07.10.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 10:38 am by Colen
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.
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07.07.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 7:28 pm by Colen
pictar
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07.06.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 6:35 pm by Colen
Walking back to our hotel from the convention center, we can see this advert:
http://www.incompetence-central.co.uk/paint.jpg
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07.05.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 8:28 pm by Colen
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…
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06.09.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 11:53 am by Colen
I just tried on some old 31″ waist pants that I haven’t worn for like 3 years because they’re too tight… and they fit! yay :D
I am 8 pounds down on my diet, 18 to go.
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05.22.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 11:48 am by Colen
Thanks to Zacchaeus for the first in our series of dungeons and dragons “pro tips”.
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05.06.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 8:54 am by Colen
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
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05.04.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 12:42 am by Colen
1AM, Can’t sleep…
I was lying in bed thinking, and I realised how little I really remember of the 4 years I was at university. 4 years, or about 2/13ths of my entire life. Probably the most important in terms of getting where I am today. And I don’t really remember it.
For example, here’s what I remember of first year -
Sitting with a bunch of other prospective students, meeting all the lecturers at our ‘orientation’ session. Meeting Dave, Colin and Grant for the first time, and spending lunch at the union with them a lot.
David Marwick lecturing a couple hundred of us on C++ streams in one of the halls. C++ streams… what a weird place to start. It’s mindboggling to think back on how little I knew then and how much I know now. And how much I still don’t know.
Eating lunch in the big hall with windows, looking out onto the loch. Sometimes reading the Wheel of Time on a thursday afternoon as I killed time.
Archery every Thursday, missing the target a lot of the time. Wow, I was bad at that then.
The computer labs, running Borland C++ builder (laffo), which you could barely configure to build real applications because the project file would exceed your disk quota.
Smaller lectures in room 1.54 (?) of the computer department. On the first floor, beside the drinks machine in the lounge.
Dropping the elective Accounting module and taking Study Skills instead, then being annoyed when my grades went from A’s to C’s.
Exams every semester / quarter / whatever in the sports halls.
Endless train journeys and bus rides. Walking across campus to get to the compsci department, trying to avoid the evil swans.
It all seems so easy, so trivial… and yet it felt like so much work at the time. Am I just looking through rose-tinted glasses, or was it really like that?
And that’s about it. It all seems not quite real. I have the same problem when I go back home for a couple of weeks – it doesn’t feel like “real life”, like it’s all a dream that I wake up from when I get back to California. If I forget it all, did it ever happen?
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
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04.30.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 9:43 am by Colen
Here’s a horrible cell phone picture of our booth at the trade show in vegas last week:
The booth
The picture on the left banner has apparently been accepted into Spectrum, which (I’m told) is a book of very good art.
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