Let me tell you about my day
Steve Cole Reports:
I got to the office at 10:23, having taken a couple of hours this morning for television shows that I slept through last night.
My spam filters had killed 300 messages in 14 hours. The ones on the server had killed over a thousand. The backdoor admin account had collected 120 spams; the primary accounts had collected 37, so the filters are doing pretty good. I have 40 actual valid Emails, an unusually high number, but that includes a bunch of staff reports on the FC MSC which is undergoing another update. Attachment bin has about 100 assorted unsolicited items including porn and virus files.
My day breaks down into a number of steps.
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STEP ONE: Going through Email. Lots of reports to process. More files from the guy who is doing the HERO translation. Wrote a set of notes on running a trade show booth for one of the industry mailing lists. (Lots of companies are posting such notes, but I've seen few ideas I haven't already had or heard.) There was a heated discussion of a particular print on demand printer who did a lousy job and didn't get products to people on time and they were kind of upset. The GPA is again debating whether to allow people to post negative information about printers who screw things up. The GPA board says "no" and the membership says "you're wrong, we want to know if the printer we just hired is going to screw us."
Quick answer to Loren Knight about fiction for PD Tholians.
Some interesting dinosaur stuff I didn't have time to read.
Doing a lot of Jean's FC MSC reports , which are taking a ton of time (over an hour, almost two) but we need that updated MSC.
Got some photos for the minis contest and had to send most of them back to be done over for various reasons. I hated doing that, but either I can stop working on new products to resize photos and adjust contrast on photos, or people who knew how to do it right and just didn't can do it right.
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STEP TWO: Checked the BBS and didn't have to put out any flame wars. (Guys, thanks for giving me an easy day there.) Did provide some better information to one discussion about printing games. And of course I defended Al Gore's good name. He really did contribute to the development of the internet and should not be denied the credit for what he did do while joking about what he didn't do.
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STEP THREE: Web crawl. Astronomy picture of the day. My DVD rental places. The Ebay auctions I am watching. The pirate web sites I check for copyright violations. Checked the server for stuck mail and spam. Assorted boardgame and sci-fi websites I check now and then. The FC Forum.
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STEP FOUR: I should take some time to work on "pending mail". The theory is that every Email has to be handled the day it arrives; otherwise it gets lost. Some complicated ones get put into a "pending" file that in theory I work on every day, but today I spent so much time on the FC MSC that I cannot go work on the pending file.
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STEP FIVE: One hour on the Hydran MSSB. Not happening today because the FC MSC took too much time. Basically, my "one hour of MSSB time" is really my "one hour of necessary things that aren't part of the product schedule" and today that went into the FC MSC. I spent all day Wednesday doing the FC MSC, all day Thursday doing the Greater Games Industry Catalog quarterly update, and all day Friday doing the Fall schedule for new product releases.
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STEP SIX: Read the FYEO file (current, real world, military technology, tactics, and intelligence). I'm five days behind and haven't got time today due to the FC MSC.
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Lunch: I look forward to lunch to add some fun, joy, and flavor to my day. Today, Leanna dragged me to a place that routinely produces awful food and they outdid themselves in making a hamburger into a burned chunk of garbage, putting me in a foul mood until I stopped to get something for desert.
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INTERRUPTION: I love a good crisis. Turns out that Graduation is turning from a "oh by the way" into something that the retailers are clamoring for. Which means Monday will see Matt doing a cover for it, and me sending some stuff to reprint sooner than expected. (We have only about 200 Klingon C7 cards, and they are used in both Klingon Border and Graduation. Any plausible combination of orders for Graduation and restocks of Klingon Border is going to run us out of C7s in a month. Which means reprinting it. Which means that sheet (which was planned for January, a plan that was never going to work anyway) will be going to press by late September and since the Monarch and Cave Lion are on it, FC; Line of Battle will move from a January release to an October release. Everyone around here is scrambling. Mike is checking inventory on everything else that goes into FCKB and FCG to see if some other little surprise is going to bite my backside.
=
PRIMARY WORK; did eight pages of PD FEDERATION. Between Petrick and myself, we have to complete a total of 580 pages by 10 Nov, and that doesn't include Communique, Star Fleet Alert, or Hailing Frequencies.
