A major computer retailer ceases operations.

Last Friday, it was announced that computer retailer CompUSA will close all of its 103 stores, which includes a store just down the road (about a mile) from here. This decision comes on the heels of our Director of Operations declaring that she will no longer purchase anything for our company from there due to systematic failure of customer service at these stores.

In analyzing the situation, I think that the only surprise in this announcement is that CompUSA managed to stay in business (here, anyway) as long as they did. There are three fundamental errors that this business made to lose our business:

1. First, the service to customers in the retail stores was reliably “last rate”. On our final visit there, we had four red shirts standing around debating nothing of substance, and not dealing with customers, while the one cashier on a lane went to the back of the store to find something, leaving a line of customers, credit cards in hand, waiting indefinitely. This was not merely a regular occurrence, but the usual situation.
2. Second, most of the advertised “deals” involved mail-in rebates, unnecessarily. Frankly, rebates are a scam, especially when instant savings offered elsewhere ostensibly give the same end result. We had a policy in place not to consider rebates when calculating costs, which resulted in far fewer purchases there.
3. Third, CompUSA is a spammer, using (fraudulent) third-party mailing lists. I know this because they regularly mail one of our honeypot email addresses that has never been added to any mailing list (and, in fact, never even existed until spammers started pummeling it with UCE). It was certainly not double opt-in.

After doing my basic analysis, the first web news article I found about this, CompUSA To Close Up Shop, has comments which show that others had similar experiences, tending to indicate that the failures were truly corporate, not merely bad management at our local store. Although it is generally better to have more choice, I say “Good riddance to CompUSA!“

For local purchase of hardware, we strongly recommend Digilink Computers. They are always helpful when we have to buy computer components, usually in an emergency situation. (Yes, this includes the new server on which this blog is hosted.) My only complaint is that they are no longer open on Sundays, which sometimes requires us to go elsewhere.

The second choice in this area is Best Buy, which is much larger, but is oriented toward general consumers, so individual components (e.g., processors, fans, or empty cases) are either not available at all or only in severely limited selection. (Digilink has a sales case with various motherboards on display; do not look for that at Best Buy.)

Let me end this post with an open invitation to Fry’s Electronics to open a store in this area. The closest Fry’s to our location is almost 250 miles down I-69 to Indianapolis, not exactly convenient. However, I know of a perfect computer retail location nearby that will be available and vacant within a month or so…

Our web server crashed… HARD.

Perhaps you have noticed that this blog, along with my main web site, SophSoft.com, has been down and non-functional for a couple of days. The web server hardware that was running these sites (and several others) got completely fried on Sunday.

When I say “fried”, I mean truly fried. The AMD processor in the box overheated and filled the area with a nauseating burning electronics smell. If anybody asks, the amount of time it takes for an improperly cooled CPU to self-destruct is about 5 seconds, and when that happens, it stinks (in more ways than one).

We were already contemplating a system upgrade anyway, and since finding a replacement for this aged processor would be considerably more hassle and cost than replacing the entire box (with one three times the speed), we acted upon the latter option. This also gave us the opportunity to dump Windows 2000 Server in favor of Ubuntu Server (Linux).

So, after building a new server box and installing a new (to me) operating system, the hardware and software now seem to be working properly. Note that “properly” is not quite “as desired“, and there is still much configuration to do in the coming days (including recovery of our secondary sites), but at least our two main sites are back together.

[Insert image of Phoenix rising from the ashes.]

I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving day (even outside the US).

Following tradition, here are the things for which I am thankful this year:

On the business side, I am thankful that we have been productive and successful this year, that business is definitely on an upward trend, and that we have a clear roadmap for the next several projects and updates. We managed to finish Vista-friendly versions of all of our products, including Pretty Good MahJongg, Action Solitaire, and Most Popular Solitaire, before the consumer release date, Pretty Good MahJongg won a Shareware Industry Award, and we released Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, expanding onto a new platform.

