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  Right on, schedule! 06:44 PM -- Tue August 28, 2007  

Well, I'm in a week of being scheduled. That's why I'm writing this - this is my "writing" hour. Since I don't want to write anything else, I will write a journal entry. I'm enjoying it so far. I already got my schedule disrupted, about an hour into it in the first place - had to take the dogs to the vet yesterday (by myself, two dogs that go insane whenever they see another dog... that's an adventure I didn't need). So that erased a chunk of yesterday, but then the rest of the day was on track and quite fun. I even made some concept art for a new game I am often thinking about, and made really nice progress on Loonyland: Titan Tunnels. It's still nowhere near functional, but I made a lot of code.

I've finally gotten somewhere on getting my merchant account, and so the website is moving much more quickly now. Now, I don't actually HAVE the merchant account, but at least I'm talking to them and filling out forms at this point. It took so long to get my business license renewed (somehow the first application I mailed got lost for well over a month, then I ended up getting TWO business licenses when I sent in another app) that the person I had been talking to at the merchant account place no longer works there. So that was something I had to work out, finding a new person there. And now it's all moving.

Some tidbits on the new site - the age-old classic Hamumu discount is making a comeback. Order more than one game at once, and you get 20% off the total! That is a huge deal. Then there's of course the power to spend Yerfbucks in place of money (each Yerfbuck is worth a whopping $0.01, but considering how easy they are to earn, you're doing nicely there). The Yerfbucks are great for rewarding loyal fans. They're easy to earn, IF you are someone who hangs out here all the time. If you just drop in and buy something, you could get $0.50 worth for signing up, but that's about it.

And lastly, I've been thinking about how I'll do shipping again, and I think I've decided to go back to handling it by hand. That means the classic $5 per game CD cost also returns (that's the combined cost for the materials and shipping anywhere in the world). That's usually cheaper than what you pay now, since currently the CD versions have higher prices to begin with, but not always for some people (it's a great deal if you don't live in the US!). What I like about it is that it's simple.

I'm also abolishing taxes. Yes, read my lips! There's only one circumstance where I would normally collect tax - a CD order to someone in California. That's such an insignificant percentage of the orders I get, I don't mind. I'll pay the tax for you. Besides, it saves me from implementing the code to handle it. No VAT either, for you types who deal with that.

Well, now I'm done with the journal, but I still have 17 minutes in my writing hour. And three of the cats are huddled around me, staring at me and occasionally squawking. It's almost their dinner time. I have to carefully avoid looking at them, or they squeak at me in desperation. Hmm, now 16 minutes.
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  Been A While 08:07 PM -- Fri August 24, 2007  

Still WoWless. Things have been very hectic as the school year starts up simultaneously with the start of our friendly local tutoring business (the not-updated tutortemecula.com - if you're a Temeculan, come get help lernin' your thinkin'!). I help out with that stuff, and get root canals and crowns, repair the pipe that brings water to our house (which I broke), work on the website... that sort of thing! There's always something keeping me from having plans.

But I'm here talking to you today to tell you this: I'm turning over a new leaf! This leaf. You can't see it, but it's here, and I'm turning it over. In the process, I'm starting another of my famous schedules. If you don't know, those are where I make a chart of how I'm going to spend my time (or sometimes make up a game, like getting points for doing things I should - but this time it's a chart), and then I stick to it religiously! For a week. So that's what I'm doing. Now that school is started, and hopefully emergency situations are all behind me, life can get more patterned instead of random insanity.

I actually created my schedule on Wednesday. Then it was blown on Thursday when I had to go into town for the dentist, and blown today when I had to fix the water pipes if I was in the mood to flush toilets and use showers and drink. But again, we'll say the emergencies are behind us, and life can be normal starting on Monday.

