This site is kept open for archival purposes. There are lots of blog posts on everything from tech stuff to Scientology on this site. It will remain open for years to come.
But, my new home is at isene.org. That is where I continue blogging and sharing materials for your free use. You can subscribe at the bottom page over at isene.org to keep yourself updated on new posts.
Articles, books, my artwork and music is shared at one of the pages on my new website, and easily reached via isene.com.
I have started the process of migrating from WordPress to Jekyll. And boy am I excited 😀
Since Jekyll is a web site platform written in Ruby with lots of possibilities and extensions, I am right at home. No more writing posts in web forms or clicking around in admin panels – like with WordPress. With Jekyll, pages, posts and other content are simple text files on my laptop. I drop images in directories, fire up a script and my website gets updated with a swish!
First out is the geekier part of me. I have moved isene.org over to Jekyll and will move also my blogging over there with isene.com and isene.me pointing to the same site (maybe to different parts of the site… we’ll see).
Walk right over to isene.org and leave a comment or five on the Welcome post. Tell me what you think about my new home. Any home improvement tips?
After 15 years in the making, finally Amar Tools is ‘feature complete’ and deserving the 1.0 release mark.
The swiss army knife tool set for the Amar Role-Playing game is freely available on Github. Although created for the Amar RPG, these tools are useful for any fantasy RPG.
The online version is available here: http://www.isene.org/amar.html
A shortened version of the feature list:
Check out the online version to see all the other features.
Thanks to all contributors – players, game masters and others that have helped push the Amar Tools with more than 30K lines of code over this milstone mark.
Another tool got added to the Amar RPG tool box: A random weather generator. Like several of the other tools, this one is also quite usable for any Role-Playing Game. However, if you are a Game Master in Amar, you get to generate weather for any of the 13 months, with religious days and moon phases added. If you are playing another game world, simply choose “Unspecified” when selecting a month. Enjoy 🙂
Aaron Smith-Levin did a second interview with me on Scientology:
I think this would wrap up my talks and interviews on Scientology for now.
I also completed my page here on Scientology. This makes it easier to give those who want me to comment, answer questions or contribute to book projects, articles or school assignments one definite page to get all my views.
I’m on a roll. Decided to add yet another tool to the Amar Role-Playing Game. You now get a randomly generated relationship map between the citizens whenever you generate a fantasy village, town or city.
You can also download your generated village/town/city as a text file, edit it as you wish and upload your edited file to get a random relationship map for your new settlement. Check out the tools here: Tools for the Amar RPG.
You will get a map like this:
Click the image to zoom in.
Be aware, for larger settlements, the map becomes chaotic.
Source code for all the Amar RPG tools is freely avalable on Github.
The Amar Role-Playing Game has got yet another tool: a random town generator. It doesn’t draw a map for you, but it will save contless hours populating villages, towns and cities. You will get a realistic distribution of house types, shops and trades. Each house is populated with residents – complete with name, age, sex, main skill level and basic personality.
Whereas this tool is created for the Amar RPG, it will save time for Game Masters of any fantasy RPG in creating settlements for a game campaign.
Source code for all the Amar RPG tools is avalable on Github.
The Amar Role-Playing Game has got two new tools lately.
To understand what Amar RPG is, check out its extensive wiki.
The new tools are a random names generator and an “Open ended dice roller“. The random names generator will give you ten names of the race you pick (from human male and female names to dwarves, elves, trolls and more).
If you are a Game Master for an Amar RPG campaign, you now have a better swiss army knife at your disposal.
Coming up is something even more time-saving. I won’t reveal just yet what it is, but I can tell you that it will save hours upon hours of preparations – even if you are playing other Role-Playing Game systems.
After 8 years of heading a recruitment company I wrote the Interview Handbook. After another two years of daily interviews, I quit the company in order to cater for my inner nerd.
I then did 12 years in the IT business before Brendan and I started the comapny “Å” (A-Circle.no) in 2012.
Everything got simpler. And simpler. And simpler. To the point where I can now revisit my 10 years in the recruitment business and boil everything down to one page. So here it is, The OnePageBook, Recruitment:
“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” (Henry David Thoreau)
If you never ever clean your room, wash the dishes or your clothes, water the plants or make dinner, the gap between your skills and your mother’s skills in these areas will keep widening. Your skills will be handicapped by your mother’s empathy and care.
If you establish processes in an organization that is supposed to take care of issues and problems for the employees, it wil handicap their abilities to handle this themselves.
In the ITIL framework, you are supposed to establish some 27 processes to cater for every part of IT service delivery in an organization. One such process is Problem Management. The purpose of this process is to handle the underlying cause of one or more issues so that it doesn’t happen again. When this is turned into a process where a subset of employees gets to be experts at detecting problems, conduct root causes analysis and solve the problems, the gap between the skills of these guys and the rest keeps widening. The process will handicap the employees problem solving skills.
Problem solving should be a skill exercized by every employee. It should be part of the company’s culture, their DNA. Everyone should jump at the opportunity to solve problems they encounter. It will hone their skills and keep them valuable as efficient problem solvers. Those who encounter a specific problem has more initial data about it and can usually solve it quicker… if they have excellent problem solving skills.
Don’t relegate important skills sets to only certain processes. Help everyone exercize and fine-tune their skills in fire-fighting, problem solving, change management, customer handling, documentation and strategic thinking.
Geir Isene - uncut 