The Chris Casey Experience

I’ve just arbitrarily decided that the success of a video game console depends on how quickly it sells 8 million units worldwide. Because I’m wacky that way.

So who wins on that entirely made-up statistic? Why, the Wii of course! Yes, the Wii has passed 8 million units sold in just 30 weeks, according to vgchartz.com. The second best seller is the Game Boy Advance, also by Nintendo, which passed 8 million units sold after 40 weeks. Tied at third, the DS and the PSP both passed 8 million within 50 weeks, although the PSP’s sales kind of level off after that while the DS suddenly shoots off into the stratosphere right around when Nintendogs came out. Right now the DS is outselling the PSP by more than two-to-one. Nothing to be ashamed of for either of them, of course.

After that it gets murkier. The Xbox 360 hit 8 million after 59 weeks, the Playstation 2 passed the post at 70 weeks, and the remaining consoles are relative slowbies: Xbox 1, 105 weeks; Gamecube and SNES, 107 weeks; Playstation 1, 140 weeks; and the original Game Boy brings up the rear, hitting 8 million at 190 weeks.

Why do I care? I dunno. I like statistics, I guess. I’m also a huge Wii supporter (LOL huge Wii) and I like anything that makes it look like a clear winner. Because it really is. :colbert:

Well, this is interesting. I just picked up a copy of the new Adobe CS3 Web Edition, and it comes with Contribute CS3. What’s wacky is, I can actually post to this blog from inside Contribute! What a country!

Even better, check as I post a random video that I had hanging about on my hard drive: (EDIT: Okay that didn’t work so well. One step at a time.)

I am the lizard king, baby.

I’m angry again, so I feel compelled to post. This is NOT A GOOD IDEA. So instead of talking about the latest indignity(ies) at work, I’ll spend some time thinking about things that are going well in my life.

• My wife loves me and I love her. (Awwww.)
• I love my dog and she loves that I bring her food. She also ADORES my wife, so the two of them together in the yard is Hallmark-card stuff right there.
• My family is very close. You wouldn’t know it just to look at us, but we’re all right together in everything.
• My house doesn’t fall over in a stiff breeze, and the pops and creaks are comforting.
• Some of my coworkers are getting angry about what’s making me angry, which is a refreshing change.

Aah. That’s actually much better. I probably won’t be able to work for a while, because the very act of working reminds me of what’s going on, but while I’m off in my internal landscape I’m inviolate. Be nice if I could just go live there, but then who would feed the dog?

I just get angry when I think about work anymore. And not just your garden-variety sort of angry either. This is “veins sticking out of forehead, face all splotchy, want to either scream or throw up” type of angry. Clog-popping anger. Blood-pressure-warning anger. Incoherent streams of curse words like when Ralphie beats up the yellow-eyed kid in A Christmas Story but not nearly as cute anger.

What’s terrible is, if I didn’t actually care about work, I’d be fine. Everyone seems to think I’m pretty good at what I do, so I don’t think I’m rampantly incompetent. I honestly want to make things better, not for myself (which nobody in management seems to believe, since apparently employees are sniveling ratfaces as a rule) but for the customers. I was under the impression that was the sort of thing companies look for in an employee. It’s all about the customers, right? Isn’t that what they keep trying to drill into our heads from the very beginning? Service with a smile!

Today I flew into Houston, preparing for a full week of training in Documentum. “But Chris,” you may say, “why are you learning about a huge complex document management system when you are but a humble Web designer?” Well, the simple answer is I’m not a professional Web designer anymore. It has been unilaterally decided that my 13 years of Web design and editing experience is trumped by someone else’s five years, so the part of my job that I enjoyed the most has passed to another employee in another department at our company. But it’s not all bad, at least I get to keep my job! It’s the part of my job that drives me insane and will leave me a burned-out Luddite, but what the hell, it’s a paycheck, right?

I found this out on Friday. I’ve been Little Mr. Sunshine all weekend, let me tell you. My shoulders won’t unknot. My stomach is a seething mass of acid. I want to sleep all the time, but I can’t stay asleep more than a couple of hours at a time.

My wife is worried about me. So am I.

What I’m trying to say is: Greetings from beautiful downtown Houston!

I had a dream last night that I’d posted a blog entry. Well, far be it from me to go against my dreams, so here we go.

Sony is in big trouble with the PS3.

Even with a $500/$600 price tag, Sony’s selling their console at around a $300 loss. Great for gamers, right? I mean, cool, you get a whole $900 console for $600. It even surfs the Internet and you can install Linux on it and play Blu-Ray HD movies and use it to stream pirated movies straight off your PC.