As for the website, lots of good things done there. Nothing amazing and new, but more and more pages getting set up in the new site, and more of the basic features coming together. Now the Contact Us page automatically fills in your email address if you're logged in. That's handy for all the people who keep sending me things from invalid addresses. Always a treat to write out a lengthy reply to someone and then see it bounce back! I'll soon have that implemented for the journal and sneak peek too, so when you want to comment, it'll just be a pop and a bobbin and bob's your uncle. Or whatever.

Bonus: a poem I composed in the shower:

Terrible Torgenson,
he built a house.
But the house that he built
was the size of a mouse!
People came by,
and they all asked him, "Why?
Is this a house for a housefly?"

So Torgenson said,
that in journals he'd read,
as you age, you decrease in height.
So according to him,
It was not just a whim -
When he's 90, it will fit just right!

Don't you just want a book of such gems? Maybe you can get one someday!
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  Sneak Peek: New Website 04:04 PM -- Mon August 13, 2007  


This screen is probably making you scroll horizontally, but that's what you get! Also, you can't find where the edges of it are, since it's the same color as this site. Haha!

As you can see, it's The Avatar Lab. You purchase avatar parts with Yerfbucks, and then you can stack up to 5 parts into your final avatar image. You can horizontally flip them via the FLIP buttons here, and adjust their position with the X and Y boxes. The sunglasses were originally made to go on a Squash avatar, so I had to flip them and adjust their position to fit this lady. There's handy instructions that pop up when you put the cursor on any of those buttons. I might have to up it to more than 5 parts. Won't be any trouble to do so. Since it takes 3 parts to build your person (head, body, pants) most of the time, that doesn't leave much room for accessories.

I know this is a pretty odd avatar I currently have. I just started cranking out a bunch of parts one day, and this is some of them.
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  WoWless Saturday 09:07 AM -- Sat August 4, 2007  

Bad news, everyone! My prepaid time card for WoW has expired. I am now WoWless. Whatever shall I do?! I'll get another time card sometime, but I will wait as long as possible. Also, I know I haven't done the newsletter for this month yet. I'm dragging my feet because it's going to be so dull. Nothing has happened, and we have no new anything to discuss! Still working on getting the new site ready to go, it will be exciting and all that. But in the meantime, dum de dum, nothing going on.
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  2 Weeks Later... 11:38 AM -- Fri July 27, 2007  

As of yesterday evening, I have a working internet connection again! I've been without for two weeks, and the endless trips into town for the library were getting really old. So much catching up to do... I have been working on the site in the meantime, but not a lot. I had plenty of time to do it, I just had no energy to work when things weren't the way they should be. And a lot of times I'd come to a point where I'd realize I needed to look something up (like javascript stuff), and couldn't do it. Life without the internet is positively barbaric.

On the Hamumu Propaganda train, please turn your hymnals to page 43 of Games For Windows magazine. The Indie Pick Of The Month is Loonyland 2. There's two screenshots, then a bunch of talk about how extremely bizarre I must be. Some choice comments:
  • "The game is straight-up goofy."
  • "wind-up mice that projectile vomit"
  • "somebody somewhere was smoking something when designing this indie title" (not true. Well, I'm sure it is true just based on pure statistics, but it wasn't me)
  • "Oddly out-of-place characters meet you along the way, including a 'legitimate businessman' with an accent thicker than Tony Soprano's." (is it really?)
  • "And at 20 bucks, I'd say I got my money's worth." (well, actually it's $24.95...)
It's a very positive review, assuming you like strange things. There were also a couple sentences praising the music, which seems to be a common theme in reviews. I guess I picked the right stuff! Wish I had written it, but still somehow it makes me proud just that I apparently did a good job of picking music, even if I didn't write it.

But that's not all the propaganda for today! Good thing I flipped through the magazine after buying it, instead of just reading my review. Turn to page 49, for "Random Access: 10 Things We're Into This Month". Thing #7 is entitled "NPC: THE GAME" (can you guess where this is going?). It reads:

Here's a goofy concept for an RPG game: You're the NPC. Well, kind of. In NPC Quest (www.hamumu.com/gamelets.php), you shop, prep your character for whatever battles lie ahead, and then kick back and watch how well you did. You have zero control over your in-game avatar. There's still some strategy to it, sure; it's just a little more passive than your typical RPG.

