Sunday, September 10, 2006

A Confession


Dear Kei:

I'm sorry for making you think that this random picture of a guy covered in mustard was a picture of me. I know it was evil, but I couldn't resist.

Thank you for saying I looked "charming." I'm sure if I was the mustard man, it would make me feel better about myself.

I also appreciate the fact that when I told you I still wore that mustard-covered orange shirt in the picture, rather than turn away in disgust, you mentioned an orange shirt you used to wear.

Thanks Kei, you're a good person. And I'm just evil. *Evil laugh*

Sincerely,
Adam "Not the Mustard Man"

PS: To all visitors, Kei still thinks I'm the mustard man. I'm just waiting for her to stumble on my blog and see that it was a joke.
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Friday, September 8, 2006

The Stage Is Set
* I was supposed to meet Massin at 11, but I passed out again from 8 PM to 1:30 AM. Thankfully he was still online and accepted my apology. I'm really having sleep issues, I don't know why my body just keeps tiring out so early. One project management rule: Never, ever miss appointments. I'm ashamed for doing it.

* Massin and I trimmed and optimized one of our fan art database tables from 1.1 million rows to only 150,000. The bottom line is it sets the stage for our three upcoming improvements. It should also increase voting speed quite a bit.

* Check out Massin's blog post about a new timing limitation with fan art voting. One thing to add to the discussion is that artists shouldn't notice a difference. Older works will still get commented on and we have a comment manager to view those comments when they come in. I can't imagine any artist remembers the # of votes on their older pieces or even checks back to see how many new votes they received from it.

* There are some major t-shirt issues that I'm working through. These are the moments that really test my abilities...I'll keep you updated, but the bottom line is I'm going to have some tough decisions to make.

* Remember when the site was really slow? There's actually no difference now and then between the hardware we use. It's all programming improvements :-). I think you can generalize this concept to other things in life.
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Thursday, September 7, 2006

Notes On Why I'm Awesome
* We have three major improvements forthcoming to the fan art site. Two will be evolutionary (like our voting change) and one will be revolutionary (never done before).

* I hear ya, the 30-second PM limit is DAMN annoying. That's why I trimmed it to 5 seconds; give it a test and see if it works better now. I'll probably remove the limit altogether, though that takes more time than just changing the # of seconds. Here's a PM exchange I just had:

User: adam can u pls change pm from 30 sec?
Me: ok, done.

...How cool am I? But actually, I met someone cooler once.

Back when I was 16, my site was represented for advertisements by a sizable company called Burst Media. Frustrated one day by the fact their main page wasn't well-organized, I emailed customer service with a pretty major suggestion. The company responded the next day saying "great idea!" and within a week it was implemented. It made my month.

* Last night, I went to lie down for a moment on my bed--very early too, at like 9 PM--and the next thing I know it's 8 AM today (!) - I've never slept so suddenly and so long before, maybe it's the change of weather

* My company is paying top-dollar to give me two days of management training by the AMA. I shall apply the concepts to this network, I sometimes love the synergy I get by having a corporate job.

* Blue potato chips are really tasty.

* I'm really excited, I put Gail's email on our contact page. She kindly volunteered to help members with day to day problems, like forgetting their password, etc.

* Woah! Look what Massin did to his myOtaku page. Also keep track of Massin's blog for all developmental changes. As he put it, I cover more the macro-related issues here while he handles the more micro & technical ones.

* How much would you charge me for a massage?
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Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Lots of lovely things in store. The voting change was just the first of many.

The goal is to take the focus away from providing unconstructive feedback, like voting, and shift it toward commenting, which is far more valuable. I want to spend a some time improving our commenting system (and there's a LOT of room for improvement).

The site is fast, we have more than enough server space, and an abundance of ideas.

