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6/27/2007

FPS Games Bridge Generation Gap

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General

— joeindie @ 5:26 pm

FPS Games Bridge Generation Gap

Consider: Baby boys born when the first version of Doom was available in 1993 are full-on teenagers now, with bad haircuts, bad hygiene, and bad attitudes. And whether they look forward to voting in 2012 or still figure voting sucks with the rest of being an adult, they sure as hell know how to play an FPS. Most of them have been doing it for years now.

The graphics in the more recent crop of FPS are much better than those first games with their “2.5D” simulation of 3D. And the controls and UI’s have evolved (some) since those early days. But at the core, FPS gameplay is pretty much the same now as it was then.

So it’s possible, in 2007 and from here on out, for fathers and sons to play a game that not only both enjoy, but that each figures its generation designed and developed.

Hell, give it another 5-10 years, and you’ll be able to have 3 generations of men and boys sitting on a couch in the living room, controllers in hand, yelling out “Fragged ya!”, “Pwned you!”, or whatever nifty new phrase means “I just shot your ass off you slow moving, clumsy motherfucker.”

-David

Comments (3)

6/23/2007

If It Ever Seems Like I’m Yelling at You…

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General

— joeindie @ 5:46 pm

If It Ever Seems Like I’m Yelling at *You*…

… get over yourself.

It may or may not be obvious, but a lot of my blog posts are me giving advice to … me.

Or me reminding myself.

Or me berating myself.

Or me kicking my own ass.

I don’t have all the answers. I just try to present my own internal dialogue about designing and developing and marketing and selling and whatever else in a readable (and hopefully engaging) format.

But, for the most part, I’m just talking to myself.

Suddenly, I wonder … Is that one of the Dirty Little Secrets of the Blogosphere? Are we all just talking to ourselves … ?

-David

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6/21/2007

Time Enough to Dance

Filed under:

Indie Lifestyle

— joeindie @ 2:15 pm

Time Enough to Dance

From about the time she could walk until she was over 3 years old, my daughter, Serene, would come into my office and grab a finger on my left hand and tug on me.

“Let’s dance!” she would say. Usually this was because of some music on TV or in a video she was watching. So I had to move fast, or we would miss the music.

We would rush out the door of the office to stand in front of the TV and we would “dance”. “Dancing” mostly consisted of holding hands and jumping up and down, or spinning in circles. We would “dance” our little dance, and then I would go back to work and she would go back to what she was doing, both of us smiling, sometimes laughing.

These dance requests didn’t always come at the most opportune of times. Most often, they couldn’t have come at worse times.

And when I’m concentrating, I’m not someone who likes being distracted. I can get downright irritable about it.

Sometimes I would be handling email, which is usually customer support and I welcomed the distraction. More often, though, I would be “juggling” code changes across an entire source base, or staring at the same code trying to puzzle out what the hell was going wrong, or concentrating and type-type-typing on a writing project.

We didn’t dance every time she came in and asked me to. But we danced a lot. Because I knew there come be a day when she no longer wanted to dance with me. And I had better get in all I could while the getting was good.

I learned I could deal with the distractions (good and bad) of my family without totally ignoring them (my family, I mean). I learned I could disengage from my current task long enough to dance with my daughter and get right back to work. And I usually felt much better after than before.

I learned that there is always time enough to dance.

-David

Comments (4)

6/20/2007

Old Vocabulary Habits Die Hard

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General

— joeindie @ 4:27 pm

Old Vocabulary Habits Die Hard

To me…

“gamer” is someone who plays RPG’s at least once a week.
“RPG” is a pen-and-paper game you play with your friends.
“play with your friends” means you actually get together in the same physical location and interact.

Yes. I’m old and stuck in my ways. Increasingly a relic.

Because to the rest of the world…

“gamer” is now just about everyone with a computer or console or mobile phone with a game on it. They play games, right? They must be gamers.
“RPG” is World of Warcraft. It says “RPG” right on the box. Must be exactly what it is.
“play with your friends” on WoW or similar games and you never have to actually see them. Or interact with them beyond aiding and pwning.

