A Dark And Quiet Room

So.

One of my guilty game pleasures is Heroscape. Honestly, as a game snob, I really shouldn’t like this game. But I do. I think part of it is my history with miniatures wargaming, which this allows me to enjoy again.

The other is eye candy.

Seriously.

Check out these pictures to see what I mean:

A massive castle
Ice and bridge
Bridges and lava

The pieces lock together so that you can build whatever battlefield you want. The units themselves range from elvish archers to dragons to robots and more. It’s everything my geeky little heart could want.

More importantly, for this post, my children also love it.

In particular, I’ve noticed that Isaac, even at age six, does quite well at this game. He seems to intuitively grasp concepts like a pinning force, flanking, and pincer movements. So, yesterday, I decided to play a game of Heroscape with just him, discussing strategy and tactics along the way, and see how he did.

We talked through some things along the way, including force selection, and I was laying out my battle plan to him for a while to illustrate my two dicta for the day:

1) Always have a plan.
2) Always be ready to change the plan.

However, I was careful to allow him to make decisions, based on some of the basic principles that I was laying out. I want to be clear on this point: Isaac played the game essentially alone.

Which is why, when I say that I won by the skin of my teeth, I want you to be impressed.

Specifically, at the end of the day, I had a solitary Viking warrior to my name. The rest of my army had been completely slaughtered to secure my victory.

Indeed, the entire game came down to one exchange between my last Viking and Isaac’s last samurai.

I won, but I had to work hard for it.

I’m so proud.

So, Friday night, I stay late at work to do a server move. For the uninitiated, this means that I was moving mission critical software and data from one machine to another. Specifically, I was upgrading our database software and moving our member data onto this new machine. This is the stuff of which Mountain Dew-fuelled late nights are made. Believe me. I’ve been at work until 3:00 a.m. before.

However, I had high hopes for this server move. We had been prepping for months to do this, doing dry runs, finding bugs, and so on. So, I figured that this should be smooth sailing.

I was wrong.

A little background: one of the functions that our database server does is to produce much of the form letters that we mail to our members. These are automatically created every night as a PDF file, which is then printed in the morning. Nifty, eh? The technical term for this is a “data-driven subscription”. The software that we use to do this is called Microsoft Reporting Services, which is a part of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

This is a computer story, and I just invoked Microsoft. I’m sure that you already know that this can’t end well.

So, I finish the server move and start testing the server to make sure that various things work, including our data-driven subscriptions. I go to the place in the computer where they should be.

Nothing.

They are all gone.

Panic. Sheer panic.

There’s not even a button to let me create a new data-driven subscription.

I’m furious at the computer. Once again, balked by a MACHINE! Carefully, I put everything back in place, to avoid further disasters. (In a previous failed server move, I failed to put everything back, overlooking one small detail. That small detail required one of those infamous late nights. Once burned, twice shy.)

So, today, I’m doing research, trying to figure out what is going on. Come to find out that our edition of Reporting Services doesn’t include data-driven subscriptions.

Blink.

Now I’m not mad at the computer. I’m mad at Microsoft. It’s like they said, “Here’s a car! You can drive it around all you want! It does all sorts of nifty things. Oh, except we won’t include headlights.” A car will work just fine without headlights, but just try driving at night without them.

I will grant that the specification chart noted that our edition of SQL Server 2005 didn’t include data-driven subscriptions, so some might say that I should cut Microsoft some slack. But, you know, when I buy a car, I don’t check to make sure that it includes headlights, either.