The Wreck of the Enron Fitzgerald

Written and (c) 2002 by Stephen V Cole with apologies to Gordon Lightfoot

The Legend lives on from the SEC on down
of the scandal they call Enronscrewedme.
The stink it is said, rivals that of the dead
when the skies of the market turn gloomy.
While the load of debt soars, twenty-nine billion bucks more,
than the whole corporation weighs empty,
The business it's said is now deader than dead,
when the debts of the market come early.

Enron was the pride of America's snide
insiders who trade in the business.
As the big traders go, it was bigger than most,
with a board and accountants with finesse.
Concluding some terms, with a couple of gas firms,
they gambled in telecom bandwidth,
And later that year when the deal hit the tank
would it be the whole loss they'd be caught with?

The buzz in the press made a tattle tale sound
and the rumors flew up to the ceilin'.
And every man knew as the chairman did too
'twas the witch of bankruptcy come stealin'.
The buyout came late and the profit had to wait,
when the third quarter re-ports came crashin'.
When October came it was India in pain,
In the face of a balance sheet slashin'.

When 401s fell, the whole board sent a note saying
employees, you cannot just cash out.
In November and then, a partnership caved in,
and the chairman said "we need a bailout".
The Chairman wired in, he had lawyers coming in
and the Board it was true was in peril.
And later that night, when his stock sank out of sight,
came the wreck of the Enron Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the friends of Bush go
when bankruptcy turns dollars to pennies?
The pundits all said, they'd have gotten ahead,
if they'd got 15 billion from Cheney.
They might have sold out or have been subsidized.
They may have gone broke making payoffs.
All that remains are the faces and the names,
of employees now facing huge layoffs.

Wall Street rolls, the SEC sings,
in the halls of their Washington mansions.
Employees can scream at the directors' schemes.
The bonds and the stock are wall paper.
And farther below, their stock portfolios
will take in what the courtrooms will send them.
The lawyers all go as reporters all know
where the gales of bankruptcy will take them.

In a musty old hall down at Justice they prayed,
in the employees' meetings that followed.
The exchange bell chimed 'til it rang 29 times
for each billion that Enron had squandered.
The Legend comes down from the SEC on down
of the scandal they call Enronscrewedme.
The stink it is said, rivals that of the dead,
when the skies of the market turn gloomy.

Got Any Marketing Ideas?

ADB, Inc., is always interested in great marketing ideas, ways and places to sell our products, as well as new products to sell. We are developing a line of non-game products (calendars, paperback books, ship books, plus Cafe Press). We have an Amazon store (not to make money so much as to put our products in front of other groups of potential customers), and the MySpace page exists for that reason as well. We tried a lot of things that didn't work (Google Pay per Click, full color ads in trade journals) and a lot of things that did work (banners on gamer websites, Star Fleet Alerts) and are always looking for new ideas. If you have any, send them to us at Marketing@StarFleetGames.com and we'll think them over.

Dragon Con Detachment Departs

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

SVC and Leanna are off to Dragon Con and Mike Sparks and I, as the rear detachment, have a lot of things to try to get done. Not just the day to day things, but additional tasks including continued effort on existing tasks that can then be E-mailed to Jean Sexton to be taken to SVC.

It is going to be a long week or so, but frankly I am looking forward to it.

Preparing for SVC and Leanna's Departure

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

SVC and Leanna will be leaving town tomorrow (26 Aug 08), and Michael Sparks and I will be left to try to keep the place running.

This is always a fun thing, as there are a lot of things to be done, and fewer people to do them.

Not only will I be trying to make headway on Module Y2, but I will also be processing orders, being the only person Jean Sexton can refer board problems to (and trying to keep more of an eye on the board than usual), plus answer E-mail and all the other tasks that have to be done.

It is going to be a very busy week here. A time when you would think I would be able to get more work done with fewer distractions, but there are actually MORE distractions when SVC and Leanna are out of town.

Ah well, that is what I get paid the big bucks for (GRIN).

WE WANT YOUR COMMENTS!

Stephen V. Cole writes:

We have merged the two websites. The combined site now has a new front page, site map, and index, making it a lot easier to use. You are welcome to comment on the changes, but more importantly, please suggest changes, and check the changes we make.

Here is my e-mail: Design@StarFleetGames.com or you can comment on either forum.

Balancing Weapons

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Balancing weapons in a game system can be a tricky business. While weapon "A" might have similar damage output to weapon "B", weapon "A" may be designed to have another tactical limitation.

Photon torpedoes are pretty much equivalent to disruptors in damage output, for example, but they require two turns to arm whereas the disruptor can fire every turn. Fusion beams can be pretty devastating at close range, but are pretty weak at long range and have the firing rate of photon torpedoes, even if they require only half the energy a photon torpedo needs to fire their shot ever other turn, and the same power a disuptor needs to fire a shot every turn.

Every weapon needs to bring something to the game. A weapon, for example that can fire every turn, but if you do not fire it on a turn, you can add more power to it the next turn. If you do not fire it then, you can add even more power on the third turn making it a pretty horrendous weapon. The problem is your opponent knows you have not fired it the two preceding turns, and knows that it cannot be held, and if he does not let you get into a good firing aspect, you have to dump all of the power as the weapon cannot be held ready, and cannot be armed a fourth turn. Which may leave you with weak version of the weapon when your opponent closes in to hit you with his faster firing, or holdable, weapons.

Make sure you are fully aware of how a given weapon operates and test your tactics before concluding that the weapon is too powerful, or too weak.

Risks Should Not Be Taken

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

We have made another transit to "the Gulag", gaining more space in the warehouse. We did two turns of the truck, mostly because while the truck probably would have held everything we had to take, we need to have space in the truck to use a pallet jack to move the pallets into position to for the lift gate to lower them.

We had two "moderate risk" moves (full sized pallets of which the load on one end was removed leaving the weight on the remaining end to ride the lift gate while the unloaded end was steadied by ground personnel), and one "high risk" move that all of us agree should NOT have been done. We had all come to the conclusion that the pallet should have been broken down in the truck (it had arrived already packed in the truck), but as the "Incident Report" would have said (had "failure" occurred, which thankfully it did not) "Supervision failed at all levels". (Worst case, the report would have said "The casualty occurred as a result of the failure of supervision at all levels.") The pallet was too big, and while the load was comparatively light, it was too much to risk moving the way it was moved.

Yes, we got it down, and "nobody died", and nothing was broken, but none of us should have allowed that maneuver to be made. All of us knew the correct thing to do was to break down that pallet, but we all stood by and let the truck driver maneuver that pallet into the high risk position, with none of saying stop, but each doing his part to try to keep the pallet under control as it made its way from the truck to the ground.

It was entirely possible that the pallet could have "gone over", and two of us might have had, at minimum broken legs (all four of them), at worse . . . death from fractured skulls as a result of being forced into uncontrolled backward falls to the pavement under the weight of the pallet.

NEVER EVER let a desire to avoid work (and that is what it came down to, none of us wanted to do the work to tear down and rebuild that pallet) make you risk your life. In the long run, it will become a habit that will get you badly injured, if not killed. Be safe, not just for yourself, but for those you are supervising.