I had a lovely weekend hanging out with my brother, although it was a weeeee bit more expensive than I had expected it to be. In general terms, a day trip to a major Japanese tourist destination like Kyoto means I budget about $100 for myself. Two people, five days, lots of travelling, well, you do the math. Luckily, the cost of the trip was somewhat defrayed by waking up every morning to a sale. I really love that feeling: “Hey Tim, Suzie from Ohio just bought us lunch!” (ok, most of lunch).
I highly recommend having a web mail service so you can quickly bang out the customer contacts while you’re away. I dealt with about 5 emails, mostly “Can your software do this?” (No, but working on it), questions about bingo in a large group (hey, I guess I am the de-facto expert now), and a refund.
August sales are now $300 and climbing, and I just sent Robosoft’s author his $99 as promised. I also promised a post-card but wasn’t smart enough to scan it before mailing it, so imagine you see an Edo era painting of a really gigantic wave with the enscription “Thanks for the excellent piece of software. Sincerely, Patrick McKenzie, Bingo Card Creator”. Incidentally, if you’re reading this and not already using his service: what are you waiting for. Seriously. $99 might sound expensive but it paid for itself in about a week and thats not even counting the increase in organic search rankings that about 100 links will get me.
Hideho everybody. My little brother is coming to Japan tomorrow afternoon for bit to hang around with me, and when he leaves I’ll have to take an annual business trip out for the day job to a small hotel which is approximately 20 miles from the nearest functioning computer. As a consequence, expect blogging to be lighter than usual for the next 6 days or so.
I just got back into the office this morning roughly an hour ago. I’m currently typing this up on a Linux box which is not my main development machine, because my main development machine just went up in a puff of acrid smoke. It turns out that in the four days I was not in the office they lost 3 machines to exactly the same symptops (laptop reacts like a PC which just got unplugged, acrid smoke pours out the back, hard disk data fine but internal components BBQed). Now, I don’t know, after losing $10,000 of hardware I personally would have, hmm, tried to isolate the cause of the problem before frying additional machines but, hey, thats why I’m an engineer and not management. A bit of whining and “Hey, boss, I took an electrical engineering course in college. Maybe the socket here is getting power spikes” (the first is technically not a lie, although the extent of my electrical engineering experience is designing half-adders and I was terrible at it) got someone to actually bust out a voltmeter and measure our outlets. “Ha, ha, good thing nothing was plugged in here, otherwise your computers would be yakiniku.” (Yakiniku = a delicious Japanese dish which involves taking raw meat, basting it in delectable herbs and spices, and then burning the heck out of it.) “Well, actually, the reason we have no computers plugged in on this table is that they are all yakiniku.” “You’re not serious.” boggles the electrical guy.
