example.

deadguy: Anything Buggo touches seems to turn to gold. She's magic incarnate or something. Contests in general have been pretty successful, regardless of the actual prize at stake, be it a custom avatar, or a signed copy of the game. Not much can hurt the Studio except a flood of one type of thread versus another. There needs to be balance, or enough of each type in a continuous flow to warrant a re-separation.


Obtuse: Well, hopefully if there were 4 mini-competitions that'd help spread people out a bit. I'll see if I can get Buggo's thoughts on it at some point. You've been associated with the Studio, are you a writer or artist yourself?

deadguy: I'm both a writer and artist, but not prolific in either. I do take an awful lot of photos, but that's because I learned long ago, the more photos you take, the better your chances are of getting a great one. The advent of digital cameras has been a boon to me. Of course, I still miss my old SLR Nikon film camera.

Obtuse: Do you have any collections of photos you have done on the net?

deadguy: I actually do, I have a flickr page. I tend to upload to it in batches, and I'm *really* behind. http://flickr.com/photos/irowboat/

Obtuse: (looking at page) Have you ever worked in chalk?

deadguy: I worked in pastel, but I only worked in one color: Bottle Green. I don't know why, but that seems to be the preferred color of life drawing classes everywhere

Obtuse: Could you tell me something about yourself no-one knows?

deadguy: That's hard, because I'm pretty straight with people. Okay, something no-one on the forums knows: I am almost always completely crushed by the brunettes I've dated once I break up with them. I always remain friends with the blondes, for some reason. If you want, you can add that I've been broken up with via post card from the middle east.

Obtuse: Okay, let's see what #homeworld thinks


deadguy: Someone asked me "if someone had a gun to your head, and gave you a choice between EvE and WoW, which would you choose and why?" and I said "The gun, because my chances of survival are better that way"

SquidDNA: What's your favorite media format and why... six words exactly

deadguy: <3 mp3 for its massive popularity

Pulstar: Favorite drink and why.

deadguy: Rum and coke because it's rarely screwed up, even by amateurs.

Pulstar: Best/wildest memory associated with said drink?

deadguy: I have no memory of that year

Soul: Dg, what is your shot of choice come March in BC?

deadguy: Patron Silver. Tequila for those who don't drink much. Of course that's more of a sipping tequila, so I'll just go with tequila

Chrysophylax: If you had the money would you buy a EOS-1ds Mk II or a D2x?

deadguy: The eos, although I think both handgrips are too skinny for my taste.

Chrysophylax: No-one ever chooses the d2x.

deadguy: they changed the mount, what am I supposed to do? Either way, I still have to buy new lenses

Hiiagra: Deadie, were you scared shitless by the 'motherfucking big firecracker'?

deadguy: I was completely caught off guard, but no actual poop came out

IcecreamLtDan: How do you keep the bones lubricated?

deadguy: The bones are permanently lubricated by nanotechnology.

Jal-18: Why do you and mommy fight so much?

deadguy: Me and mommy fight so much because you're a bad child.


deadguy: Well, you did ask.

Jal-18: Followup: how would one go about getting a new daddy?

deadguy: You'll have to travel back in time and become your own father. which will immediately fulfill the age old curse of "I hope you have kids JUST LIKE YOU!"

IcecreamLtDan: What do you do for fun?

deadguy: I watch movies, write, doodle, and play games. I also pick random people to forcibly join channels like #hamsterstyle and #FearOfRobots. I also have a girlfriend, and she's fun.

IcecreamLtDan: What games are you playing now?

deadguy: I am playing Splinter Cell: Double Agent at the moment. Double Agent is good, but I haven't been dragged along the story as well as the first Splinter Cell

Unk: Stockings or tights?

deadguy: Depends on how quickly I can get them off a girl.

IcecreamLtDan: Do you build your own computers, or buy them pre-built?

deadguy: I build all my own computers

SquidDNA: Deadie just buys sand and ore.

Obtuse: dead, was there anything you wanted to add to round this off?

deadguy: If you ever get coffee that tastes like it's been on the burner a while, add a dab of salt - half a pinch or so. Cuts that flavour.

Obtuse: Okay, that’s all we have time for. Thanks for reading, and, as deadguy always says: if you find yourself suddenly engulfed in flame, please remember that you did it to yourself.

Ragnarok

Good job Obtuse, as always!

keep up the good work!

EDIT: of course i do

Obtuse

Thanks, you read frighteningly fast, by the way o.O

PULSTAR

Excellent as always Obtuse, though I fear you're going to run out of room in your sig for all the links soon

Mirehn_Bielann

Very nice Obtuse. Cheers!

JAL-18

Awesome.

Obtuse

Jal, your exchange with deadguy made me smile

reki

So... deadguy... as a GD moderator, how do you feel about thread bumping?

ps nice interview obtuse & deadie

Someguy

So is it true that you're my half brother?

off-topic, I enjoy these interviews by obtuse.

deadguy

I... I want... I... want to lock this for bumping but I'm too much of an attention whore.

And yes SG, I am your long lost half brother. We should go find our biological father, although the last time I called Jackie Chan at home, he didn't seemed very happy. I'm hoping the Chuck Norris Total Gym I sent him improved his mood.

Dimension

squid owns, and deadle is hot.

I wonder why I'm the only one who calls him that p_O

Moe

Because deadie sounds much cuter.

HI DEADIE!

Retroboy

moez necroz? onoz!

-- Retro, proud of his poetic genius

Question

Mind telling us which ISP you work for?

Nurizeko

I must like you deadguy, I read the whole thing.

:P

AceRimmer

Very nice work. No photo of deadguy, though? You gave us one of Reki.

Obtuse

Rimmer: Check the yearbook entry, it's in there. Well, at least his chin is, but unfortunately that's the best I can do short of him providing another picture himself. :S

Question: I don't think at this point he's at liberty to disclose that information due to the not entirely positive portrayal he has given it in various places :P

ionfish

You just need to composite it with last year's picture, which shows the top of his head.

Obtuse

I present the hideous monstrosity (no offense, dead) that is my MS paint skillz:



I call it.... 'deadguy'. He's actually looking quite chipper for someone mashed together from two stages of life.

P.S. if someone wants to do a better one, feel free

Itphes

I think it's fine just the way it is :P

Great interview though.

Question

Edit : Weird, the picture didnt show up earlier

Methuselath

*Bump!* Per Obtuse's request...

He has a wierd fetish. Everytime he's on top of the page he gets a hardon

* Methuselath rings for a doctor


Any psychiatrist in the house?

Mnementh

Mister dead was the saviour of irc...after molle.

Obtuse

Er, thanks Meth o.O If anyone happens to have any questions for deadguy which weren't answered here they can post and hopefully'll get a deadguy reply. Or you could just track him down in IRC, which is quicker.

deadguy

I say who I work for all the time, so I don't see any point in not mentioning it. I work for XMission. We have our problems, but we're more transparent than any other company I know; a description of the problems and solution (or hope of solution) is emailed out to every customer after any service interruption. We get more compliments on our customer service than we get complaints, so that's got to be a plus.

Also, that's a pretty good gluing together of my head. I'm thinking I'll just start posting pieces and people can build a jigsaw of me.

Elif Tymes

Nice interview

ionfish

I always figured that's what you were doing anyway.