I got to the office at 10:23, having taken a couple of hours this morning for television shows that I slept through last night.
My spam filters had killed 300 messages in 14 hours. The ones on the server had killed over a thousand. The backdoor admin account had collected 120 spams; the primary accounts had collected 37, so the filters are doing pretty good. I have 40 actual valid Emails, an unusually high number, but that includes a bunch of staff reports on the FC MSC which is undergoing another update. Attachment bin has about 100 assorted unsolicited items including porn and virus files.
My day breaks down into a number of steps.
=
STEP ONE: Going through Email. Lots of reports to process. More files from the guy who is doing the HERO translation. Wrote a set of notes on running a trade show booth for one of the industry mailing lists. (Lots of companies are posting such notes, but I've seen few ideas I haven't already had or heard.) There was a heated discussion of a particular print on demand printer who did a lousy job and didn't get products to people on time and they were kind of upset. The GPA is again debating whether to allow people to post negative information about printers who screw things up. The GPA board says "no" and the membership says "you're wrong, we want to know if the printer we just hired is going to screw us."
Quick answer to Loren Knight about fiction for PD Tholians.
Some interesting dinosaur stuff I didn't have time to read.
Doing a lot of Jean's FC MSC reports , which are taking a ton of time (over an hour, almost two) but we need that updated MSC.
Got some photos for the minis contest and had to send most of them back to be done over for various reasons. I hated doing that, but either I can stop working on new products to resize photos and adjust contrast on photos, or people who knew how to do it right and just didn't can do it right.
=
STEP TWO: Checked the BBS and didn't have to put out any flame wars. (Guys, thanks for giving me an easy day there.) Did provide some better information to one discussion about printing games. And of course I defended Al Gore's good name. He really did contribute to the development of the internet and should not be denied the credit for what he did do while joking about what he didn't do.
=
STEP THREE: Web crawl. Astronomy picture of the day. My DVD rental places. The Ebay auctions I am watching. The pirate web sites I check for copyright violations. Checked the server for stuck mail and spam. Assorted boardgame and sci-fi websites I check now and then. The FC Forum.
=
STEP FOUR: I should take some time to work on "pending mail". The theory is that every Email has to be handled the day it arrives; otherwise it gets lost. Some complicated ones get put into a "pending" file that in theory I work on every day, but today I spent so much time on the FC MSC that I cannot go work on the pending file.
=
STEP FIVE: One hour on the Hydran MSSB. Not happening today because the FC MSC took too much time. Basically, my "one hour of MSSB time" is really my "one hour of necessary things that aren't part of the product schedule" and today that went into the FC MSC. I spent all day Wednesday doing the FC MSC, all day Thursday doing the Greater Games Industry Catalog quarterly update, and all day Friday doing the Fall schedule for new product releases.
=
STEP SIX: Read the FYEO file (current, real world, military technology, tactics, and intelligence). I'm five days behind and haven't got time today due to the FC MSC.
=
Lunch: I look forward to lunch to add some fun, joy, and flavor to my day. Today, Leanna dragged me to a place that routinely produces awful food and they outdid themselves in making a hamburger into a burned chunk of garbage, putting me in a foul mood until I stopped to get something for desert.
=
INTERRUPTION: I love a good crisis. Turns out that Graduation is turning from a "oh by the way" into something that the retailers are clamoring for. Which means Monday will see Matt doing a cover for it, and me sending some stuff to reprint sooner than expected. (We have only about 200 Klingon C7 cards, and they are used in both Klingon Border and Graduation. Any plausible combination of orders for Graduation and restocks of Klingon Border is going to run us out of C7s in a month. Which means reprinting it. Which means that sheet (which was planned for January, a plan that was never going to work anyway) will be going to press by late September and since the Monarch and Cave Lion are on it, FC; Line of Battle will move from a January release to an October release. Everyone around here is scrambling. Mike is checking inventory on everything else that goes into FCKB and FCG to see if some other little surprise is going to bite my backside.
=
PRIMARY WORK; did eight pages of PD FEDERATION. Between Petrick and myself, we have to complete a total of 580 pages by 10 Nov, and that doesn't include Communique, Star Fleet Alert, or Hailing Frequencies.
posted by Federation Commander at 7:40 PM
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