So that was really cool to find. Now how can I get more coverage...?
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  I have gone mad! 05:39 PM -- Wed July 25, 2007  

Oops. When I changed Supreme CDs to out of stock on our Buy Stuff page, I managed to break the page, causing most orders to fail entirely. And with my handy lack of internet access, I didn't find out for a few days. It's fixed now, of course. That was surely a good deal what with our appearance in Games For Windows' August issue, which just came out! I don't have it with me to quote to you at this time (surely an "LL2 Propaganda" journal entry is in your near future), but there's quite a positive review. Check it out, on page 43. Apparently, they find me a bit bizarre.

Also, I got a root canal done on Monday, and I want to tell you: if you are in the Temecula area, and looking for a dentist, Creating Smiles with Dr. Witek is the place for you! I've always been really impressed with how he managed to make every filling painless (and I get plenty, hence the current root canal - I DO take care of my teeth, mind you. Do YOU floss twice a day?? It's bad genetics, lucky me), but this was over the top. I mean, "root canal" is basically a code word for "unimaginable pain" in common American parlance. But from the moment he poked the novacaine into my gums (prior to which I was indeed in unimaginable pain, hence the need for a root canal), the pain was gone. He scraped stuff out of me and packed it all back together with numerous severe warnings of how I was going to be in serious pain for a few days. I was so worried, all that talk about the heavy pain drugs people use for that stuff. Guess what? NO pain. And I mean actual NONE. It's two days later now, and I even went back there for the cleaning I was originally scheduled to have before my mouth exploded (the cleaning was of course painful as always). There is NO pain! I think that's at least partially just the circumstances of the nerve involved - even the dentist was surprised to hear I was in no pain - but this dentist is the one to choose. A root canal's a multi-part process, so I will be back next Monday for another scraping (I could give details of how it all works, but if you want to know that, look it up - no need to horrify my readers), so I reserve the right to experience pain then. I don't expect to, though. It's just so nice. The whole experience is hardly anything more than getting a filling, not the big nightmare I had expected. Well, the first visit anyway. Two more trips to go, I think.

And I'm really enjoying being able to drink things on both sides of my mouth at will painlessly, like a crazy person.

My internet should be back by tomorrow. I will hopefully see you all on chat and forums much more often then! Well, assuming this does fix it, but I have high hopes. Everything seems hopeful when your teeth are fixed! I am looking forward to the magic of networked communication.
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  The Postal Service Has Gone Mad 02:48 PM -- Wed July 18, 2007  

Okay, just doing that to continue the theme. Turns out that the application I mailed to renew my business license a month and a half ago was never received (or so the county folks say!). So, off to do that again and hope it goes through this time. That certainly explains the huge hold-up in getting that done. Still, there's so much more to do on the site before it's really ready. I need to get cranking.
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  Wildblue's Gone Mad 01:14 PM -- Sat July 14, 2007  

And to add insult to injury, before I could reply to all but a couple of those emails I dug out of gmail (I have now bypassed them, which is a pain, but beats losing emails), my satellite went down. I am typing this from the library. Our home has been netless for 48 hours now! It hurts! I'm on an online chat with them, since when I called them, it said "your wait time is greater than 40 minutes, hold on!"

Reading up on forums, it sounds like Wildblue equipment is really bad. A bunch of installers are complaining about how they have to constantly go in and replace the TRIAs (not sure quite what that is, but I think it's the high tech part that sits in the satellite dish itself) constantly, and they don't get paid enough for the service calls for it. Some of them say they no longer install Wildblue because of it. Sounds like another winner I've hooked up with! Oh, how I'm dying for some DSL. But it's not likely to arrive in our world for many many years. One of the perks of country living.

