I've tackled a new project. I'm taking my WarEngine wargaming system and putting it in the hands of the community of wargamers in the form of a WarEngine Wiki. I signed up for a cheap hosting account that supports PHP5 and MySQL and installed the latest version of the free MediaWiki, the same software used to run Wikipedia. I've added some built-in Google AdSense banners and a donation page as a way to try making the service at least pay for itself and perhaps even generate some passive income.
I've also seeded the site with some content, including the Shock Force setting I developed when I was publishing wargames as DemonBlade Games. By putting all this in a wiki, I'm hoping that the community will then add to it. I've dropped $25 on a month's worth of ads on The Miniatures Page to drive some traffic to the site, too.
This has some similarity to writing to a "monetized" blog site, but I think it has some nice potential from the perspective that I don't necessarily have to (and if it works, shouldn't) provide all the content. I only launched it last week, so it's too early to tell, but if nothing else, it will be a good experiment in whether hosting and building an online community of this sort can be a profitable commercial endeavor, too.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Sunday, November 12, 2006
The Miracle of Heating
My office is cold. It's not yet numbingly cold, and maybe it won't be, but I'm a bit worried about it.
My office is a room off the kitchen in the house we rent in Rockville, Maryland. It's nice because it has windows on three sides that look out onto the backyard, which is quite large and very pleasant. Here's a picture of the view straight back:
The problem is that the house is aging, and not well. Since we've moved in, the pipes in the basement have sprung leaks half-a-dozen times. The landlord sends out a guy to fix them, he repeatedly tells her that she needs to replace the whole pipe system, but she insists he simply patch it.
A couple of months ago, the furnace broke down. Again, our landlord went to discount labor sources, in this case, a tenant at one of her other properties. That guy took awhile to show up, then didn't fix it. The landlord got another guy to come out, who finally replaced the oil pump, but when the furnace started shutting itself down again a few days later, he came back and found that some other part of the furnace was also busted. Basically, the whole thing needs to be replaced.
In the last couple of weeks, we've learned that the landlord doesn't intend to continue renting the house out once we move out, something we are thinking of doing next spring anyway. She intends sell it to a developer who will subdivide the property, tear down this house, and put up four million-dollar-plus homes. Under the circumstances, it seems she doesn't really want to fix stuff.
Instead, she promised us a couple of big free-standing electric heaters. Having seen the one the my friend, Ben, uses at his house, I was willing to give that a try. Yesterday, I got home from taking Gregory to a Cub Scout event to find two small, electric, parabolic space heaters on the front doorstep - one of them very dusty and missing a knob. I'm very skeptical that these (plus the two other heaters we bought ourselves do handle the cold days while they futzed around with fixing the furnace) will replace the normal heating capabilities of the built-in heating system.
We will have to see how this works out, but since the next place we live will also be a rental, you can bet that it will be in a commercially run operation where you don't have to worry about adequate heating being high enough on the landlord's priority list.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Contrast
I've been doing some thinking lately about the value of contrast, primarily about how it is an important tool in developing or marketing a new product. Contrast adds interest, so contrast is common in things to which we find ourselves drawn.
I'm using contrast here in a very broad sense, where it means that there are any two attributes of a single thing that are significantly different. Consider some examples, beginning with what we eat. Almost every meal we eat includes two or more foods. There really isn't any reason beyond getting a wide variety of nutrients not available in a single food for us to prepare multiple foods when we eat. However, even if it covered every element of nutrition you needed, you would be unlikely to feel particular satisfied by eating the same single item with every meal.
Another very basic example is that we tend not to design objects to be of a single color. My laptop, on which I'm typing this now, has a number of buttons that when they are in the "on" position light up with a blue glow. The blue contrasts with the black of the plastic and is therefore pleasing.
Not every example is so trivial, though. While it may not have such a firm grip on its market as it once did, Monster was remarkable in the job listing website business because of the contrast between the generally serious matter of browsing through jobs and the more whimsical nature of cartoon monsters adorning the pages. Similarly, "Amazon" (at least to me) conjures up images of a rain forest where the only inhabitants have little if anything in the way of a written language, which contrasts heavily with the concept of an online bookstore. I've noticed Elizabeth regularly browsing a make-up site called "Beauty Whore." Whatever you might feel about the name itself, it is certainly striking and memorable.
Even the name I picked for my online alter-ego, Dark Tortoise, was picked in part because of the contrast between "dark" and "tortoise." If asked to name a bunch of things that are dark, especially if given the "sinister" definition of the word, it's unlikely that "tortoise" would show up on your list anywhere in the top thousand.
I've been talking to my realtor friend, Ben, about ideas for a real estate website. Most such sites are, in my opinion, largely forgettable. They also tend to highlight the realtor, leaving the houses listed for sale as pretty much a set of photos and some basic attributes, like number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Buying a home, though, is largely an emotional decision with the house itself at the center of that decision. Thinking about contrast and that emotional factor suggests new ideas of how to present homes in an appealing, remarkable, and memorable way.
For example, we could present the homes almost as though they were people themselves so that the website visitor has the opportunity to be introduced to the homes and find one with a pleasing personality. We could include things like video testimonials about the houses given by either the developer or architect for new houses or the previous owners for resales. The presentation could even be made to look much like a typical (but well-designed) customized profile page on social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook. The contrast between an inanimate object and the anthropomorphizing of that object would be unusual and notable.
Contrast, while not the only tool for creating distinction, seems a critical one. How could you apply new contrast to make something in your life more interesting, either to yourself or others as appropriate?
I'm using contrast here in a very broad sense, where it means that there are any two attributes of a single thing that are significantly different. Consider some examples, beginning with what we eat. Almost every meal we eat includes two or more foods. There really isn't any reason beyond getting a wide variety of nutrients not available in a single food for us to prepare multiple foods when we eat. However, even if it covered every element of nutrition you needed, you would be unlikely to feel particular satisfied by eating the same single item with every meal.
Another very basic example is that we tend not to design objects to be of a single color. My laptop, on which I'm typing this now, has a number of buttons that when they are in the "on" position light up with a blue glow. The blue contrasts with the black of the plastic and is therefore pleasing.
Not every example is so trivial, though. While it may not have such a firm grip on its market as it once did, Monster was remarkable in the job listing website business because of the contrast between the generally serious matter of browsing through jobs and the more whimsical nature of cartoon monsters adorning the pages. Similarly, "Amazon" (at least to me) conjures up images of a rain forest where the only inhabitants have little if anything in the way of a written language, which contrasts heavily with the concept of an online bookstore. I've noticed Elizabeth regularly browsing a make-up site called "Beauty Whore." Whatever you might feel about the name itself, it is certainly striking and memorable.
Even the name I picked for my online alter-ego, Dark Tortoise, was picked in part because of the contrast between "dark" and "tortoise." If asked to name a bunch of things that are dark, especially if given the "sinister" definition of the word, it's unlikely that "tortoise" would show up on your list anywhere in the top thousand.
I've been talking to my realtor friend, Ben, about ideas for a real estate website. Most such sites are, in my opinion, largely forgettable. They also tend to highlight the realtor, leaving the houses listed for sale as pretty much a set of photos and some basic attributes, like number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Buying a home, though, is largely an emotional decision with the house itself at the center of that decision. Thinking about contrast and that emotional factor suggests new ideas of how to present homes in an appealing, remarkable, and memorable way.
For example, we could present the homes almost as though they were people themselves so that the website visitor has the opportunity to be introduced to the homes and find one with a pleasing personality. We could include things like video testimonials about the houses given by either the developer or architect for new houses or the previous owners for resales. The presentation could even be made to look much like a typical (but well-designed) customized profile page on social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook. The contrast between an inanimate object and the anthropomorphizing of that object would be unusual and notable.
Contrast, while not the only tool for creating distinction, seems a critical one. How could you apply new contrast to make something in your life more interesting, either to yourself or others as appropriate?
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Halloween Costumes
Last night, like so many others, we walked around begging for candy from neighbors. We did so well bringing home the loot that I suspect we live in a development full of ruthless dentists.
When I say we, I mean me and the little guys, Gregory and Katerina. Gregory was dressed up as the recently quite popular pirate, looking for all the world what I'd picture a young Wesley in The Princess Bride may have looked, but judge for yourself:
When I say we, I mean me and the little guys, Gregory and Katerina. Gregory was dressed up as the recently quite popular pirate, looking for all the world what I'd picture a young Wesley in The Princess Bride may have looked, but judge for yourself:
Katerina, meanwhile was a rag doll, but had no idea why people were asking her if she was Raggedy Ann. I guess she'd never been introduced to the doll after which her costume was modelled. Here she is:
We were also joined by Katerina's friend, Muye, but I don't have a picture of her because I only took a couple of photos at home. She looked quite good as the Queen of Camelot. She told Gregory who she was dressed as, and he exclaimed, "The Queen of Camels! Ha!" A piratical view of things, indeed.
Elizabeth spent the evening at a friend's house, disinclined to have a costume, but happy to have a good reason to further indulge her make-up obsession to create spiderweb eyes. She sent me this picture of her with friends:
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