Monday, February 27, 2006

Lovely Day
I successfully arrived at Comic-Con today. It was a wonderful experience.

I met a lot of people in the industry, exchanged business cards, got a lot of freebies, and was even recognized once. I'm really excited to get interviews done with some of the people I met...Look for them soon!

The most important culmination of Comic-Con though, beside making so many new friends, was that it got the gerbils in my head running at a faster pace. So many new ideas...


E-mail from Gail:

"Now that you see that I am the all wise and knowing Panda you'll never question me ever again!"


Mention in a blog post:

Find out why Sara thought I was the only myOtaku user who ever updated their blog.


Lady Katana's New Weapon:

Finally, something with manga.
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Sunday, February 26, 2006

Went to Comic-Con today, but was turned away with hundreds of others because they grossly oversold the show.

"But I am Adam, king of OTAKU" I argued, stomping my feet loudly. Oddly, that didn't quite work and I was promptly shown the door.

I'll try again tomorrow.

In other news, all servers are online and balancing our load. Speed should be blazing now :).
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Saturday, February 25, 2006

Last Second Scramble
So Gail (Panda) emailed me late last night to ask if I was attending Comic-Con.

*GULP*. I had totally and utterly forgotten about it.

Frightened to face her mad Panda wrath, I scrambled, registering tickets online and freeing my Saturday schedule. There was one problem though...

I was going to this huge convention and had no business cards to hand out. Oh well, no biggie. I breathed deeply and relaxed.

...Until I got another email from Gail. She subtly suggested printing a set for the convention:

(size 35 font)

"ADAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I DON'T
CARE WHAT IT TAKES, NO BUSINESS CARDS = NO BREATHING FOR YOU!"

And so I threw a jacket over the pajamas I was wearing and ran outside to the nearest Kinko's to place a rush order.

Tomorrow morning, I'm picking them up and then heading to the convention. Sweet.

(In case you were wondering, I just listed THEOTAKU.COM on the card and put my title as "Publisher." Nice and simple.)
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Friday, February 24, 2006

The Horror!
Someone sent me an anime eCard from a non-Otaku site! For shame! (Thanks for the kind gesture though, whoever you are.)

Quick update on the widget I published yesterday. So far we've received over 70 "suggestions."

So far Loveless and Zatch Bell are way ahead of the pack. We do have a lot of anime tied for 3rd place though, including Gail's favorite: Trinity Blood.

We'll see what the next couple of weeks bring.

PS: Bingo!
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Thursday, February 23, 2006

My new widget: Suggest a Category! Go look! Go suggest!

Also check out Gail's Screening Room today. Very nice.
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Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Good Night
I'm almost done coding a new widget for the site. While not as cool as the featured fandom, it'll be really useful moving forward. Stay tuned.

Our second server is back online and fully customized. I tried moving parts of the site to run off of it, but accidentally edited the wrong files and we lost a few updates :-/.

Hopefully Justin can set it up tomorrow so that we're only reading from the second server and not writing to it...then we can really see some speed gains, without the lost updates.
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Monday, February 20, 2006

Pouring Rain
Throughout my long tenure with sites and things, I pretty much expect that when you hit a problem, more problems will inevitably follow (though they won't necessarily be related). The trick is just to keep your head high, see them as new challenges/opportunities, and tackle them one at a time.

After I had the server hard drive crash, my Internet connection mysteriously went down for about 36 hours. Then when it returned, I saw a major error that was preventing people from posting to their myO blogs.

Anyway, this was all a minor hiccup. We're going to be back to full capability soon enough.

Quick notes:

(1) My Internet connection is back (obviously)

(2) Justin fixed the myO blog posting error

(3) The server has a new hard drive and we only have a few more customizations to go before we start reading data from it again.

(4) We're going to implement some ridiculously good mechanisms to prevent anything like this from *ever* happening again.

Thanks to our news team for keeping the site content-rich!
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Saturday, February 18, 2006

Yesterday Was Dramatic
Here's why yesterday sucked:

* I had an early morning presentation at my day job where I had to demo a few things I'd built to an important client. Everything broke during my demo! Even things I'd tested dozens of times. I even saw errors that made no sense that I'd never seen before in my life.

* I then had to work until 10 PM, the latest I'd ever worked there. I ended up eating dinner at midnight.

* When I finally got home, I noticed something was wrong with our slave server. I email our network operating center and they tell me that it died and have to start from scratch! In 7 years I'd never had a server die on me! And I had spent a LOT of money custom configuring this server and now I have to redo all of it.

(Right now we're reading everything from the site off of one server. Thanks Justin for your quick response on this. It's somewhat sluggish but at least it works.)

* Gail had a dramatic day as well.
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Friday, February 17, 2006

Three Milestones
First, we now over over 300,000 members.

Second, over 400 copies of Art of Otaku have been sold.

Third...BINGO.

Whew.

Also, check this myOtaku site out. Very innovative idea, who's behind it?
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Thursday, February 16, 2006

   Valentine's Day Statistics
It's like reuniting with an old friend; so nice to have a blazing site again.

Anyway, quick trivia: How many greetings were sent from our site on Valentine's Day?

Made your guess?

The answer is 6,502. However...3,400 were sent the day before and about 2,000 were sent today.

So I'd estimate roughly 10,000 eCards were sent because of Valentine's Day. That's a lot of love.

(But why didn't anyone send me one...?)
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