So for now anyway, and maybe for the next couple of weeks until we get a tech out (last time I called for one, the appointment was 2 weeks later!), I can only be on when I come down to the library. Very bleh. I'm trying to get replies out to all your emails now, so here goes!
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  Google's Gone Mad 06:49 PM -- Wed July 11, 2007  

I had a debacle this week trying to get my ISP to fix my email. I discovered I wasn't receiving many things. Long story of back and forth with fixes and things, and at last I found the problem. It wasn't my ISP at all. I forward all my email to gmail as one step in a chain of spam filters, and for no reason this past week, they have upped their spam 'protection' about five million times. Now almost NOTHING gets through! I'm plowing backwards through the spam box in my gmail account right now, discovering hundreds of things I should've received, but it's taking a long long time, and I could easily make a mistake and miss something. So...

If you emailed me recently and didn't get a reply, please write again!

And hopefully I will get past this. I think I may have to drop gmail from the loop and just accept that I'm going to be downloading a whole lot more email before my vastly more intelligent local spam filter (K9) can catch it. It's very sad because it used to be a really handy thing. It was a very mild filter, just weeding out the thousands of much more egregious things, so that I had maybe 5% as much email to actually spend time downloading before my local filter got to work (after which I basically had ONLY good emails - a very solid system!). Now it's so aggressive, I can't trust it. I'm going to have to either sift through it every day (totally defeating the purpose), or just go ahead and skip it.
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  Sneak Peek: New Website 10:09 PM -- Sun July 8, 2007  


Why not a sneak peek!? This is a sig-image from the new site. It's generated from the info in your Dumb Account. Interesting features: obviously, it's got your name in the lower left, and your custom title in the lower right. I'm wondering about changing what it says at the top. Maybe something like "Hamumu Dumbcard" or something to indicate that this is a card of your Hamumu history. Oh, and maybe I should add extremely tiny icons to the upper right indicating which games you own. Not a bad plan at all.

The two remaining parts are the best. The 100 little squares you can barely see are placeholders for Trophies that you haven't yet earned. There aren't actually 100 possible trophies yet, though someday there will hopefully be even more than that. Regardless, there will only be as many squares shown as there are possible trophies, so you don't get confused. And of course, if you do get trophies, they'll be shown in the proper spot instead of an empty square! Get them all!! You can earn trophies in various Hamumu games, as well as entirely outside of games for other reasons. Some trophies have multiple ranks. An obvious and pointless one will be the trophy representing your forum rank - as you reach certain post thresholds, it advances, just like the not-so-custom titles do now. You earn prize points for every trophy you get, but usually just a few.

The goofy picture of a dumb little guy is my avatar! Well, not really. It's my test image for an avatar. I hope to have a much less horrible looking one eventually. But avatars are going to be fun - you buy different characters, backgrounds and props (like sunglasses, laser guns, etc) with your Yerfbucks, then you can paste them together to build up your own personal character that will show up there. You'll be able to choose any combination of the parts you've bought or unlocked, up to a certain number of items total, and you'll be able to arrange them on the image. I also hope to change the old Dumb People Browsing thing to be a string of avatar images instead (and a "?" with a number for guests), but that may prove to be too much bandwidth and screen space to be wise.

You can of course use this sig image as your sig in our forums, or use it on other forums or wherever you like. It will link to your Dumb Page on the site by default, so people can stare jealously at your vast achievements. The avatar image under your name in forum posts will be replaced by your new custom-crafted avatar as well. There may also be other sig image style options, if the plain blue & white doesn't do it for you. Oh, and I also want to put your avatar in the chatroom as well, but that will make the chat scroll awfully fast, since they're so tall... I'm not sure. One last bit of wonderment to the avatars - there may (maybe!) come games that use your avatar, either as a character (that doesn't animate, of course) or as the icon to represent your profile in the game. I really want to integrate things all around, so each of us becomes a character. You may also be able to engage in battles on the website with avatars, though I'm thinking of a different way of going about that.

So that's a glimpse at part of the new website stuff.
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