Bad Bots - Final

As we wrap up this series on bad bot behavior, the nit-pickers have complained mightily.  After all, they state, Albert writes Library and he does not program the bot to cheat, short-change or otherwise rip off the players, or his customers, us bot owners.  One could counter that we have access to a configuration menu and otherwise have full control over bot operations and thus, we could program the bot to behave badly.

But all this misses the point.  All this represents is a symptom of something larger, greed.

What is greed?  The movie Wall Street proclaims that Greed is good.  Yet the Bible tells us that greed is one of the seven deadly sins.  So which is it?  To paraphrase a certain former President, it all depends on what the definition of the word is.

Some people have equated the term profit for greed.  They’ll argue that desiring any more than you consume is greedy and thus selfish. 

But careful study of history and economic systems tell us that the pursuit of profits is what lead the advances of the past 200 years.   Pursuit of profits is what enabled Steve Jobs to create devices that many people would want even though few people even conceived of such devices when the Apple Founder dreamed of them.

One can pursue profits ethically or unethically.  Unethical pursuits of profits have abounded throughout history.  Whether it is misrepresenting the amount of cards in your bot inventory or altering the credits your customer has, being unethical is one trait few people can legitimately justify.  Don’t do it.

Bad to the Bone (Part 4)

Last time I discussed the strategy of making false or misleading statements in the classified section of Magic Online  This whole concept of misleading statements to sell a product or a service has a name: marketing.   Some have described the field of marketing as legalized lying.

Whether or not a soft drink is the best soft drink around is purely a subjective statement.  Whether the taste of a diet food is the same as its equivalent is open to legitimate debate.  These debates center on subjective matters; designed as such to get around the legal barriers to the truth in advertising laws.

Objective claims typically not made because fact checkers will indeed attempt to verify the authenticity of said claims.  If your bot claims to have 60,000 cards in its inventory, it is much easier to verify than stating that your bot has a large inventory.  (How is large defined?)

But this bad behavior is trivial compared to what some botters do: change the credit their customers have.

Why would a botter openly change the credits of one of their customers?  Maybe the customer is a cherry picker, picking only the best cards and leaving the chaff.  Maybe the customer is really another bot and one does not want the competition to profit at their expense.

One might even be tempted to think that this is a profitable strategy.  After all, they’ll reason, the bot gives the customer their balance at the start and end of each trade.  Most customers have multiple accounts across the various bot chains and who is going to be meticulous enough to actually verify each and every account?  Plus, computers do not lie, right?  So who is going to notice if their balance drops?  We all trust computers, don’t we?

There are several reasons why this unethical approach will not work.

It is not cost effective.  In terms of your time, the amount of time it takes to alter a customer’s credit is not worth the fractional ticket you will gain.  (Even the most casual customers will notice a negative credit balance.)

Getting caught will bring about serious consequences.  First off, you will have one extremely angry customer who will definitely publicize that your bot alters credits.  The accusation alone would be enough to cause some players to black-list your bot so that it could never happen to them, which naturally means no customers and thus, no profits.

WotC could intervene.  While the bot owner would argue that this is not the prevue of WotC as trading has little to do with the game experience, the legal arm of WotC might see things differently.  Ripping off customers would be considered a violation of the Terms of Service and thus, terminate your account without prejudice.  This would mean losing all your inventory.

OK, so you use a mule bot for such things.  WotC could up the ante and decide to terminate all accounts which the bot owner has.  No problem, register each bot under a different name and email address.  But WotC would track all MTGO activity from your IP address, making it real simple for them to suspend or terminate your bot chain.

Is losing your business really worth 0.35 credits?

Bad to the Bone - Part 3

On Sunday, my colleague posted that putting the names of popular bot chains in their classified

messages was unethical and used by bad bots.

http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-comprehensive-guide-for-aspiring_13.html

Simply putting the name of the competition in your advertising message so that your bot will show up in search results has been done since marketers realized they might be able to curtail the competition by using such strategies.