On the personal side, I am very thankful that my immediate family is happy and healthy. My wife is actively volunteering in our community, my older son is enjoying his first year at Michigan State University, and my younger son started his high school career by being cast in their production(s) of Working that will travel to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Thanksgiving 2005
Thanksgiving 2006

An update to our Mac solitaire game is now available.

Goodsol Development has released a product update, Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 1.01. One can download or purchase the update, or find out more about the game, at the Pretty Goodsol Solitare Mac Edition web page.

Due to customer requests, this update adds two new variants to the solitaire game, Gaps, which can be found on the ‘Preferences->Rules’ menu. Some people really wanted the option of unlimited redeals, so that is now available. Since this makes the game impossible to lose (without quitting, that is), and hence no real challenge, we also added an option of only four (4) redeals, which is easier than the default two (2) redeals. This easier (but not unlosable) option provides some challenge but makes most (if not all) deals of Gaps winnable, with some effort.

Fortunately, the release version of the title contained no showstopper bugs, but we did fix a couple of aesthetic issues, along with one annoying problem that made the random deal selection when starting a ‘New’ game considerably less than random. Ironically, it had similar symptoms to a bug reported and fixed during beta testing, but the cause was completely unrelated. More on that in the future…

Start playing games as a family tradition this week.

The week of Thanksgiving, in the United States, has been declared National Games Week. This year, that means November 18-24, 2007. Although the original promoter, Games Quarterly magazine, has ceased publication, there is a MySpace page for National Games Week dedicated to its continuance.

Here, it is a short work week, leading up to our biggest holiday for traditional family gatherings, followed immediately by a day dedicated to just staying home. What better time could there be to enjoy the simple pleasures of playing games with friends and family. I encourage you to break out the board games, or maybe a deck of cards, and enjoy a timeless activity experienced around the world for centuries. Better still, use this opportunity to start a game night tradition in your household or neighborhood.

By the way, the crocodile at my door tells me that Nashanull Keel-a-Zeeba Day is this week, too.

ELHS Theater is performing Working through November 18.

This weekend, the East Lansing High School Theater program began a two-week run of the musical, Working, based on the book of the same name by Studs Terkel. The play opened last Friday and runs through next Sunday [November 18] afternoon. The next performance will be Wednesday at 7:00pm, with Friday and Saturday shows at 7:30pm, and then “closing night” (for this incarnation) at 2:00pm, all at the East Lansing High School Center for Performing Arts.

I attended the show last night, primarily to see my son, William, who was cast in the named role of Anthony Coelho, a stone mason. Although I had not heard about this musical previously, I certainly enjoyed myself. It is unusual in the fact that there is not a plot, per se, but rather individual vignettes examining different personal working situations, taken from interviews. There were some portions that were surprisingly moving, especially considering that the whole cast are teenagers. “Fathers and Sons” was particularly emotional.

What makes the ELHS version of Working special is that the cast has been invited to perform the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland next August. This is reputed to be the largest art festival in the world, and only about 60 schools from the US are invited each year; East Lansing has the only program in the State of Michigan that was invited for 2008. It is a Big Deal (and I am proud that my son gets to participate).

The trick, of course, is fund raising in order to allow the (slightly different) Scotland cast to make the overseas journey for a week or so. We are looking for sponsors and/or a major benefactor to help provide the approximately $150K it will take to get the cast and crew to Edinburgh. The theme of the show is such that character/job sponsorships and product placement are possible. (We have already “donated” $750 ourselves.)

Anybody interested in helping out can view the promotional video (on YouTube) entitled, Working Our Way to Scotland. (For fun, see if you can spot William rehearsing in his Pretty Good Solitaire t-shirt in the video.)

Tickets are still available for the remaining (Fall) performances for $10, of which $2 is a contribution toward the Edinburgh trip. I already have my ticket for next Sunday, so maybe I will see you there.

Our first ever product for Apple Macintosh was released today.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is now available from Goodsol Development.

After many months of development, the first product we have developed for Mac OS X has been shipped, and I must say that I am quite happy with the end result. The title received a significant amount of polish even since my New platform: Max OS X post a couple of weeks ago, so I think that the slight release delay was beneficial. You can also read what Thomas Warfield wrote about Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition in his blog.

