Thursday, March 9, 2006

Quick story from Comic-Con:

I jumped on a bus and swiped my metro card. "INSUFFICIENT FUNDS" it stated mockingly. The cost was $2 and I only had $1 on the card. After a second of disorientation, I opened my wallet to pay the additional dollar in quarters. No luck, my change pouch was empty. I then tried to hand the bus driver $2 in cash. She shook her head.

I sighed. Then, unexpectedly, an old woman stood up and looked at me wide-eyed. "Excuse me son...do you need quarters?" She had a warm expression, eager to help.

"Yeah!" I said excitedly, "I have cash but no quarters...much appreciated."

She nodded happily: "If you get off on the next stop, there's a bank a few blocks south; you can go there and get quarters."

I stared at her blankly. "Uh...thanks?"

Remind me never to take the bus again. I jumped out of it and hopped on a cab.
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Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Gail isn't her normal Panda self and Lady Katana is on Spring Break.

Thankfully Dagger keeps our anime news coverage smoking with hard-hitting posts.

Now, check out this article on Spirited Away. Then read the comments. Quite a literary debate we have going.

Finally, if you see a Loveless banner floating around the site, it's from our friends at Tokyopop. I met them at Comic-Con and am giving them some free banners as a gesture of OTAKU good will.

(PS: If I wasn't terrified of Gail's panda wrath already, here's another reason.)
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Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Cutting Losses
I'm always weaving and bobbing, trying new ideas, editing and re-doing. So it's not a terrible shame that I've had to kill my webcomic pet project. The content just wasn't coming together.

I had a great name and some interesting technology built for it. Maybe one day it'll return.

...next!
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Monday, March 6, 2006

How About Those Academy Awards?
Maybe we should have a yearly Otaku Awards ceremony? But how would it make sense to do that? Maybe by focusing just on new American-released properties. Best Film, Series, New Character, etc. What do you think? Any ideas?

(At least Wallance and Grommit won't be a nominee...)

This week I'm going to try and migrate people's anime portfolios to a special page on theOtaku.com. It might take me two weeks to do it. It might even take a month but it will certainly be worthwhile regardless.

The truth is having portfolio links at the bottom of myOtaku just doesn't work. Having a portfolio page on theOtaku that's linked on people's myOtaku page is definitely the best strategy.
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Sunday, March 5, 2006

Also...
What's your opinion of the white bar on the top of every theOtaku page? This bar should unify our network, so we can reach people browsing all parts of the site. Still tinkering with it though.
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I took an online personality test the other day. It gave me a few insights into myself:

(1) I'm a natural "architect" - as in I can put pieces together to create things very effectively

(2) I'm extremely logical/rational, not very emotional, and an expert problem-solver

(3) I'm independent and always thinking

Sounds about right. Anyway, one example of my "problem solver" personality is with the keyboard issue. That happened last night; I fixed it this morning.

How? First, I found a list of all the local computer repair shops. Second, I eliminated all the ones that didn't seem like they specialized in hardware and then called the rest. Many were closed, but one was open and happy to take my laptop in. The turnaround time was fast.

The personality test I took was at PersonalDNA.com. Check it out; it's very cool.
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Saturday, March 4, 2006

Servers Healthy Again
How odd, I can't get the movie ULTRAVIOLET out of my head. I wonder why...

Anyway servers are fine again. It was a freak incident last night that (hopefully) won't be repeated.

Added a bunch of hubs to theOtaku today. Thankfully Trinity Blood was one of them, so I won't have to worry about dreaming of blood-thirsty pandas.

You know, I'm a big fan of tagging; used a lot on social websites. Had tagging existed when I started theOtaku, I would have definitely implemented that instead of what we have now.

I mistakenly dropped some small paperclips on my laptop keyboard. Took one of the keys out to get the paperclip underneath, but then couldn't get the key back in.

Then I made the terrible mistake of taking another key out to look at the locking mechanism and compare.

Now I'm missing two keys that I can't figure out how to put back in O_O.
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Friday, March 3, 2006

Well, at least we lasted a few days :)
I call conspiracy. Just days after my post talking about how great our server setup was and how there's no need to worry about speed issues, etc., we have a mysterious error that forces us to take one of our servers offline.

It should be back online tomorrow. This is getting ridiculous. I feel like I'm Tony Hawk on an amazing skateboard and everytime I go to skate there's an earthquake that makes me fall. There's no reason for it.

On another note, I've been doing some really cool stuff with our main page news layout. For example, when you click a news link now, you can quickly navigate to the last 5 news stories. This should save you a few clicks :-).

(I have one or two more news tricks up my sleeves though.)

(And don't forget to wish Dagger a happy birthday!)
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Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Doubling Traffic?
I'm feeling very good about how things are going. That's why I'm going setup an outrageous goal for the network: To double our traffic in the next six months (by September).

Can we do it? Doubling our traffic would mean receiving one million page views per day. That would solidify us as the most popular non-hentai, non-illegal anime portal online.

All we need is to grow 12-13% per month for the next 6 months. I think we have a good shot, especially now that our infrastructure and content situation is the best it's ever been.

Addressing Issues:

* Doubling traffic won't slow us down. Our infrastructure is very robust now and can be scaled quite easily. The terrible speeds from before will never be repeated.

* We took down the top 10 lists for two reasons. First, there was concern of people downvoting those who appeared on the top 10. And second, these lists are very processor-intensive to generate. There's much more elegant ways to create the lists, but it's something that I'd have to see a lot of demand for before spending the time to do that.
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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Thinking About AnimeNext
I'm talking to the kind folks at AnimeNext. AnimeNext is a major NY anime convention; It takes place in June.

I'm wondering if we could host a giant Otaku meetup there. I could print a lot of special shirts and then anyone who emails me their receipt to the convention could get a free one (only pay shipping). That way, when you go, you'll automatically be able to spot all the otaku-ites mingling around.

The goal would be two-fold: One to meet fellow members and two to create a "wtf" factor among people at the convention, haha.

It would be a lot of fun to "own" this convention and make it our own. What do you think? Could we muster enough people together?
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