Bad bots however do far more than simply inserting the competition’s name so that their bot shows up in the results. 

• Saying that your bot will sell a card for X when the bot sells it for X+Y
• Saying that your bot will purchase a card for X when the bot will buy it for X-Y
• Saying that your bot will purchase X copies of a card when in reality it is set to only accept X-Y
• Saying that your bots are linked when in reality they are not.
• Saying that you have X cards in your collection when in reality the bot has significantly fewer cards.
• Posting an email address or a website which does not exist or gives the customer a way to contact the owners

These tactics may give the bot a little publicity and maybe even an up-tick in sales, but customers will notice and over time, such tactics are not successful.

Doubt me?  Look at your own life and your own purchases and the brands you trust.  Would you buy an eye-pad from a company named Aqqle?  If gasoline was listed at $4 a gallon on sign buy $5 on the pump, would you purchase gasoline there?  Would you go purchase it a second time?

Bad to the Bone - Part 2

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

When one uses this phrase to describe someone, they usually are referring to a positive attribute, typically work ethic. 

Of course, this also breeds copycats.  In sports, it causes imitation.  What was successful for a time becomes copied until it no longer works anymore.  In American Football, the Miami Dolphins unveiled the Wildcat offense which was trendy for a couple of years.  Currently, the read-option has become that trend.

In the business world, this can have more serious consequences than it can in sports.  Ask Rolex if they like people copying their design for watches.  This problem, along with counterfeiting, have created a niche industry of copyrights, patents, and the enforcement of such laws.  Some even say that this is a world-wide problem.

So how does it affect us bot owners? 

Suppose I own a bot chain Bot1, Bot 2, Bot 3 and Bot 4.  I am happily making a healthy profit on my chain and am satisfied.  Now suppose someone comes along with Bot5, Bot6, Bot7 and Bot8.  The confusion is going to cause me to lose business.  As you can imagine, I will not be too pleased about this.

So what can I do about this?

WotC probably will not do anything about it.  They will not step in because nothing was done to violate their Terms of Service.  They won’t get involved in a bot spat and this would set a bad precedence.  WotC has very little to gain by interfering and a lot to lose.  So I suspect they would not get involved.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase Bot5, Bot6 and so on for your purposes.  If nothing else, they can be used for future expansion of your bot empire.  Even if you never use those accounts, just having those accounts means no one else can have them, preserving your integrity and reputation.  You can even use these accounts as mules, a place to put inventory while transferring from one bot to another, or when purchasing a collection.

Bad to the Bone - Part 1

United Airlines to honor tickets sold for $0.
Computer glitch sending wrong bills for toll roads.
Hollywood condo owner receives $154,000 water bill.
Google flags the entire Internet as malware.

Each of the above is a real headline.  The news media loves stories like these as it breaks up the monotony of the local crime report and it also allows the media to subtlety pin the blame on an inanimate object instead of a real living human being. 

They are constant too.  This past Sunday, a Miami Marlins pitcher tossed a no-hitter, a pretty rare feat for baseball.  The Marlins organization allowed people to purchase the un-sold tickets.  If you chose the print-from-home option for these tickets, you’ll soon discover they were printed with the wrong date.  Computer errors are simply all too common.

Computers have deeply integrated into our society and will continue to integrate itself even more in the foreseeable future.  It is hard to imagine where society will be in a few years with technology like Siri and cell phones becoming more like personal assistants than an emergency communications device.

Yet we seem to forget that computers are nothing but tools.  Extremely powerful and useful tools but they are tools nonetheless, doing nothing of their own initiative, only doing what someone else has programmed them to do.  (Even Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than a randomization of a pre-loaded set of instructions.)

We all can agree that for the most part, computers have benefited society.  Who hasn’t been mesmerized by Wikipedia?  If you’ve ever used online bill pay, you appreciate not having to write a paper check once a month and making odd trips to the post office trying to get more stamps.

