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Monday, December 14, 2009

This week at ADB, Inc., 6-12 December 2009

Steve Cole reports:

It was cold all week, below freezing at night. We finally had an afternoon where you didn't mind walking around outside on Friday, and again on Saturday. Snow flurries on Tuesday melted when they hit. Petrick and I kept up our exercise program, but I'm still not losing weight. Leanna is, and she looks great. Thursday, we found a crime scene literally on our doorstep. Somebody left their car parked here when they took a taxi home from the bar next door. During the wee hours, the car was broken into and stolen. I called the police to make sure they were finished before I had Eric and Mike sweep up the broken glass.

Leanna got my new widescreen monitor working on Sunday. She and I (along with Petrick and Mike) worked the whole day Sunday due to the massive number of mail orders. The massive number of mail orders continued all week.

Eric and I got Hailing Frequencies out on the 1tenth, while Mike West and I got Communique out on the same day. We've got a streak going of several on-time issues in a row.

I finally got started on F&E 2010. The first step is to convert the existing book into Pagemaker, which takes between two and four hours per chapter. I got chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 done by Saturday. Jean set my goal as one chapter per day. Of course, converting the software is just one part of the project, but I have to convert the whole book before doing serious design work as otherwise I'd have nowhere to put the new text.

A ton of work has been done on CL #41, which is over 1/3 finished and it's still five months away. We have two good fiction stories, the snapshots, the developmental history article, Victory and Command at Origins 09, as well as the twelve SSDs done.

I sent the Booster #92 cards to the staff so we can release that in February. I finished the FC Scenario Database and gave it to Eric to upload.

Eric was busy all week messing with the website. He added more ships to the Starmada page, more sublight SSDs, more play aids for PD, better links on a lot of pages, created the video page and artist page.

I sent four ships to FCOL: Old Galaxy Pirate Raider, LDR CWS, Klingon D7A, and Frax DN. I have converted all of the CL #40, Communique #48, and FCHA ships to FCOL and will send four a week to Paul Franz.

I cleaned out over 200 old in-box Emails, answering a bunch of stuff that should not have waited this long.

The whole industry is up in arms about Outlaw Press, which is using a ton of other people's art and games without permission, selling them as PODs and PDFs. There is talk of a class-action lawsuit (which isn't really the way that works, it's more a matter of finding a lawyer who will take the case and collect his fee from the pirate publisher).