Yes, but: Sony, with a loss leader, is now expecting the purchaser to make them enough of a profit on other products to make up for the difference. So once you’ve loosed $500 from your wallet for a big shiny piece of plastic, you’re expected to buy thousands of dollars worth of other Sony stuff which make an actual profit. (Not just $300 worth, mind you, since Sony has to pay for manufacturing and advertising and shipping, which cuts into the profits.) This is why Sony is marketing Blu-Ray out the wazoo, since DVD discs have a very low overhead. Note that Blu-Ray hasn’t “won” the HD market by a long shot, any more than PSP-UMD discs have dominated handheld movie watching. If HD-DVD takes off instead, then Sony is absolutely 100% screwed.

Meanwhile, game developers are running around talking about how they need to sell buttloads of games to cover the development costs of their AAA titles. Sony, in their wisdom, has set the cost of entry really high. They’ve shut out the casual 2-hours-a-week sort of gamer by demanding lots of money and topping it off with the overt expectation that the consumer cough up lots more money for Sony HDTVs and Sony Blu-Ray discs and generally give all their disposable income to Sony right now. And the consumer pretty much has to capitulate, because honestly, who buys a $600 game system and then sits around playing one or two games?

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE CORNER … My former girlfriend, now my wife, owned a Nintendo Entertainment System when we started dating. She owned four games (admittedly pretty good games, but still) and that was plenty for her. I wouldn’t be surprised if the peripheral game market was similar.

So here’s Sony’s dilemma. They have to sell a bunch of PS3s, and then sell mountains of other Sony products to make up for the loss they’re taking. Even then, Sony has set the price point to where only hardkore gamerz, indulgent parents, or trendwhores care enough to pony up the dough. Developers want to know they’re not going to get screwed by low sales before they decide to develop games for a system. Sales are already beginning to soften. Blu-Ray may end up the BetaMax of the HD video format.

My prediction: Sony, arrogantly convinced they’re still the best and their marketing plan is flawless, continues stumbling long enough for other companies to consume their entire audience. As the writing appears on the wall, Sony decides to cut the price on the PS3 and take even MORE of a loss, but by this time Microsoft is gearing up for a new console release and Sony is the old also-ran. They remain in the console market for another generation at most, attempting to Borgify all the good things of the other consoles, but their market will have evaporated. In the end, Sony releases a bunch of Greatest Hits collections for Nintendo and goes back to making TVs.

Since I’m not in enough trouble at work, I shall continue to blog about it.

There’s nothing quite so amazing as somebody who looks at a program which took months to write, somebody who was intimately involved in its creation and knows how hard you worked on it, and says, “We need you to make an enormous change, and we need it in three days.” There’s a certain beauty in that, like zooming endlessly into a fractal, layers upon layers of crystalized stupidity. Think about the opening scene of the movie “Innerspace.” Remember that? How we start out looking at a weird warped smear of colors, and we start to pull back, and back, and back, while the credits roll, until you realize we’re looking at an extreme close-up of an ice cube in a shot glass? Well, as far as this project goes, we’re still in the ice-cavern stage. The blunt totality of the dumbness won’t hit us for a few days yet.

This has happened a lot lately. Apparently we have a reputation as miracle workers, which I suppose isn’t such a bad thing because it keeps the non-techies in line. And most of the time we DO toss out solutions when people come to us with semi-trivial problems which don’t take any time to fix when you know what you’re doing. But then a project comes along which can be described in one sentence, like “Give everyone on this list a free widget.” Say, that’s a simple concept that even we non-techies can grasp. Surely it will take no time at all to implement! I’ll just whack a short deadline on that and toss it over to the IT department and WHOA WHY DID THEY START FROTHING AT THE MOUTH

Ah well. Nine times out of ten it’s a good gig. But that tenth time … that damn tenth time … :argh:

Three years ago, I was called upon to redesign the Web site of our company. We had a site made entirely in frames with sub-frames and weird naming conventions (urgh). I went in and stripped all that crap out, put a template-driven system into place, and wrote programs to convert the entire Web site wholesale. And I did it all by myself. (signed: Chris, age 4) In the end, we had a system which could be changed globally at a moment’s notice to keep up with trends. Lots of CSS and stuff, as I’m sure you’re gathering. Go ahead, gather.

After that, I started in on the design. My original idea was something bold and classic, tied together with a “stone and layers” theme (I work for a geophysical society) and a rather unique right-hand navigation scheme.

Then … it started going pear-shaped. First I made a mistake in trying to “shallow out” the site. Bear in mind the site is 7,800 static pages, divided in eight categories which I was told I could NEVER EVER CHANGE. One of these categories had a grand total of two pages in it. Another had over 3,000. Yyyyyyeah. So, clever idiot that I am, I found a flyout menu Javascript which would pop up the main categories for the bigger sections. This was great … until I realized that two of the sections had so many sub-sections that the flyout menu was longer than the screen. But, hey, the site could be changed with a touch, and this worked as an interim solution. Maybe someday I could convince them to make some major structural changes.