But as much good as computers have done for society, there are bad people in this world who also have computers.  These computers are programmed to do things which are judged by others as “bad”.  These exists a whole industry whose purpose is to protect your computer from the over 200,000 pieces of malware which is discovered daily.

Even we bot owners are not immune.  We’ve all profited from Library and we are satisfied with its operation.  However, there are those who think that their profits are not enough and will do unethical things to attempt to get those profits.  We’ll be discussing those in this series and we’ll start next time.

This was ML Bot 1.01

I found a screenshot of the first version of ML Bot, year 2007 :-)
It was like that!!

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

Force of Will - not the card one!

I would love to say that I am a navigated businessman who found the secret of growing a company :-) Of course this is not true, but yet I find a common pattern on the successful companies and how their CEOs manage them.

in two words: "Force of Will" (not the card!)

You have to be smart, brilliant, passionate.. but if you lack the capacity to "stay at it", to hold on, to work hard in the tough periods... you won't succeed. Running a business is not a sprint, 

it's a marathon. 

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

Celebrate!

When was the last time you actually enjoyed Magic?

It’s not a factious question.  We’ve had plenty of heavy and deep subjects with topics of VMware, hardware configuration, how to maximize your bots business and even how to maintain your bots while on vacation.  There are times I wonder if all of time and effort placed into botting is worth it.  After all, we are humans.  Yes, botting is our business but most of us got into botting because we first started playing Magic.

So, I ask again, when was the last time you actually enjoyed Magic?

If it has been too long, let me make a suggestion: the folks over at Wizards of the Coast, in celebration of 14 years of Magic the Gathering, is giving everyone a free tournament on September 7th.

In short, you go to your local brick-and-mortar store and register.  In return, you will get a 2014 booster pack.  You open that up and choose a color.  You will then get a core pack that relates to that color.  You then make a deck.  You then play your tournament and once you’ve completed that, you will receive another 2014 booster pack, just for participating!

So, you’ll get 2 boosters and some core cards in the 2014 base set.  Not a bad little heist for an afternoon of playing the game we all love anyway?  What’s not to like?

Official announcement: 
http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/events.aspx?x=mtg/event/mcelebration-facts

Mirror, Mirror (Part 1 of 3)

When a new product is released, who can afford it?  Only the rich can afford to purchase it.  Businesses then use the profits from these purchases to begin to produce a larger batch, which is then sold to the almost-rich.  Then those profits are used to mass produce a product which is then available to the general public at a reasonable price.

We’ve seen this process occur many times in recent years.  The automobile, televisions, cell phones and computers are listed as common examples of this process at work.  But it is not limited to just technology products.  Medical breakthroughs, rehabilitation from injuries, and programming techniques all filter down so the general public can gain access to them.

So what does this have to do with Magic?

This illustrates that the health of an activity or a sport is based not on the very top, but on the masses who can partake in the activity.  Tiger Woods popularized golf, but it is the multitudes of people who play golf regularly which makes the health of golf, tournaments, television revenue, etc all possible.  The same can be said of tennis and soccer and others.

It’s not the professionals, but the amateurs which determine the activity’s health.  I’ll expand on this next time.

Passionate.

We are often told we need to be passionate about our work, our company or the product we are selling. And while it is true, it is also a little bit ephemeral.

Today I heard a better way to describe this:

Transfer our enthusiasm. 

 I love it, and I’m going to use it as a way to judge myself after I present an idea or project to people in the future.

Do not give up

We live in a "startup" world.
We are bombed with news about Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and Android... all growing at embarassing rates and earning millions of dollars. This is ok but... it's not the real world. It's a tiny lucky fraction.

For the rest of the world (and for the rest of the world I mean: "everyone", 99.9999999% of the persons) working hard and staying at it is foundamental. The good part is that you can easily avoid failure, especially when botting: do not give up after 3 weeks, don't get discouraged, insist, iterate and learn from your errors. Stay up late at night, prepare yourself a good coffee, wake up early in the morning.

If you want to be successful, get ready for a lot of long days followed by long nights. I really like the mantra from Jason Fried and 37 Signals. He has a smallish company, 20 or so people that profits Millions per year, and that’s my goal for my companies, but here’s one thing I just found out about how to get there… Stay at it: everyday you continue to build things, the closer you get to a kick-ass, super-profitable business empire.

The good of the new Redeem Fee

Much has been said about the new Redemption Fee, and for sure there are many negative aspects. Today I forced myself to find out some positive effects. I cannot think that WotC decided the increase just to put more money in the pocket.... I am sure WotC has a long time view... at least I hope.


- First of all, the price of the cards will drop 5%-10%. We will have the same amount of tixs online, but cheaper cards. What does it means? It means that our bots will buy more cards for the same amount of money, and that their collection will be better stocked. This is positive because, as I always say, the return factor of a customer is greatly influenced by the stock / the collection, rather than low prices. Many great chains have so-so prices, still they are full of customers because they simply have very well stocked collections.

- Secondly, cheaper cards and boosters means more newcomers. Mtgo is a very expensive game, and the average teenager cannot afford it. But what if he/she could? This type of new players could account for a large % of the base players. And once a teenager gets its first salary (after 2/3 years)...... he is already attracted to Mtgo and willing to spend money there.

- Finally, for redeemers, the situation won't change much. The drop in price will compensate the new fee, and more or less they will earn the same as before. The professional redeemers won't be affected too much - they will, but nothing dramatic will happen.

Experience With Limited Investment

It can be a daunting task starting a bot without a huge capital investment.  I started with one hundred tickets I had bought and put up well over half of my personal collection. Over the next few months I learned through trial and error what I could buy for, What I should sell for and what settings worked out best for me.

Narrowing Your Expectations

The first thing I learned is that with what I had I couldn’t expect to buy everything. I was allowing my bot to buy a play set of each rarity in all formats. This was not working for my bot. I was only able to buy a select few cards scattered across all the available sets. I composed all that I had learned from my first few months of operating and re-addressed where I wanted to go from there. 

Setting A Goal

My bot should have a clear purpose and I wanted people to come back to it knowing that it would deal in the formats and sets they were interested in. I reduced myself from buying everything to buying standard cards only. This allowed me to have a concise purpose that I could advertise on top of allowing me to buy and build my bots inventory with more direction. 

The Results

With no further investment the bot had bought up play sets of all the common, uncommon and most of the rare cards that were in the current standard rotation. I began accumulating a growing supply of tickets while maintaining my standard collection. I now had a self-sustaining bot.

Expanding The Business

This was the moment I was waiting for; I was no longer just spending. I was growing the value of my collection while maintain a supply of tickets to continue re-investing in the collection. I had done this by narrowing my focus on standard, but I wanted to expand. I used the profits I was making from standard to invest in modern. 

Setting New Goals

After this expansion into modern I am just now reaching another point where the bot is selling as much as it is buying and I have a surplus of tickets. Over the next few months I plan to expand further, perhaps turning my single bot into a chain of bots and of course will keep everyone updated on my experiences with this process.

Summary of Seven Months

I started my bot on 6/12/12 and today 1/29/13, approximately seven months later I have grown a collection of around three thousand cards to more than twenty-two thousand cards.  I look forward to sharing my experiences with you as I continue to grow and expand!

Future-Proofing: Thought Patterns

As I close this series on Future-Proofing, I think it is time to discuss the one thing that we really can not control, or even adequately plan for: changing thought patterns.

First off, let me define what I mean by changing thought patterns: They are a change of the way we think, but not so much in the obvious sense, but more subtler.  This usually takes a long time to happen and notice.  It’s also has a society component.  I guess I should give a couple of examples.

I bought my house a decade ago.  When I bought it, I made certain every room in the house had a telephone jack.  Today, if I am going to buy a house, I do not particularly care about making certain each room having a telephone jack.  I know there are people who would be content if their house had no telephone jacks at all.

So what happened?  Did my views on telephones change?  Not really.  But the world around me has changed.  Cell phones are so ubiquitous that people no longer have desk phones but one that more or less has become attached to their bodies and as a result, the way we look at communication is different.  No one planned this.  No conspiracy theory to remove all desk phones and land lines.  Just happened.

Another example: large families.  Back in the day, it was common to at least know someone who came from a large family, having say five (5) or more siblings.  These days, at least in the United States and Western Europe, the concept of a large family is completely foreign.  I only know of one family with more than two (2) children. 

Why did this happen?  The experts and planners will spout things like population control, (there are too many people on the planet), decreasing infant morality (Used to be having ten children meant that two would survive to adulthood..  Nowadays, not needed.) and the high cost of having children.

I’m using these two examples to show what changing thought patterns are.  (So do not nit-pick the examples themselves.)  It shows that we should never be complacent about things.  We should expect that something may happen which will totally change the way we run out business.  Sometimes, it is planned, like MTGO v4.  Other times, well, you get my point. 

Future-Proofing: Competitive Advantage

In our soon-to-be complete series on Future Proofing, I wish to further explore the topic I brought up last time, the topic if competition and how it will look when MTGO 4 comes online.

The first thing that this will probably happen during a routine downtime on Wednesday morning PST.  This will make the transition as smooth as possible for the players.  However, when play resumes, it will be a new environment… not just because of the visual changes, but that not one bot will be on MTGO.  This is because all the routines, how to confirm trades, how to select cards, and so on will be different.  This also does not include any new changes that will appear.

But we also know that it will not stay that way.  There is simply too much profit to be made and the crew at MTGO Library is going to be writing a new bot as will as others looking to get into the game.  There may be some who simply do not wish to go through this process.  Yatbot never made the transition from version 2 to version 3.  But the bottom line here is that Library will be making the transition.

Let’s assume that it takes two (2) weeks to get Library v4 stable enough to make trades.  What should we be doing in the meantime? 

First off, I would suggest doing upgrades on the hardware.  MTGO v4 is going to be more resource hungry than v3.  This means any physical machine which runs Library is going to need a minimum of a Gig of RAM, and more hard drive space allocated to it.  This same advice will also be applicable to virtual machines or VM’s. 

Secondly, do hardware maintenance.  Shut the machine totally down.  Unplug your computer, open up the case and take a can of air to the inside and splash all accumulated dust outside.  Do the same with the power supply, although I do not recommend opening that up.

Thirdly, this is going to be a good time to rethink your bot empire’s plan.  What are your short term, medium term and long term goals for the bots?  While there will still be a limited and professional version of Library, making huge changes here will not be as difficult to configure during this time than once you have your bot(s) up and running.

|Finally, make certain you get some good rest and enjoy the break from botting.  When Library v4 becomes available, there is going to be a learning curve to learn its nuances and to configure Library to our specifications.  It will be best to do that from a relaxed state than a restless state,

Future-Proofing: Competition

"And what does that mean for us?  Much more business!"

Or much more competition as the bot/human ratio keeps growing. - Carlos Lazaro

Carlos’ comment from my last entry is a rather depressing one, and one that I’d like to dispel. 

First of all, we do not fear competition.  Competition is what makes us stronger, as a community and as business owners.  If there were only five (5) bots on MTGO, what would we see?  Outrageous prices and constantly busy servers.  If there were five thousand (5,000) bots on MTGO, what would we see?  Very realistic prices, and an easy way to trade unwanted cards for products the customer does want.

So how does that help us?  More bots means less profits for all.

Because when a player gets a good trade experience, be it from our bots or another bot, the player will keep playing Magic.  If there was a bot monopoly, there is a chance that players will leave the game, and they might not return.  It is very difficult for us to make a profit when there are no players logged into MTGO.

