wagnerblog.com

Have you ever had a smorgasboard? Probably if you live in parts of the country that were settled by Scandinavian immigrants. Its a lot of fun. In California I have only seen two restaurants in 20 years that offered it and both have long gone out of business.  A smorgasboard in this case simply means I am going to ramble on about some news and developments. A variety of things.

First off - Halo 3. Every other programmer on the planet has probably posted about it now. I like the better rendering of people and some of the new weapons. I don?t like how much it runs on a guided path and the fact that the story line is pretty much the same as always. Including a mad dash run to the finale. It was fun to play in a sort of nostalgic sense but didnt give me the same thrill as Halo 1 did. Bummer.

Playing on the XBox brought a distinct yearning for a higher resolution TV with it. Lately I’ve been waffeling back an forth - plasma or lcd ? …. 720p or 1080p ? …. turns out there is a really nifty chart on this site here that helps to determine what maybe best.

This week marked the 6 months anniversary of becoming an entrepreneur (again). