Thursday, January 11, 2001

by the Wunderland Toast Society

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• I added icons to my home page and massively updated the six below it
• I also created a seventh subpage in the process: Emperor
• Our mailing list robot has been upgraded!
• Alison did lots of work on her webpages
• GinohnNews: Unfinished Top Ten Lists
• Yet Another Five Tombstoners

Well, it's now definitely late, and it just keeps on getting later. This week still finds us working on our big holiday mailing, consisting of Geronimo Inquirer #5 and a free copy of our new game (still (but only for another week) codenamed Secret Project 44-CC). We had hoped to have them all shipped out before I finished this update, but all we could manage to get in the mail today are the copies we're sending out to our Mad Lab Rabbits. The stores that sell our games, and our distant friends and relatives, will all have to keep being paitent. Hopefully the rest of the mailings will be out the door by Saturday. But in any event, many of you reading this will soon be receiving a little package from us... here's hoping you enjoy it! And once again: Happy New Year!

The other big project that's been crushing skulls around here is the latest transplantation of this website. At our IP's request, we are moving this website from the server it's been on (somewhere in Texas) to a better server (somewhere in Virgina). This move also required a change of operating systems (a shift from one flavor of UNIX to another), so Dale and Kristin have been working until bleary-eyed on the technical issues involved, in particular shifting all of our mailing lists over from Majordomo to Mailman. (To put it another way, Fred-3 got his brain upgraded.) But the good news is, the site has moved and everything seems to be working! Thanks Dale for all your help!

In less pleasant news, our TV blew out this week. It now behaves exactly as it would if it weren't plugged in... except for a constant, annoying, high-pitched whine. I wonder if it can be fixed? And then there's the trouble with the copier. Remember last week I said we'd gotten a new digital copier/printer for the business? Well, no sooner do we start trying using it, to make the cardstock flaps for Secret Project 44-CC, than we discover that it can't handle cardstock. "Wait a minute... what?!" I hear you saying. "How can something calling itself a Copier/Printer not handle something as basic as thick paper?" Yeah, that's what we said, too. But the copies came out looking terrible. Anyway, after some testing and reading of specifications, it was determined that Sharp digital copier/printers are not intended for use with cardstock, though we aren't sure why. Their equivalent analog copiers work just fine, but it says in the spec for the digital machines that cardstock is a no-no. Needless to say, this made the machine unacceptable to us... the first two jobs we had lined up for this machine involved cardstock. Kristin mentioned this during the sales pitch, but later, when he'd read the specs, the sales guy said "Oh, I didn't realize you were planning to use cardstock with it." (I love sales guys.) Anyway, they took it away and wrote us a refund check, but now we're back to shopping for that perfect all-in-one networked digital copier/printer. Anyone got any recommendations?

In other news...

• We've settled on the schedule of events for the next Big Experiment, just in time to get it into the Origins Pre-Event mailing. Thanks, Liam, for the excellent first draft!
• We've struck a deal with the Balticon Convention Committee, so it's official: There will be Pop-Tart Cafe at Balticon 35! And this time it'll be two days long, since the convention itself, which takes place now during the Memorial Day weekend, runs for an extra day. Mark your calendars!
• The newest printing of Q-Turn has arrived, and for the first time, they weren't assembled by us. Kristin contracted the work out, to a place called the Finishing Line, and they did a great job. And from now on, they'll be shrink-wrapped, with a subtle little hang-tab mounted on top!
• I finally got to play the new Lord of the Rings board game everyone's raving about, and I have to admit, it's pretty cool!

Remember Peter McWilliams!