Let me illustrate using a recent example: Remember when Microsoft said that they were no longer going to work on Internet Explorer.  After all, why should they spend money improving a product (Explorer 6) that is given away at no charge and that browsers are done, ie completed.

This lasted awhile and then some high school student takes a chunk of code and re-works it into what we now call Firefox.  Then Google decides to jump into the browser field with Chrome.  Should I mention the plethora of browsers which now exist? 

And what has that done for us?  We have features that we couldn’t even conceive a few years ago.  We are more productive, get more enjoyment, and can be safer by using now-standard features like tabbed browsing, a slew of addons and community-based rating systems like Web of Trust.

Competition has made the browser programs better.  And in this same manner, competition makes us better botters.  Next time I will explore the competition question in more detail.

Future Proofing: Selling (Part 2 of 2)

Today is Boxing Day.  For those who are not acquainted with this holiday, it is not a day of celebration of the sport of boxing, but rather a day where everyone takes the presents they received on Christmas and returns them to the store and tries to exchange them for something more desirable to the recipient. 

In our continuing series on Future-Proofing, I asked an important question last time: When are YOU getting out of the bot business?  First, let’s go over why this is an important question:

Last time I said that successful people answer questions long before other people consider asking them.  Successful people know when they are going to leave a job before they accept the position.  Successful people know when they are going to sell a car, stock, etc before it is purchased.  When bidding for auctions, successful people know how much they ultimately will bid.   Impulse buyers get caught in the hype and bid emotionally.  The same principle applies to businesses.  Successful people know when they are going to leave the business before they decide to start one.

But when most of us got into this, we were not thinking that way.  When I started, YATbot was the bot I used.  I got into the bot business as a way to get cards so that I would not have to purchase them from bots or WotC.  In this manner, I could continue to play the game without spending any currency.  If I made a profit, well, that was a nice bonus.

Turns out that bonus from YATbot was enough to expand to have multiple copies running and grew enough to make a nice little part time business out of it.

When MTGO v3 came out and it became apparent that YATbot would not be upgraded, instead of simply trying to sell off my inventory for pennies on the ticket, like so many others were doing, I decided to find another bot program, MTGO Library is what I settled on and I am glad found it.

That’s all well and good, but what does this tell us about when to quit the bot business?

This incident told me that I was willing to fight to stay in this business.  Which means that I am not going to want to give this up any time soon.

But I have since drawn up a succession plan.  My wife can run this business.  If my kids get interested, I could pass off this business to them.  If I wanted to sell, I know a few people who could be interested in learning about this business and I could unload that way.  In a sense, this business could go on, even if I am not around to do anything about it.  But that hinges on one final thing, and on that, we will conclude this series on Future-Proofing, next time.

Future Proofing: Selling (Part 1 of 2)

With all this talk of the world ending on Friday, at least to those who believe the Mayan Calendar.  One of the unintended consequences of this quirk of time keeping is that many people are taking long views of their lives and asking questions that they had never really considered before.

Some of them are the obvious, the meaning of life, what am I doing with my life, why am I in this relationship, why am I living in this situation, etc.

Couple this with the traditional New Year’s Resolutions that people will inevitably make, stop smoking, lose weight, start a diet, write a book, read more books, etc, there are a lot of questions that are being asked and answers few and far between.

One of the strategies that some do is read what successful people do, and then emulate their thoughts and conduct and hope by osmosis or formulaic behaviors will bring them success.  (I do find it funny that many of these people will not even define success but that’s another story.)

One of the patterns that  separate successful people from those who are not is successful people ask questions:  When buying a stock, successful people answer the question “when am I going to sell this stock”?  This implies a strategy for buying and selling where unsuccessful people will simply open an account and buy stocks not thinking of when they should be sold.