The title itself is a game containing 30 different types of solitaire (as a start), which is a universal binary for both Intel and PowerPC Macs, and it runs on Panther (OS X 10.3), Tiger (10.4), and Leopard (10.5), the latest “big cat” that was released a little more than a week ago and reportedly sold 2 million copies in its first weekend.

To try our new game, download a 30-day evaluation version, or just buy a copy here.

Now that the program is finished (the initial version, anyway), the project source code is properly archived, and the wishlist for version 1.1 is filed, my hard work is over and I get a chance to catch up on a serious backlog of non-programming work. At the same time, the marketing work is really just getting started, and then we will have a decent idea of how the Macintosh game market stacks up to that on Windows.

Stay tuned…

There are a couple of important happenings in the next few days.

This evening will be the monthly chapter meeting of the Southern Michigan IGDA (International Game Developers Association). This October meeting is an Education Roundtable which will feature several area game/multimedia professors, including Dr. Bruce Maxim of UofM – Dearborn, Brian Winn of Michigan State University, Kim Callery of IADT Detroit, and Jacob Pollak of Schoolcraft College.

For those who are close enough to attend, the meeting will take place on the University of Michigan – Dearborn campus (4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI). It will start at 6:00pm, running until perhaps 9:00pm, in auditorium room 1011 of the IAVS (Borg Warner) building. (No, I am not exactly sure where that is, either, but here is a campus map.)

Starting tomorrow will be the Bloomington Schmooze 2007, the latest installment of the Fall Shareware Schmooze, this time hosted by Eric Isaacson of Eric Isaacson Software, makers of ZIPKEY. This schmooze will run Thursday through Sunday, with home base at the Abe Martin Lodge within Indiana’s Brown County State Park, near Nashville (Indiana, not Tennessee).

A shareware schmooze is a unique networking (and socializing) event in which people who, for the most part, work online gather in one location to meet in person. There is no fixed agenda, so the activities can vary from simply sitting in comfortable chairs drinking and snacking all weekend, to opening laptops and working on technical software issues, to visiting local points of interest, to discussing business, politics, sports, the weather, or nothing at all. For more information, visit the official shareware schmooze page.

If you are in the area and have an interest in either building the game industry in Michigan or in the education of our next generation of game developers, stop by the IGDA chapter meeting. If you are involved in development of games and/or independent software of any kind, I urge you to come to the Shareware Schmooze, if even for just part of a day, to meet others who are making a living in the industry.

Sorry for the late notice.

We are getting prepared to release a Macintosh game next week.

As mentioned in several previous posts, including New development platform, most of my recent development has been on “another” platform (read: not Windows), and I can now confirm here that we are almost ready to release a solitaire game for Mac OS X.

The title was developed using Xcode, the development environment that ships (“free“) with every Apple computer, written entirely in C++ (Gnu) and using Carbon. Our decision to use Carbon, as opposed to Cocoa, was made when Apple still openly spoke of both frameworks being “first class citizens” on OS X and even recommended Carbon for cross-platform code. We were almost into beta when Apple revealed, in classic bombshell fashion, that Carbon had been demoted and would not be fully supported in 64-bit versions of the operating system, starting with the next release.

That next release (a.k.a, the next big cat) is Leopard, OS X 10.5, which is going to be released this coming Friday. Ironically, that is just a single day after our originally planned release date, so we will be releasing a little bit later to properly test on this latest Apple operating system. (That is my story and I am sticking to it; the slight schedule slippage on this product was only coincidental.)

Although much of the underlying source code is derived from, or (in some cases) identical to, code used under Windows, the game is not a simple port, as nearly the entire user interface was rewritten to conform with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and to be “Mac native“. Everything we have heard and read suggests that straight ports that do not look like Mac products (especially those which look like Windows applications) are rejected by Apple users. This should definitely not be an issue with our new title.

This long development process has been quite a learning experience, and there are lots of areas in which OS X excels over Windows, and vice versa. I will detail some of these once the game finally goes gold. In the meantime, it should not take too much investigation and deduction for the interested to figure out the name of this latest project.