Today I went out to lunch
with Robert. First I helped him move some tables at his house and then
he took me out in thanks. We went to a new restaurant in Redwood City,
Sichuan. Kind of nice, midscale restaurant. We had a tofu dish,
general's chicken, and a marinated beef appetizer. All very good and we
barely finished it all.
Of course when I eat that much I'm pretty much full for the rest of the
day, one reason why I don't eat lunch. Robert was slightly worried
about the PeopleSoft aquisition. He was thinking that Oracle would
incorporate the best PeopleSoft products, replacing the corresponding
Oracle products, which would be bad for those Oracle groups. I have
more faith in upper management that they'll make good decisions. Some
Oracle people may be laid off but I don't think it'llbe too bad.
I played Elite Force 2 for a couple of hours. In other words, way too
long because by the end I was quite naseous. So I've finally arrived to
the secret Romulan camp and I'm trying to create a diversion but I
think I did what I was supposed to do and nothing happened. I'm
probably just doing it wrong. Hopefully it wasn't something I forgot to
do in a previous section -- I don't think the game is that badly
scripted such that you get in a situation where you're stuck.
So Mozilla 1.7.5 is released. Apparently Firefox has the latest code
and Mozilla is now lagging a bit. It doesn't make sense to me since I
think Mozilla should be the reference implementation. I guess it's
because it's Open Source and decentralized and if more people want to
work on Firefox then that moves ahead. To me that's a drawback.
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And it seems like Mozilla
gets a little worse each time. Now when you have an attached dialog box
(one attached to a window) you can't move the window. It makes
inconvenient if I want to look at what's behind the window so I can
copy some text to the dialog box. I'd probably switch to Firefox if it
had any sort of HTML editing functionality.
I just finished recataloging my Car Wars stuff. You know, 5th edition
was not bad. Small glossy rulebooks with everything you need to play a
duel scenario. People didn't like it because the rules were repeated in
each of the 9 duel products and there were no vehicle design rules. I
don't know. I tend to think it wasn't marketed to the old Car Wars
gamer crowd.
SJG wanted to bring in a new generation of young people. It didn't
work. But I don't think it was because of the lack of vehicle creation
rules or the bright graphics and simplified mechanics. Look at WizKids
which found a market for simple miniature war games. Car Wars could
have been the same with a good miniatures line -- more like little toys
actually. Not necessarily the click-dial thing. I think glossy
cardboard cards that come with the miniature would have sufficed.
Oh well, it's all second-guessing. You launch a product, sometimes it
sells and sometimes it doesn't. You have to be willing to stop selling
the stuff that is not profitable. Maybe some day we'll get a new
edition of Car Wars. If not I have plenty of Car Wars stuff to keep me
happy should I ever run a campaign.
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