Many people start businesses and never answer the obvious question, “when should I get out of this business which I am starting up?”  Usually the answers are death, forced retirement, or when some random person comes around and makes an offer to buy the business.  As you can imagine, this leads to unsuccessful results.
 
So, in our series on future-proofing, let’s go over this question: When are you going to leave the bot business?  I will expound on this topic next time.

Future-Proofing: Surviving the Apocalypse

If you are reading this today, then we have survived the 12/12/12 apocalypse that was scheduled for today.  (Did anyone have any doubts about it?)  But in our continuing series of future-proofing, let me talk about an apocalypse of a different kind…  instead of a catastrophic event affecting the world, how about an event which affects just you?

Let’s look at how traditional business owners generally operate: The owner spends the first three (3) to five (5) years doing virtually every aspect of their budding business.  Oh, they may hire some help to ease the load but the owner does everything of consequence.  They rarely take a day off, much less do anything like take a real vacation.  All this work ensues a greater possibility of survival for a fledgling business.

After five years or so, the owner is burned out by all the sleepless nights, the stress of growing a business and all the unexpected that occurs, the owner is convinced to hire someone to assist in managing the business.  This gives the owner a chance to take a much needed mental break and a vacation is taken.  Another added benefit is that the owner starts to take a day off here and there. 

When the business owner hires a manager who can run the business in the owner’s absence, this gives a level of stability to the business.  No longer can the business be disputed by an unexpected event because the owner is nowhere to be found.  The manager can handle minor situations.  This is a good thing.

We bot owners need to look at what we do as running a business.  Most of us have contingency plans on how to run our bots should a hard drive crash or a motherboard burns out.  If we use virtual machines, we have backups of their configuration so we can get a bot back up and running quickly.  Some of us even have backup computers just in case.

But what about YOU?  What if you were unable to manage your bots for an extended period of time?  What would happen?  The bots are designed to run 24/7 with minimal interaction so the bots can run fine for the short term.  But once you get past a week, little quirks start to appear.  As much as Windows was designed to be a stable operating system, in my experience, Windows likes to be restarted once a week.

What about changing the settings?  The bot is not able to select cards from a new set automatically.  (Nor should it as we all run our bots differently)  What about changing advertising messages?  (Would you do business with a bot where the classified message reads “Now selling Zendikar!”?)

So what do I do?  My wife checks on the bots status and can restart the bots when Windows has a hiccup.  She knows how to start and stop the VM’s that the bots are on.  But doing this post made me realize that she should know how to change the messages, how to have the bots select cards based the business model I use so when a new set comes out, she can do it if I am unable to.

In the business world, this kind of planning is called long term contingency or a survival plan.  My wife is part of my survival plan.  What is yours?

Yard Signs? What Yard Signs?

Unless you live under a rock, you know that there will be a Presidential Election in the United States in under a fortnight.  As I live in the United States, it is difficult to not be bombarded with political advertising via television, radio and in your mailbox.

However, I have noticed something different this election cycle and I would like to ask those who reside in the United States to confirm or deny something.  Don’t worry, I am not going to go into Obama vs. Ramney talk.  That isn’t the point of this blog.  And don’t worry about this off-topic subject.  I’ll return to a bot related topic next time.

Going about my normal life and driving around, I have seen political signs for the local County Commissioners, I’ve seen signs for the Mayoral candidates.  I’ve seen signs for the House of Representative candidates.  But when it comes to the Presidential candidates, I’ve not seen many Obama signage and bumper stickers, and I’ve seen only a trickle of Romney signs and no bumper stickers. 

I find this strange indeed.  In 2008, yard signs and bumper stickers could be found everywhere.  This time around, you would be hard pressed to tell there was even a Presidential election happening.  It’s not like these are the minor candidates either.  Both Obama and Romney will garner at least 46% of the popular vote. 

So what are the US readers seeing?  Are there yard signs galore or is this just a local thing that I am noticing?

Next time, we’ll do a thought experiment.