Thursday, December 10, 1998

First, the New Stuff:

• 10 new photos on the Image Wall
• Jake put up my new cube sculpture
• The Wunderland.Com Trophy Case
• As a sort of hint, I've added a catch phrase to the Proton page
• The Looney Labs Mission Statement has evolved again
• Chapter 63 of the Empty City (in which Doug has an idea for something to do with an Atomic Bomb)

The big news around our house is that Kristin has stepped down from her position as the Manager of Information Systems at TSI TelSys, and is moving instead into a part-time role with the company. Kristin helped start the company back in '95, building the Information Systems department from scratch, and now that her founder's stock has fully vested, she is free to begin transitioning into the lifestyle of the free-lance consultant (which I've been enjoying since leaving Magnet back in '96).

In a related story, TSI is finally hiring a new computer support technician. This increase in the IS department staff will allow Kristin to focus more on the long-term intrastructural development work she prefers, but which so frequently gets set aside whenever a user support fire needs putting out. Moreover, switching to part-time at TSI will allow Kristin to devote more time to her other job, here at Looney Labs, and the more time she has to work on running and growing our business, the sooner it will become self-sufficient.

However, with Kristin shortening her paid hours, I'm going to need to find a new job. Of course, I can't really complain.... I've gotten to take a lot of time off this year to do art and design work for our new products, but having completed many of those efforts, our focus now shifts towards marketing and selling those products, and that's Kristin's area, not mine. So, it's time for Andy to go back to work.

Fortunately, I'm not in a big hurry. The holiday surge in gift shop sales is keeping me both busy and adequately funded, for the time being. But come January, I'll need to get serious about finding something new to work on. So, I've updated my online programming resume to reflect my current status, and I'd appreciate any leads that you, my loyal readers, might know about. Thanks!

The other big news is that I presumably have a lot of new readers this week. Last week, Kristin Matherly (a.k.a. the Other Kristin) posted the Day of Ruin joke from the Y2K calendar t-shirt to rec.humor.funny, and we got a ton of new mailing list signups this week as a result. This single posting has generated so much new traffic to our site that we've decided to bestow platinum membership on the other Kristin. Good call, Kristin!

Wow! They're actually building a space station! Of course, President Reagan's "within a decade" deadline came and went ages ago, but hey, better late than never!

Enjoy Life!

Prohibition-oriented advertising routinely ignores two truisms: 1) There's no such thing as bad publicity, and 2) Forbidden fruit is the tastiest. So... if kids don't take the new anti-smoking ads seriously, aren't they really just cigarette ads?

You know they're desperate when our "leaders" attempt to obstruct democracy by suppressing election results. When is the government going to release the vote count on Washington DC's Initiative 59?