Weekend catchup
Oct. 24th, 2006 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progFriday worked on ITA stuff from home via finally-working VPN, and received a long-sought written spec on this project I am tackling alone. First I need to machine me up some Perl tools, and spent the day sketching out some modules I can design to help me start hacking this company. I shall enjoy this, at least at first. I hope I can keep it up.
Friday evening was a lot of fun. My clothes are ratty, so I went clothes shopping with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dictator555. I hate making clothes decisions by myself so this was excellent. She helped me pick out some nice shirts at the Eddie Bauer outlet, and on her advice I got mediums instead of larges. Yes, they fit nicer off the rack, but will they survive their first washing? We shall see.
I did have to put the kibosh on a pair of strange gray jeans she suggested. They actually fit perfectly, and I this I mean they were snug from the waist to the knees. In the mirror, they looked much tighter than they felt, and as a lifelong rumply-pants-wearer I was sufficiently tweaked by the effect to veto them.
No, for the pants purchase I reverted to my old ways, diving into Filene's Basement, locating some trou of my numbers that seemed inoffensive, and getting the hell out. Even with the dictator's company my clothes-shopping tolerance is only so long. Alas I am wearing the gray chinos I got now, and they manage to be slightly too short, revealing a scandalous amount of ankle while I sit. Grr. (At least I wear tall socks.) I need to find who online sells "OTB" pants and get some more of those. I liked those a lot.
Bakc to Friday: dinner at Pho Pasteur. It was good. I had not had pho since I worked in Hermon, under a boss whose Vietnamese parents-in-law ran a restaurant in Bangor. (The Oriental Dang, which I think is sadly no longer with us.) And then Battlestar watching with a big and noisy crowd. It was very good.
Saturday and Sunday worked on Volity RSS and the newsletter, both long-delayed projects, and both all done now. I mean, we will make more RSS feeds and more newsletters, but our little publishing systems for both are complete and it'll be a lot easier now.
We ended up mailing out over 400 newsletters to people who either (1) explicitly asked for mail via the website's prefs page, or (2) haven't set their prefs at all. In the latter case, we set their mail prefs to "no" as soon as the letter went out, so they won't get any more mass-mailing from us unless they visit the website and then check the "mail me stuff" checkbox. A postscript in the newsletter says as much. This isdaerr's idea, and like all his ideas of treating your customers well I tend to put my full weight behind it. He is a customer-happiness geek, and to be listened to in this regard!
At any rate I'm pretty psyched that we managed to collect 400 emails without trying particularly hard. We only started to do so after chatting with Kristin Looney's (looneykristin's) about it after Origins, when she chided us for not doing enough to establish connections with our customers. And even then we were pretty passive about it, making it easy for people to register their email addresses, and giving them good reasons to do it (like password recovery), but not throwing a fit or barring them from gameplay if they chose not to.
Monday was almost entirely sunk into Jmac's Arcade. I produced the Nibbler ep, and then went ahead and did the other stuff I had been threatening, including mixing a better version of the Scramble one and then putting them all on YouTube as well as Google Video. (Will link to them later.) I hadn't uploaded anything to YouTube before and it's interesting to compare the features they offer to uploaders, versus Google. And, as I had hoped, Missile Command got a decent thumbnail, so yay.
Then games atdougos, where I played "Courtyards", a game produced by some guy who (I am told) owned a $10,000 wood-printer and wanted to make a game out of it so zappity-zap. It's an all-right tile-laying game, but I think it's more about "hey look what I did with my wood printer" than anything. Even the box is made from interlocking slats of printer-output. Unfortunately the rules are on a plain old sheet of paper; he should have tried burning them into the box!
And then I krushed everyone at Citadels. Ma ha ha ha. I love that game so much. I still really want to play the two/three-player variant again sometime, though. (Spoiler for the next Gameshelf: I do not win the game we played. I don't think I even came close!)
Friday evening was a lot of fun. My clothes are ratty, so I went clothes shopping with
dictator555. I hate making clothes decisions by myself so this was excellent. She helped me pick out some nice shirts at the Eddie Bauer outlet, and on her advice I got mediums instead of larges. Yes, they fit nicer off the rack, but will they survive their first washing? We shall see.I did have to put the kibosh on a pair of strange gray jeans she suggested. They actually fit perfectly, and I this I mean they were snug from the waist to the knees. In the mirror, they looked much tighter than they felt, and as a lifelong rumply-pants-wearer I was sufficiently tweaked by the effect to veto them.
No, for the pants purchase I reverted to my old ways, diving into Filene's Basement, locating some trou of my numbers that seemed inoffensive, and getting the hell out. Even with the dictator's company my clothes-shopping tolerance is only so long. Alas I am wearing the gray chinos I got now, and they manage to be slightly too short, revealing a scandalous amount of ankle while I sit. Grr. (At least I wear tall socks.) I need to find who online sells "OTB" pants and get some more of those. I liked those a lot.
Bakc to Friday: dinner at Pho Pasteur. It was good. I had not had pho since I worked in Hermon, under a boss whose Vietnamese parents-in-law ran a restaurant in Bangor. (The Oriental Dang, which I think is sadly no longer with us.) And then Battlestar watching with a big and noisy crowd. It was very good.
Saturday and Sunday worked on Volity RSS and the newsletter, both long-delayed projects, and both all done now. I mean, we will make more RSS feeds and more newsletters, but our little publishing systems for both are complete and it'll be a lot easier now.
We ended up mailing out over 400 newsletters to people who either (1) explicitly asked for mail via the website's prefs page, or (2) haven't set their prefs at all. In the latter case, we set their mail prefs to "no" as soon as the letter went out, so they won't get any more mass-mailing from us unless they visit the website and then check the "mail me stuff" checkbox. A postscript in the newsletter says as much. This is
daerr's idea, and like all his ideas of treating your customers well I tend to put my full weight behind it. He is a customer-happiness geek, and to be listened to in this regard!At any rate I'm pretty psyched that we managed to collect 400 emails without trying particularly hard. We only started to do so after chatting with Kristin Looney's (
looneykristin's) about it after Origins, when she chided us for not doing enough to establish connections with our customers. And even then we were pretty passive about it, making it easy for people to register their email addresses, and giving them good reasons to do it (like password recovery), but not throwing a fit or barring them from gameplay if they chose not to.Monday was almost entirely sunk into Jmac's Arcade. I produced the Nibbler ep, and then went ahead and did the other stuff I had been threatening, including mixing a better version of the Scramble one and then putting them all on YouTube as well as Google Video. (Will link to them later.) I hadn't uploaded anything to YouTube before and it's interesting to compare the features they offer to uploaders, versus Google. And, as I had hoped, Missile Command got a decent thumbnail, so yay.
Then games at
dougos, where I played "Courtyards", a game produced by some guy who (I am told) owned a $10,000 wood-printer and wanted to make a game out of it so zappity-zap. It's an all-right tile-laying game, but I think it's more about "hey look what I did with my wood printer" than anything. Even the box is made from interlocking slats of printer-output. Unfortunately the rules are on a plain old sheet of paper; he should have tried burning them into the box!And then I krushed everyone at Citadels. Ma ha ha ha. I love that game so much. I still really want to play the two/three-player variant again sometime, though. (Spoiler for the next Gameshelf: I do not win the game we played. I don't think I even came close!)
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The Oriental Dang
Date: 2006-10-25 12:07 am (UTC)Ah! Filene's Basement my favorite model of retail store. It's missed.