07.26.07
Hmm, upgrades
Just updated Wordpress and installed Akismet to deal with a sudden influx of spam. Let’s hope this fixes it…
07.10.07
“Trackbacks” need to die
So I was reading this post about the chap at Verizon who turned down the iPhone, resulting in AT&T picking it up instead and selling 700,000 of them:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/the-verizon-guy.html
The post is relatively short, but just look at the comments. Instead of useful comments like “no u r rong”, “I agree with your insightful thoughts” or “lmao wut a newb”, almost every single comment is a “trackback” from another blog. Guys, I just read the article here, I don’t need to see your stupid spin on it as well. Having a trackback URL is fine, but I don’t care about reading the first two sentences! Just stop. Please.
07.06.07
Best advert
Walking back to our hotel from the convention center, we can see this advert:
http://www.incompetence-central.co.uk/paint.jpg
07.05.07
Transformers: The Movie plus other stuff I guess
Amazingly enough, the new transformers movie doesn’t suck. I’m not entirely sure how that happened; perhaps there was some sort of mixup at the studio. Whatever the reason, you should go see it.
How good is it, you ask? Well, I’m actually going to give the movie two separate ratings. If you’re a reasonably normal person, it gets 6 or 7 out of 10 – it’s pretty funny, the special effects are amazing and almost none of the movie made me wish I wasn’t there. It’s a little juvenile, but hey, it’s for kids. (Although they do throw the word “bitch” around a few times, which I wasn’t entirely happy with, but there you go.)
Major downsides to the movie were the stupid shakeycam(tm) fights and the confusion over who is who, since there’s no easy way to work out which giant pile of metal is an autobot or decepticon unless it’s actively being a tank at the time. My boss, whose only exposure to transformers is me ranting about them and his nephews, said he’d give it “2.5 stars out of 4″ so that’s what I’m basing this off.
Now, if you’re actually a fan of transformers, you fall into one of two categories:
Category 1) Michael Bay better not change ANYTHING! If Optimus Prime doesn’t have his trailer, and if they don’t have Soundwave turning into a boombox, I’m not going to see it! Waahhhhh!
Category 2) I’ll put up with pretty much anything to see transformers on the big screen.
If you belong to category 1, stop reading immediately, because you need to be killed and your body burned. If you belong to category 2, this movie gets 10/10, so stop reading and go and see it.
So anyway. Right now I’m in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins game convention. We decided to go to this on a couple weeks notice and kinda threw things together in a rush, but it’s going really well – if our sales keep going as well as they did today, we’ll be really happy. In particular, our “sell through rate” is really good – of the people we give demos of Hero Lab to, about 50% actually buy it on the spot – of the rest, 3/4 of them say “This is really sweet, I’ll come back and buy it later” (although not all of them do, which is normal) and the rest just do the “hmm, thanks for the demo” not interested thing. We ended up being busy pretty much all day, and Thursday is always one of the slowest 2 days of the convention. Long may things continue!
Getting here was a bit of an adventure – we had originally planned to fly San Jose -> Las Vegas -> Columbus, since there are no direct flights (apparently nobody actually wants to go to Columbus). However upon getting through security at San Jose, we were informed that the flight was cancelled because of mechanical problems and that they’d have to rebook us on a flight leaving 8 hours later that didn’t get in until 9am the next day, a time so early it doesn’t actually exist.
We declined their kind offer of 8 hours and $20 of meal vouchers at San Francisco airport, and got them to give us a taxi to the mall, where we got a bite to eat and saw the new Die Hard movie (which is possibly one of the best action movies ever made, go see that too). Then we took a second free taxi back to the San Jose airport, where we got a bus to San Francisco airport and then got the red-eye flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we waited in their horrible airport before finally getting to Columbus and collapsing into bed at 10am.
Now I’m going to check out some support emails then go to bed. Tomorrow I really need to get to bed early and catch up on my sleep…