Terra Nova Welcomes Cory Ondrejka

Cory heads up product development at Linden Lab, architects of Second Life, the world making quite the splash these days (and one guesses there is more to come). Speaking of splash, Linden's company bio page reveals that Lieutenant Commander (edit: was Ensign) Ondrejka (USN, inactive res.) is an expert on naval nuclear power systems, weapons engineering, and computer programming. Word to the wise: avoid this man's 2L creations at all costs, especially if they seem to be big, gray, fast, sentient, and loaded. But don't avoid his commentary! We've gained much from his comments here and expect to gain even more from his posts. Cory, welcome!

Comments

[BBC]

1.

Edward Castronova said:
Word to the wise: avoid this man's 2L creations at all costs, especially if they seem to be big, gray, fast, sentient, and loaded.

Be even more afraid if they are small, yellow, and quack. This blog just gets better and better!

[hunter]

2.

Okay, here's the cliche "there goes the neighborhood" post :-)

welcome cory - looking forward to your thoughts

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

3.

"Okay, here's the cliche "there goes the neighborhood" post :-)"

Yay! I started a cliche! ;)

Geez, with all these people coming on board I won't have time to read all the posts! Oh, the agony.

[Cory Ondrejka]

4.

The curious thing is the parts of my c.v. Ted chose to emphasize. My time in the Navy and defense contracting is significantly less than my time making arcade, console and PC video games, although I certainly wish that I still had the budgets to play with that I had at Lockheed :-). It also provides me with the excuse to post:

GO NAVY, BEAT ARMY! (which we just did, 34-6 in the yearly football -- American football, Richard -- game.

What is amusing is that the US military uses a form of time based versus achievement based rewards similar to what some MMORPGs are currently struggling with. That is, if you are an active duty officer in the US Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines, you will gain rank in a somewhat predictable way (at least for the first decade or so of your career and assuming that you don't put your destroyer on a sandbar.) You start out as an "O-1", (Ensign in the Navy, 2nd Lieutenant in the rest) and after 2 years become an "O-2" (Lieutenant (jg) in the Navy, 1st Lieutenant everywhere else.) 2 additional years bring O-3, with O-4 4 to 6 years after that. This assumes that you are active duty, ie your are in the military full time.

Where it becomes interesting is if you leave active duty and enter the reserves. Active reservists (1 weekend a month, 2 week a year, except when we're invading other countries) actually gain rank just about as fast as active personel, perhaps adding a year to the time to reach O-3 and O-4 and imposing some ultimate caps, with reservists very rarely achieve O-7 or above (Admirals or Generals).

Where it becomes even more interesting is that after you leave the military you are often kept in the inactive reserves, where you no longer have any active duty time and don't have right to use your rank for anything. But, if the military decides that they need you, they can call you back up and reinstate you. While in the inactive reserves, you keep getting promoted (I got my LCDR letter last year) and if they reinstate you, that's what you come back in as. These promotions seem to run another year or two behind the active reserves.

In describing this at the office, we were all cracking up when we realize that this is analgous to approaches that some MMORPGs are taking to ensure that users who can't be "hard core" players can still advance, just not quite as fast as hard core folks.

c