I hate it when the words I use to identify myself get slurped up (and fucked up) by the mainstream.

Hardly surprising, I suppose. Us relics are known to be curmudgeonly.

-David

Comments (2)

6/16/2007

Blogging on the Weekend is Such a Waste of Time

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Indie Lifestyle

— joeindie @ 4:20 pm

Blogging on the Weekend is *Such* a Waste of Time

Or it should be.

C’mon, c’mon. Show a few signs of life. Go outside. Mow the lawn. Take a walk.

Do something besides lurk about the Web, checking email and RSS feeds every 3-5 minutes.

-David

Comments (2)

6/14/2007

Estimated Quarterly Taxes are Due Tomorrow (15 June)

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Indie Lifestyle

— joeindie @ 7:06 pm

Estimated Quarterly Taxes are Due Tomorrow (15 June)

According to the US government–or more specifically, the Internal Revenue Service–the second quarter of any particular year is actually only a sixth of the year.

And that surprises me every year.

You’d think, after 8 years, that I’d get used to it. But no.

Oh. Even better: Your expected to pay approximately the same in taxes every quarter (based on your taxes owed in the previous year), or you might get slapped with an underpayment penalty. I ran into that one this year. Bizarre, I thought, how I had overpaid my taxes for 2006 (I hate when I do that) and yet still faced the possibility of an underpayment penalty. All because in June 2006 I had sent in my estimate of taxes owed for the government-shortened second quarter.

Meh.

So, here I go, schlepping the accumulated cash from my ING Direct savings account labeled “Tax” [*] into my checking account so that I can pay my estimated taxes.

Wee!

-David

[*] It’s kinda fun, BTW, to earn interest on your tax dollars. Of course, you’ll have to pay taxes on the interest too. Makes me wonder how much money my former employers made off the taxes they withheld for me and paid to the government four times per year.

Comments (1)

6/13/2007

Sales of The Journal were down in May. Do you know why?

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— joeindie @ 1:02 pm

Sales of The Journal were down in May. Do you know why?

Seriously. Do you know why?

‘Cause I have no eff-ing clue.

Of course, “down” is relative. May 2007 was the best May ever for The Journal. Sales were down only in relation to the first four months of 2007.

Still, when you have an 11% drop from April to May, it gets your attention.

Coincidentally, in April I started working to overhaul my marketing efforts, especially my Google Ad Word campaigns but also my Web page for The Journal. I even worked on the in-software pitching (AKA “the nag screens”).

Was the dip related to the changes in marketing?

Or had I started my revamped marketing efforts just in time (because sales have bounced back [so far] in June)?

Would May have been the start of a downward trend if I hadn’t made the marketing changes?

Could I have prevented the dip in May if I had started my marketing changes a month earlier, in March?

Was the dip just a seasonal thing and June was going to be better anyway?

I had started working on changes to the software itself to better support Windows Vista. Could the lack of true Vista support have been causing a decline as the number of Vista users increased?

Is it none of these? All of these?

I don’t know.

These are the questions that keep me up nights.

Well, sorta. They keep me up in slow months. In months where sales proceed apace, I seldom even think about these questions.

And maybe that is the problem.

-David

Comments (3)

6/12/2007

Wistful Remembrances of Wage Slavery…

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Indie Lifestyle

— joeindie @ 2:28 pm

Wistful Remembrances of Wage Slavery…

The other day, Kyle asked in a comment:

“do you miss the security that came with having an employed job and the benefits that come with it? Obviously you’re happy working on your own, but is there anything you do miss about your old life?”

The Short Answers ™ are, in order:

Yes, sometimes. And, yes, a few things.

In more detail…

Sometimes, as I’ve mentioned here before, I miss the treadmill of corporate America. No…”miss” is too strong. Rather, sometimes I wish I could still trade an hour or two of mindless labor for a known quantity of cash. But it’s not a wish I invest too heavily in.

