Fun With Regulations (and the companies who love them)

OK, out of the gutter folks (for those who understood that reference in the title). I don’t normally talk about work, but I feel it important to my fellow MystBloggers and others in the Myst/Uru community to explain why I’ve been (mostly) out of touch since late March.

It’s no secret – to those who know me – that I work in the Financial Sector. That’s about as much as you’ll get out of me too, since the ethics contract is a bit vague regarding what I can actually say; But in this case it does not matter, and you’ll find most of the following in search engines anyway (though not as simplified).

Pretty much every company in that field the past few months are working on the same thing – a major rule shift called RegNMS (Full name: Regulation National Market System). The primary goal of this change is relatively simple – protecting investors by ensuring that every order requested is filled (traded) at the best price.

From Anywhere (at least in the US I think).

Right, I’ll let that sink in a few minutes…

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Anyway, the implementation of this is also relatively simple – sort of:

1) Seven major trading centers become the ‘backbone’ of a distributed network for passing Trade Orders around. A sort of meta-trading center.

2) Everyone else who wants to be involved in trading has to connect to this backbone, at one or more of the trading centers.

3) Orders that come in to this network get matched and filled at the best prices – possibly from several sources, depending on the nature of the order.

There are, of course, a ‘few’ technical challenges involved here. There’s going to be a hell of a lot more message traffic; There are discussions saying everything between 4x and 10x today’s current volumes. The number of trades (both overall and from the perspective of an individual company) is probably going to skyrocket. And no one is quite sure yet how this will pan out for the markets and/or the companies who are ‘listed’ in any of the various exchanges.

Another pause for those who are still following me, to let that sink in too…

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So, yeah, I’m working on the setup and monitoring of what’s basically a moving target. We will all know for certain in about a month – the first 100 stocks will go ‘live’ (on the main rule I described above) July 9th IIRC, with everybody on it by October.

So if you thought I was a recluse the past three months, just wait. Comments welcome as always (in particular corrections to my bumbling, rambling post); I’m shutting off the auto-close of old posts for awhile.

–TSK

Explaining an Interregnum, and a Brief Review of Travian Browser MMO

Of course, the first thing I need to discuss after a month is, well – what *have* I been doing the past month, anyway?

Well, Travian, mostly…

This has been one of the stranger MMO-type games I’ve ever been involved with, for the following reasons:

– Totally played on a web browser. It even has embedded chat and forums available for ‘clan’ groups (aka alliances), though larger alliance clusters use external forums.

– It is both very slow and very fast at the same time. This is hard to explain without your spending a month on the game yourself; If starting from scratch, you *may* have your first village about 60% done by then. But once your involved in alliance-level combat, folks start to work on co-ordinated attacks, down to second and sub-second accuracy. Its kinda unreal, and at times unnerving.

– It is (or was) primarily free, or at least reasonably inexpensive. You originally could play the game for free, or pay US$20 for a year of what’s called ‘Plus,’ that gave you a couple extended features that were useful for the part-time player. Now, with recent server restarts (each instance ’round’ lasts about one year), they’ve integrated the ‘Gold’ system: You buy Gold from them, and you’re given access to many different features that use that Gold. Many of those features are unbalancing to those who decide not to use Gold though – more so than ordinary Plus players did – so there’s been a backlash from that. And there’s also the fact that an above average player can easily rack up Gold purchases greater than WoW’s US$15 per month…

So, the server I’m on today is expected to go into its ‘endgame’ phase any week now. And with that completion, will be the last I’ll have to do with Travian. I will not get involved in the Gold system, but not because its unbalacing – but because I’m *definately* an above average player and would end up using more US$ than I’d normally be willing to pay out.

More on who I am there and what I’ve done will be revealed after the server completes. There is a lot of intrigue and spying associated with the game at the higher alliance levels, so its best to let my SysAdmin instincts kick in here for now. ;)

One last thing – server groups are instanced by country – its not just the com group. Click on the flags at the top of my link to switch server groups.

–TSK

Hello, Back and Kicking…

Good Lord, its been too long. Sorry about that, I’m having ‘fun’ with work again.

Lots to update regarding just about every catagory, so will be posting specific updates through the next few days.

*wave*
–TSK

Um, What Day is This Again?

Argh. Got suckered in by Google’s prank today – Google TiSP (BETA).

In defense, I had just gotten up and had been doing semi-mindless chores to get myself back in gear. And the pic did spark my curiosity enough (in a ‘what the?’ kind of way) to click further.

People are getting better at this, admittedly. Very professional; Hats off to Google on this one. Now I’m waiting to see if SL will do a similar trick (perhaps not since its Sunday).

And on a similar note, I’d recommend taking a peek at a show coming up tonight on Science Channel I think. Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real Should be a hoot, I’ll probably record it.

–TSK

Tax Rant

Worked with H&R today to finish both mine and my mother’s taxes.

I find it ironic that i owe almost as much as my mother will be getting in refunds. Bleh.

But, at least it was pointed out that my work W4 is configured wrong (not enough taken out), and they gave me the info to correct it. I guess I’ll see next year…

–TSK

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