I am so damn stupid I’m surprised I haven’t drowned to death staring up at a thunderstorm.

Anyway, I did what I could, then put the design out there for all the authorities to see. This was … eye-opening. Y’see, I work for an association that’s run by committees. Lots of committees. Tons of them. And apparently, everyone on every one of those committees wants to be a Web developer.

So the design went this way and that way and suddenly all the managers got involved too and they all wanted their own departments to be extra special and AAARGH. It’s great when not even your own immediate supervisor will go to bat for you, even when they claim to empathize, because they have as big an agenda as any of the rest of ’em.

In the end, the site design became a twisted mockery. You’ve heard the old saw that a camel is a horse as designed by a committee? What we ended up with is a steam-driven zombified yak that requires a team of puppeteers to fart. Everyone hated it. Everyone STILL hates it. Hell, *I* hate it, and I designed the damn thing. So hey maybe if they see how awful it is they’ll finally decide to change the underlying problems so I can finally make it useful.

MY EYES ARE DRY OH I FORGOT TO BLINK THEM AGAIN HURR I HATE WHEN THAT HAPPENS

It’s now three years past. Somehow the company has lumbered along with this travesty of Web design. I’ve done what I can, here and there, trying to stay under the radar. I’ve written report after report as to how we can best improve the site. Management doesn’t want to admit they’ve whined themselves into a corner, so those reports and presentations have gone nowhere. I’m frankly embarassed by what we have, and given half an ounce of leeway I’d happily redesign the site and make it world-class. Alas, corporate inertia.

Today an internal committee, of which I am not a part, met with a prospective vendor for a new Web site backend in an initiative which they expect will take years and lots of money. I have no problem with this, because at last it indicates a willingness to finally come around. (I don’t think it requires a million-dollar initiative, but at this point I’m completely used to saving my breath.) They’ve been listening to vendors for the past two days. Big yawn. But today’s group included some Web designers who demonstrated some basic principles of design. Principles of design I was specifically told not to follow by a dozen committees and my own boss(es) three years ago. And apparently they ate it up, it’s a whole new paradigm, it’ll turn our company around, our current designer is a wart on the ass of any of these fine gentlemen. Excuse me while I go spit on the lump of flesh who made our Web site. What a talentless waste of perfectly good carbon.

So how was your day?

There’s a mini-controversy going on at my work about people reading each others’ blogs and using personal information for leverage in the complex and subtle intrigue of office politics, or else just being creepy stalkers. I started looking over my previous entries and realized that, hey, I don’t have any juicy information here that anyone could use to blackmail me or others at my workplace. This post is an attempt to rectify that. My blog is for everyone. Don’t want to disappoint the creeps!

• Man, there’s this one guy at work. You know the sort of guy I’m talking about. Yeah. Man.
   
• My best friend at work is a woman. And we’re both married! For that matter, one of my best friends in college was a married woman too, only back then, I was single!
   
• At a previous employer, I knew a person who was a complete jerk. He’d just walk by me, and I’d think, “What a jerk!” I didn’t say it out loud, though, because that’s rude and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But I was sure thinking it. LOUDLY.
   
• There are a lot of attractive women at my work. No joke there. Just bragging.
   
• You know that one person? Totally sleeping with someone. Probably their spouse, but you can never be sure.
   
• People who read other people’s emails without their permission should be killed with a pitchfork.
   
• I went over to my recently departed coworker’s desk and took her ergonomic mouse pad. Up tha powah!
   
• Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve recently come to believe that some of the people I work with may actually have genitals. I try not to think about that one too much.
   
• I once ate an entire slim young gay Thai hooker. No, wait, what was it again? Oh yeah, an entire pie.

A friend of mine is leaving (fleeing?) the company, which is sad mostly because I wouldn’t have categorized her as a “friend” until six months ago even though we’ve been working in the same department for two years. Oh, she’s perfectly nice and all, but it takes a while to crack that work-acquaintance shell. Maybe it’s the litigious nature of society. It’s hard to josh around with someone if you’re afraid they’ll take something you say and twist it into you giving them your house as part of a settlement.

“Nice day, isn’t it?”

“You’re just saying that because I’m BLACK!”

“… you’re not black.”

“You’d notice, wouldn’t you? RACIST!”

And next thing you know you’re having to stay one step ahead of Tommy Lee Jones. Yeah, screw that. Easier just to smile and nod and be absolutely non-committal until you can pick up subtle clues that another person doesn’t want to drive a pair of scissors into your eye. For a normal person, this phase takes a week or two. For me, it averages a year and a half.

Anyway, she says she’s off to “Dallas,” which I think was a TV series once. I wonder whether it’s closer to Hooterville or to Petticoat Junction.