A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

After aspartaimee started repeatedly complaining about my Herr Doktor Rotwang userpic, a Rotwang-hating movement geared up within my flist. I've retired him as my default icon; you get to look at ol' Ambrose until I can think of something better.

In other news, it's been two weeks since I was last at my desk at ITA, and in the interim someone swapped headsets of my two phones. (I don't know why I have two phones).

I read and enjoyed the Charlie Stross novella Missile Gap this morning. You can read it in its entirety online here, as well as purchasey information if you're into that sort of thing. The story summary is basically "What if Charlie Stross tried to write a Cold War political thriller?" It's quite depressing but really the tone's set in the first few paragraphs.

I was sad during my lunchbreak in failing to find the original of one of my turn-of-the-century comics (though interested to find a lot of other stuff; maybe I'll scan em and post a retrospective sometime). I had promised this particular one to a friend as a present, and my not being sure where it is gnaws at me; it's some of my best work in an artistic area I haven't practiced in many years. I'm sure it's buried somewhere. More incentive to clean my damn room, perhaps.

The UPS-clobbered check is officially lost, sez my bank. Redeployment procedures initiated. At least the bank volunteered to reimburse me for any related fees I get stuck with.

I also learned the identity of the bottleneck that has been preventing ITA from paying my invoices in a timelier fashion. I bet they didn't know they were a bottleneck, so i just wrote them a polite email. Unfortunately for now I still have some severe cashflow issues even though my Accounts Receivable looks quite healthy. I'll be able to meet rent in January, but just barely. Can't pay a cent of debt yet. (Sorry, creditors.)

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I've started regularly visiting the bathroom on 5. You will recall this as the one with they keypad on the door, the source of much snide non-drama (it was too one-sided to be real drama) on the all-office mailing list. Well, I guess the powers that be silently surrendered to the will of the workers by the time I remembered the bathroom was there; the door's always been unlocked for me.

I go down there because the men's room on this floor is kind of a dump, and it's much nicer on 5. Probably because fewer people (or men, anyway) are willing to go down two flights of stairs to pee.

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Too many stomachache days lately. Had three in a row after a particularly self-abusive day (lots and lots of coffee + tibetan food) last weekend, then had a reprieve for a couple days, only to have a moderate ache start up while I was showering this morning and then sick around all day. I really want to know what's causing this. Unfortunately the health insurance people were really lame and never sent me anything, so I still have no doctor.

Did very little since posting yesterday, other than lie on the couch. In the afternoon dictator555 came over and dropped off some stuff and hung out a little, which was nice.

Had a solid sleep between midnight and 10, and the illness is gone now, though of course I'm mindful that my guts have taken a beating. Just gulped two glasses of Gatorade and more chicken broth.

Going to wash up and go to Kendall, I think. There is a sucky thing afoot in that Dan is asking for a demo of my ITA project, but since I really haven't been putting much time into it lately (esp. very lately, between holidays and sick) that's not a question I can answer now. Will endeavor to turn this into a ocnversation about deadlines or even basic expectations, which really haven't come up at all yet.

Friday 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 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.

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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.

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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!)

Friday I got all things straightened out with work setup, I think, in terms of both technology and HR. I know how to submit my invoices, and my workstation PC is now equipped with sudo and VPN access. The sandbox environment purrs along happily, waiting for me to do something. And I will, next Wednesday, the first day of what I expect to be many WedThuFri work-weeks there.

I can drop the coy façade and announce that the company is, o shocker, ITA Software. Due to the NDA - still a novelty for me - I'm going to play it safe and just not blog about the actual stuff I do there. It isn't all that interesting anyway. I reserve the right to decouple something I learned about programming or design from the reason of why I learned it, and write about that.

I will feel free to write about stuff besides actual work at work, too. Started to do that here but I'll save it for later.

And, yes, I billed for the time I did spend there this past week, and will submit my first invoice on Tuesday. I will walk there. It is a nice walk!

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Today switched back to Volity time and I made good use of it, building the subscription-purchase webpage. Then I built a filing cabinet that's been in a flat-pack box in the kitchen for 10 months while watching a lot of TV and attempting to import all the video from Wednesday's Gameshelf shoot. My camera is gunked up, or something; lots of read errors that have nothing to do with the tape. I gotta learn how to clean it. (Tried just blowing on it. Not enough.)

My major Volity for tomorrow is to write a refunds policy (we have one sketched out, after lots of thought and discussion) and then set up a Google Checkout account. All hail Google

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The deposit I mailed last Friday hasn't posted yet, but the one I mailed the next day has. Sadly, it was 5 percent the size of the earlier one. Checks continue to bounce; I'm in deep trouble. I will need to pull the lever on my credit card that squirts money into my bank account at a 982823% interest rate. Actually I would have done it already but I can't figure out how it do it on the MBNA website (maybe you can't, I dunno) so I'll have to talk to human on the phone about it and I hate that so I haven't yet.