Thursday, October 7, 1999

by the Wunderland Toast Society

The exciting news this week is that Kory is unveiling the alpha version of Javaquarius! Now you can play Aquarius right here on the web, against 3 computerized entities: Tirade, Daddy-O, and the long haired babe from the Aquarius postcard. Assuming it works for you, that is... keep in mind that this is the initial release and Kory undoubtedly has a few bugs to work out. (In particular, Mac users may have trouble with it.) If you experience technical difficulties, please send Kory email, explaining what happened, so that he has as much debugging feedback as possible. Thanks, and enjoy!

We were really expecting to have samples of the first injection-molded Icehouse pieces in our hands by now, but there has been another delay. Duane says it's so close he can smell it, and he assures us it will only be a few more days. But although the extra time we built into our schedule is rapidly being consumed, we still expect to make our planned Halloween release date.

Meanwhile, production of the books is also behind schedule (not that it matters, since they're not as late as the pieces). Even so, I'm happy to report that the edits have all been incorporated and we'll be taking the final corrected versions to the printers on Friday morning. Thanks to everyone who helped us get them ready! Particular thanks go to the Pittsburgh Office, who went over the beta release editions with a magnifying glass (literally) and produced a huge list of minor corrections that none of our other reviewers even noticed.

On Sunday, we went to the Takoma Part Street Festival (an event that marks the official beginning of Autumn in my mind) and we had a grand time. Great food, great music, and a great crowd. Plus we bumped into an amazing number of our friends there...

At one point we wandered away from the crowd, and found ourselves in an antique store. There I discovered a complete, never-used, still-in-its-original-box electric train set, almost exactly like the one I got for Christmas in 1971, when I was 8 years old. (Mine was exactly like the one depicted on the box; this one has a couple of differently colored cars, but is otherwise identical.) And it was so cheap that I simply had to buy it. But now I'm not sure what to do with it... I'm tempted to put the engine right into service on our Kitchen-Living Room line, but my collector's instinct says I should preserve the set intact, just as I found it. Hmm. I wonder what I could get for it on E-bay...

One final note: are there any website promotion consultants reading this page? That's one area of web development work that we just ain't no good at, and with the all-important holiday season rapidly approaching, it's vital that we do a better job of attracting traffic to our online stores -- and soon. So having failed to muster the time or know-how to do it ourselves, we've decided we need to just find someone we can pay to work on the problem for us. Got a recommendation? Contact us. (Also, as long as I'm asking for things, if anyone out there has an old computer monitor they'd like to get rid of, we're interested. We will be resurrecting the old Mac IIsi that was our very first webserver for Wunderland.Com, to run some backend credit card processing software... but we need a monitor for it. 13" or smaller is great, either Mac or PC should work fine.)