Among other things I am a scrum master, and working on a tool which if we combine with a work flow tool, embed some functions in Outlook / email we'll have a product which every program and product manager in the world will lick your boots to use because it visually shows you the status combined with the hours of work remaining to complete projects or programs.
As a result of being in the belly of the game beast my childhood spent reading a statistically alarming amount of science fiction is all coming back to me now. My first volunteer work as a 12 yrs old child was as a 5th grade librarian so I could gain access to books considered over my age group to read without permission. "I Robot" by Isaac Asimov was the first book I cracked open snuck a peak at the pages reading it with a feeling of mystery and awe, while hiding behind the book cart between the dark library stacks and classrooms at Williwaw Elementry. Then I read every thing I could find by Robert Heinlein - the "Heinlein juveniles."
Halo is one of the Microsoft's premiere games, I found mention of it linked off the intranet to a public review http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15644342/ about Gears of War. It is for all these games I work on the back end tools for the devs as a PM. Today in a hardware meeting discussion one of the PMs said he found four types of Xbox games that come in Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and I can hardly wait to see them. I don't know much of anything about MS games, but I am ready to learn.
Halo’s subject matter reminded me of Larry Niven, the scifi writer, one of my tertiary faves for good reasons --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Niven
"Apparently, the video game titled Halo has used a lot of ideas from Ringworld. Items such as the Kzinti Blade, the Kzinti itself, and the puppeteers share relations with: Energy Sword, Brutes, and Prophets respectively.
Various other objects between both Ringworld and Halo may be noticed, including the entire principle of the "Ring" in Ringworld, and the "Halo" in Halo, while the ringworld's sun is a weapon on the ring, the actual ring itself is a weapon in halo."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
Here Niven introduced =
"The idea that luck is a genetic trait that can be favored by selective breeding."
I very much enjoyed the concept of flash crowd – I thought it brilliant> vertainly he had foresight:
"Larry Niven introduced the idea of a flash crowd in his story "Flash Crowd" (1973), which evolved in 2003 to the flash mob in which people meet together to protest in a creative way at a specific time and place to disappear as quickly as they appeared some minutes later. The term Flash Crowd is also used to describe a web site showing little or no response due to excessive amounts of traffic. A Flash Crowd on a web site is synonymous with Slashdotting."
Slashdot has my vote but for other reasons.
May I tell you I am very comfortable among this group of people? Some place in Entertainment may be the best gig yet. It's hard to beat working with Microsoft's SuperTeam though.
Probably I stopped reading scifi because it was so difficult to find new concepts or even fresh writing in the hard scifi class of literature. You have to actually know something, and there are so many traditional classics and fine authors to read instead.
What's scary is when you realize that you have actually read many of these books:
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best
Banned or otherwise:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/
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