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Magical thinking
Apr. 14th, 2006 12:41 amI'm down to the 4800s online, which is threatening my hopes for the 2006 congressional election. If I drop past 4500 the Iran air war will immediately commence.
Apr. 14th, 2006
(no subject)
Apr. 14th, 2006 01:01 amAccording to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
videos_antville, this is the first official video to a Boards of Canada song. It's not that great of a video but I thought it worth noting coz its first half appears to be footage from Joseph Kittinger's stupidly high-altitude 1960 skydive, which I knew about but hadn't seen before; I didn't know he was holding a camera when he did it. Holy crap he was really up there, huh. (I'm pretty sure that he did not have a surfboard, though.)
Also, I like Boards of Canada.
videos_antville, this is the first official video to a Boards of Canada song. It's not that great of a video but I thought it worth noting coz its first half appears to be footage from Joseph Kittinger's stupidly high-altitude 1960 skydive, which I knew about but hadn't seen before; I didn't know he was holding a camera when he did it. Holy crap he was really up there, huh. (I'm pretty sure that he did not have a surfboard, though.)Also, I like Boards of Canada.
(no subject)
Apr. 14th, 2006 01:12 amInteresting New Scientist story about "organ printing", a method for mechanically arranging individual cells into arbitrary shapes and encouraging them to work together.
But I love the lead:
OH NOES I just hope they don't let any silly women near the apparatus.
But I love the lead:
Sitting in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
OH NOES I just hope they don't let any silly women near the apparatus.
(no subject)
Apr. 14th, 2006 01:59 amI neglected to note that the guy who ran away from Volity at the start of the month came back the next day and published two games, Hex and Y, which you can play right now with Gamut.
I found a Windows application that makes a perfectly acceptable .msi file with a JRE downloader and everything, but it costs $300. I have done a good job conditioning myself to spend company money only as a last resort, so it remains unbought. I will try to figure out WiX tomorrow, since![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daerr gave me a valuable insight to our process that makes the problem easier than I thought it was. If it delays me any more than that, though, I'll just buy the damn program... the month is nearly half done and we can't get a dime until the site is up.
For days now, I have been muttering about punting and releasing a dumb .exe that simply hands Java-less windows users a weblink to Sun's download page (this is, in fact, the Gamut that's currently downloadable from the developer-oriented http://volity.org site) but the Andys insist that this is unacceptable when we can do it right, and of course they're correct. So I've just been seething since then, finding myself taking a crash course in Windows release engineering (and also in, uh, Windows) while half of me screams that it's all balderdash that's keeping us away from our money. Yes, that's right: balderdash.
Well, it'll be solved one way or another this weekend.
I enjoyed a welcome change of gears tonight with a meeting about our current money situation and business models.
Our bank account is dwindling at a manageable rate, and as long as I succeed in starting a full-on funding hunt this month then we're fine. (Where "fine" means "we're definitely doing all we can.") I have a half-dozen money leads of varying states of solidity, which, I think, is pretty good... I don't necessarily expect any to pay out, but I do expect some to redirect, and others to branch out into more leads. So long as I'm moving, it's fine. Ask me next month about the payouts.
The business-model talk was great. I feel happy about what we are now. We have gained a lot of knowledge about our platform's strengths and potentials since going full-time on it, and feel like I have decent answers to the questions that I got stuck on (in the stuck-pig sense) the last time I talked to VC.
We also have a better idea what market we're in. Casual gaming, has, over the last year, become a better-recogized segment of the larger digital-gaming market. The next time someone asks me what casual gaming is I can rattlle off market size and demographic details to them. Kids love that.
I found a Windows application that makes a perfectly acceptable .msi file with a JRE downloader and everything, but it costs $300. I have done a good job conditioning myself to spend company money only as a last resort, so it remains unbought. I will try to figure out WiX tomorrow, since
daerr gave me a valuable insight to our process that makes the problem easier than I thought it was. If it delays me any more than that, though, I'll just buy the damn program... the month is nearly half done and we can't get a dime until the site is up.For days now, I have been muttering about punting and releasing a dumb .exe that simply hands Java-less windows users a weblink to Sun's download page (this is, in fact, the Gamut that's currently downloadable from the developer-oriented http://volity.org site) but the Andys insist that this is unacceptable when we can do it right, and of course they're correct. So I've just been seething since then, finding myself taking a crash course in Windows release engineering (and also in, uh, Windows) while half of me screams that it's all balderdash that's keeping us away from our money. Yes, that's right: balderdash.
Well, it'll be solved one way or another this weekend.
I enjoyed a welcome change of gears tonight with a meeting about our current money situation and business models.
Our bank account is dwindling at a manageable rate, and as long as I succeed in starting a full-on funding hunt this month then we're fine. (Where "fine" means "we're definitely doing all we can.") I have a half-dozen money leads of varying states of solidity, which, I think, is pretty good... I don't necessarily expect any to pay out, but I do expect some to redirect, and others to branch out into more leads. So long as I'm moving, it's fine. Ask me next month about the payouts.
The business-model talk was great. I feel happy about what we are now. We have gained a lot of knowledge about our platform's strengths and potentials since going full-time on it, and feel like I have decent answers to the questions that I got stuck on (in the stuck-pig sense) the last time I talked to VC.
We also have a better idea what market we're in. Casual gaming, has, over the last year, become a better-recogized segment of the larger digital-gaming market. The next time someone asks me what casual gaming is I can rattlle off market size and demographic details to them. Kids love that.
(no subject)
Apr. 14th, 2006 06:52 pmI'm giving up and buying Advanced Installer.
I made a little bit of progress with WiX, but I just know that it will take days more research and frustration before I figure out how to do that Java trick, and it's just not worth my time. I hate paying so much for a program, but I play through a scenario in my mind where a friend makes a scriptable installer for us and we gladly pay him $300. That makes it easier to swallow.
Asdaerr just noted in conversation, it's kind of weird that we don't know any Windows developers or release engineers who can help us with this. I mean, Windows. That's what the whole of the outside world uses, isn't it? You'd think at least some of our friends, though they're all Unix-n-Mac freaks like us, would know how to do that stuff anyway. But alas.
I made a little bit of progress with WiX, but I just know that it will take days more research and frustration before I figure out how to do that Java trick, and it's just not worth my time. I hate paying so much for a program, but I play through a scenario in my mind where a friend makes a scriptable installer for us and we gladly pay him $300. That makes it easier to swallow.
As
daerr just noted in conversation, it's kind of weird that we don't know any Windows developers or release engineers who can help us with this. I mean, Windows. That's what the whole of the outside world uses, isn't it? You'd think at least some of our friends, though they're all Unix-n-Mac freaks like us, would know how to do that stuff anyway. But alas.