Begining the End Run…

Well,
it’s time to start the end run on Trajectory and Gremlin Panic! For the
next three weeks, the offices will be almost empty. Lance is in Jonesboro,
AR (poor bastard – that jobsite has turned political, which is a piss poor
place to really learn about startup proceedures. But I think he’s figured
out how it all works anyway.) Dad is in China. Paul will be in and out
of the offices (ya know – normally I consider him to be a lazy, slow bastard.
However, he’s actually been on more jobsites lately than I have! So he’s
contributing more important stuff to CEI than I am 😛 ) That pretty much
just leaves me here by myself. Perfect – right now I’ve got no upcoming
projects, so I can handle techsupport, make some changes to the network that
needs to be done (damnit – already taking phone calls. Must be a monday
morning. Yep – it sure is.) The rest of the time – I’m gonna rock on getting
the games done, and getting Everything And the Six Pence In Your
Shoe up and running.

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I hired my first employee for Midnight Ryder Technologies.
A guy by the name of Henry Hutchison is the new Marketing Director, which
hopefully will increase sales while freeing me up for programming and directing
projects.  I also found a very likely candidate for a level designer for
Trajectory, but no modeler yet (bummer.)  I may have to break down and do
the modeling myself – I’m going to wait just a bit longer to see if anyone
takes me up on the job offer or not.

One of the companies I started
doing business with seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth.  Garage
Developer International was planning on printing CD’s with both Boulder Panic!
2 DX and Tile Panic! on ’em.  Well, thier domain isn’t accessable today,
and for the last three days it kept coming up ‘Forbiden’ for the homepage.
 I’m not sure what happened, but, it’s a pitty.  It was a good idea.  Good
enough, in fact, that I might steal the idea.

Thier model was rather
simple, but poorly implemented.  They publised CD’s with demos for a cheap
cost, and also published full product CD’s for like $30.  They also offered
online sales channels – which is where I think they got in trouble (they
only made like $.50 off of each sale.  That doesn’t hardly cover the bandwidth
cost on some of the games.)  I’m scheming how I would pull off something
similar without all the headaches they set up for themselves.  Of course,
it would take money to do it – don’t have enough of it at the moment.  I’ll
wait until my 3 month vacation from game development to act on any plans
– of which one is begnning to germinate.

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This
weekend was party weekend – Val hosted a bday party, and Heabo and I handled
the bar-tending duties.  And apparently, I’m not unofficially the person
to turn to when it’s time to play party games.  No one brought cards, dice,
or anything for me to work with, but expected me to be able to come up with
stuff off the top of my head.  Fabulous.  Ok, time for a new tactic – I’m
going to build be up a book of games – basically, just every imagineable
party game, and some of them that I’m gonna make from time to time.  Then
I’ll just whip this sucker out the next time someone looks at me askin’ for
a friggin’ party game to play.

The next party is already planned –
July 27th will be a combination Bday party.  Tisha’s BDay is right near mine,
and we’ll just combine the two and have another party.  This one has a theme
– it’s a Tacky Toga party.  Find the worst possible material to construct
a toga from, and wear it!  I may have a few other things up my sleves for
this party, of course 😉

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 I’m lookin’ forward
to my trip to Colorado.  Too bad I have no idea how exactly it’s being paid
for now.  This weekend we managed to bounce a check – actually, successive
checks.  Bigtime ugly.  It’s been like three months since we’ve done anything
like that, so I’m not feelin’ too bad about it.  It REALLY set Heabo off
though (read her journal entry for that part of it.)  The company isn’t gonna
have start up cash now (well, not MUCH anyway – it might have $50 at tops.)
 I’ve discovered that the bank has changed it’s rules, but it makes sense
WHY they do this.  Right now, we do all of our bill paying online.   I think
Intrust suspends the credit limit then, allowing you to spend more than you
have in your account.  At first that seems really stupid.  But potentially,
it saves you money.  Why?  Intrust uses MyBills for the online bill paying.
 IF  you bounced a check using them , you would get stuck with paying an
overdraft from Intrust, an bad check fee from mybills ($30, I think) , plus
potentially one from the recipient (between $30 and $45 these days.)  OK,
makes sense.  Unluckly, we just got hit with a whopping $150 in overdraft
fees in a chain reaction check bouncing.  OUCH.  We’ll figure out somethign,
I’m sure.  Too bad the car needs gas, I need tobacco products, etc.  However,
I think the company can cover part of that this month, so no problems there.

Hopefully,
adding a marketing director for Midnight Ryder Technologies will help a great
deal on that front.  That just leaves getting Everything and… running and
producing revenue streams.  Then cash won’t be quite so tight.

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Projects
at the house are going good.  Heabo has put down the tile in front of the
fireplace – awsome looking stuff.   The first cabnet shell is amost complete
– Heabo is going to paint the inside before I puth the lazy suzane in it
and hang it.  I ALMOST started the next shell, but, I ended up watching The
Omega Code with Heabo instead.  I’ll kick some ass on it tonight.  The next
cabnet shell is a cinch – no special angles or anything like that.  Just
6 board, and hang it.  Then hopefully I’ll have the first one hung, and I
can do the next two ‘simple’ cabnets, and the do the final cabnet over top
of the refrigerator.  In other words – the project is starting to fall together
quite nicely 🙂

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Workout last week didn’t go
well.  Obviously I wasn’t supposed to strain myself for 48 hours, and I consider
my workout to be a blood pressure inducer.  This week, I intend to get back
at it.  

My happy moment for last week though is kinda funny.  I didn’t
have many pair of pants clean, and was rummagin’ through the closet and ran
across a pair of slacks.  I looked at ’em, and  decided there was no way
I could wear ’em – too small.  Heabo was still asleep, so I decided to see
how badly they fit.  Well, they DID fit – whoa.  I wore ’em for the rest
of the day.  That means I now do not own any pairs of pants that don’t fit
– well, a couple are now rediculously loose, and a couple are still tighter
than I should probably wear 😉  But I can at least put them all all 😉
 Definitely have to get back to it this week, and hopefully in the next couple
of weeks I’ll shed enough to make the tight ones reasonable.

I do
intend to at least work out a bit while I’m in Colorado in the mornings –
it makes the day much more energetic.  Just not sure what I’m gonna do for
a workout (since I don’t do things like jogging, etc. which are easily portable.)
 Too bad I can’t afford proper sparing equiptment, otherwise I might challenge
Ian to exchange blows in sparing in the mornings (which, IMHO, would be a
much more wonderful workout than beating on a heavy bag.)  In fact, it’s
a pitty that neither Heabo or Jess can spar with me.  Both of them do similar
things when  sparing against me – either backing off, or laughing at the
dead serious expression I get on my face.  The only way to get Heabo to take
me on is to literally piss her off, THEN she’ll finally start swinging seriously
at me.  I wish that wasn’t the case – then I’d start tryin’ to talk Heabo
into sparing first thing in the mornings, getting the adrenaline going for
both of us, and making the day more energetic.

Granted – I’ve yet
to own proper hand, foot, and head gear for sparing.  And heck, I need elbow
and knee pads to be safe with the way I fight (I learned a little kick boxing
at one point, so knee to hip and side attacks in the heat of things are possible,
and elbow follow throughs are used if someone decides to try and step inside
my slightly longer than normal arm reach.  And I don’t think they make anything
to help with forearm smashes, but I was never that big on them anyway, they
were just a desperation move most of the time.)  The big thing, of course,
is just learning to use my head, and NOT resort to certain attacks.

Ok, time to get crankin’ on work – could be an interesting day!