On a personal note, I've been drinking a glass of wine every night before bed. Surprisingly, my sleep has been amazing. I wonder if it'll last...
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Sunday, September 3, 2006

Pffft
*Smiles smugly at the sky*

You gotta do better than that :-).
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Saturday, September 2, 2006

Sorry for the emo blog post; was just feeling frustrated about the thumbnailing issue and wanted to throw up a placeholder...
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Friday, September 1, 2006

'Nuff Said
Massin and I are an unstoppable combination. Observe the following PM I just received:

"I've been meaning to pm you about how much faster [theOtaku.com] seems. It's taking almost no time to load and I love it!"

We rock.
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Thursday, August 31, 2006

So Hard...
* Writing code to change what server we read or write to on-the-fly is incredibly hard. Massin and I have been working on this for the last week and it's just an amazing headache. Thanks to Massin for his patience and hard work.

* I made another omelette sandwich for dinner tonight but it tasted awful. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong.

* After we get these annoying technical things out of the way, we have three quick improvements for the fan art site. Then we have some bigger initiatives.

* Ha, I have a lot of unread PMs. But I have almost 5,000 unread emails. The thing is, the "unread" label isn't very accurate because I do read the subjects, and most subjects tell me immediately if the note is worth reading in full. It would be a full-time job to read everything that came my way and I get a lot of really terrible messages.

* T-shirt sales will come to a close tomorrow. It was an extraordinary amount of work and a useful experiment in terms of personal learning. I consider the run a quiet success, but it's not something I want to do again. Thanks to Jennifer for her design and everyone who grabbed one. I just hope the company I'm paying to do them comes through.

* Why are female pop stars so dramatic? Shakira, Kelly Clarkson...it's like they had one bad breakup and sing 200 songs about it. It can't be healthy to keep re-living negative experiences like that. Research and personal experience have shown that if you break up with someone, you have to surgically remove everything related to them from your life. You don't dwell on it and single about it on tour for years to come. While a lot of these singers are hot, I'd never ever want to date one!

* Ugh, someone ordered the *download* version of Art of Otaku and then hit me with a chargeback complaining their CD never arrived. I was actually called and yelled at by someone for something similar a couple weeks ago. See what I have to go through :-).
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Lala Notes
* I was supposed to wake up really early so I could ship all the voting ballots back to Canada. Sadly, I woke up at like 10:30, making me so late for work that I had to call my boss and apologize.

* ...Being the superhero I am, I still managed to ship all the the ballots back to Canada. Mailing things Internationally is a huge pain though, so much paperwork. I'll let you know if any of the choices I voted for ended up winning.

* I made a grilled cheese+tomato sandwich for dinner. Delish.

* I'm going to take a break from Advance Wars. What's cool is that all my video game playing wasn't a waste. I'm applying some elements of Advance Wars to the book I'm writing about business for artists.

* I'm really beefing up the book now. The "core" is done, but a lot remains.

* I'm really excited about the fan art site. We're going to add a few new features/improvements to it soon. One of the biggest changes we're going to make is that we're going to change the rating system!

* Remember when I mentioned that I wanted to majorly trim the header of the sites? James made a quick mock-up of a new header a few months ago. I haven't talked to James since then (he's pretty elusive...) but I threw the mock up on theOtaku just so you could see the difference:

Click here to see

I love it, personally. While it might seem weird at first, it puts the content at the forefront. And when you browse, you browse the content, not the header.

* While our cosplay site might not have as many photos as other cosplay sites, we do have the most attractive members.
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Monday, August 28, 2006

The Good, Bad, and Ugly
The Good...

* I bought lots of really good groceries today. I can't wait to start cooking them.

* I setup the landline in my apartment, so I have a working phone here.

* We have a ton of server space now and updating the site so it takes advantage of it went without a hitch :-). This should buy us another year before we have to worry about it again.

* Manipulating mysql via SSH is quite l33t and makes me happy.


The Bad...

* Moving queries to our third server resulted in some really odd bugs. We're trying to figure out what happened; it'll be a tough nut to crack.

* I have to wake up really early so that I can mail all the Canadian stuff back tomorrow in time for their deadline.

* I need to play less Advance Wars and spend more time writing my book :-).


The Ugly...

* People kept dropping by today and wanting to eat out. I wasn't able to get any cooking done, though I did eat a lot of ice cream...
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