What I really miss, though, is:

A 401(k) or other retirement/pension plan that receives corporate contributions. Being self-employed, the only entity contributing to my retirement fund is me. And for some reason I never give myself matching contributions.
Health insurance that’s at least partially paid for by someone else.
2-3 weeks of vacation time per year. The nature of my business is such that I make money whether or not I boot my computer (or do any other work-related activity) on a given day–and what I make in a day isn’t limited to my “daily wage”. However, since 1999 when I became a full-time indie, I’ve taken only one extended vacation (conferences don’t count), and been on only a few short roadtrips. Why? Some years from being broke, but more commonly because there’s no manager telling me that if I don’t take my vacation time soon it’s going to go away (“Use it or lose it.”). We had been thinking to take a vacation this summer…but then we went and bought a house. Maybe in the fall.
Someone else paying for my hardware and software.
Co-workers in adjacent or nearby cubicles. I love working at home. But it’s nice to have some face-to-face time with another adult who understands what you’re working on. My wife listens patiently as I ramble on, of course, but she’s never been a software developer nor does she plan to ever be one. So, for the most part, what professional discussion I participate in is online. Which is OK for the most part, but it’s just not the same. That’s one reason I love going to conferences. The free t-shirts are OK, but the real appeal is interaction with other professionals.

That’s about it, I guess–unless you want to add “attractive female co-workers and/or interns”.

-David

Comments (2)

6/11/2007

Hey, Joe!

Filed under:

Indie Lifestyle

— joeindie @ 2:31 pm

Hey, Joe!

Sorry for the Long Silence.

Back in early April, my wife & I realized we were wrong about something: We could afford to buy a new house.

This came as a shock to us.

Ever since the Financial Implosion of 2002, we’ve figured we were quite stuck in the small house we bought in 1997 (our first house). With the birth of our second child in late 2001, we had outgrown the house (it has less than 1000 sq. ft.), but couldn’t afford to move. Even in early 2007, after a brief review of our finances, we had decided that we were going to be living there (cramped, stacked and stepping over each other) until probably 2009–at the earliest.

But then in March, out of the blue, we realized that we were still looking at our financial situation through the habits and attitudes created by bouncing off the financial bottom. And we didn’t have to look at them that way any more.

We weren’t all of a sudden rich. (And we still aren’t.)

We didn’t have a lot of money explode in our savings account. (And we have less now. <sigh>)

What changed was purely in how we looked at our situation.

Suddenly we were able to see:

We could afford to buy a new house, using our accumulated savings and what we put into savings each month.
We could afford to buy the new house before selling the old house (within limits), and stay current on both mortgages.
And, finally, when we sold the old house we realized we could make enough to pay off the house plus 100% of our remaining credit card debt.

#1 & #2 are a direct result of the aggressive savings plan we instituted a few years ago, as we (finally) started to recover financially. #2 was necessary for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into. That put a limit on the maximum mortgage the bank would give us for the new house, of course, but also forced us to stay within a reasonable budget, instead of buying the absolute maximum house we could afford (and would likely regret later).

And #3 comes from getting a 15-year mortgage when we bought the house in 1997. That decision 10 years ago has alternated between Good Idea! and Ouch! Damnit that Hurts!, depending on the year. It looks like it will end on a good note, though, since 10 years into a 15 year mortgage means we have a lot of equity to play with. (For this house, though, I took the easy way/learned my lesson and just got a 30-year mortgage.)

Thinking about it even now, it amazes me that we can not only get a bigger, better house but also improve our financial situation. And nothing changed, except us.

So, anyway, once we realized we could buy a new house, we proceeded to do it. And that’s what I’ve been focusing on for nearly 2 months now. We started looking at houses, called the bank to start the approval process for the mortgage, and prepared for a long summer of looking at houses.

It took us less than 3 weeks.

We found the house we wanted on 19 April, put in an offer on 20 April, and closed on 18 May. We moved in over Memorial Day weekend.

Things are finally getting back to normal. There are still boxes stacked in the garage and pushed into corners of various rooms, but that’s likely to be the case for a while yet.

And we still need to sell the other house. But we had our housewarming party this past weekend, so I guess it’s OK if we call this “Home” now.

Until later,

-David

By request, a couple pics of the new house: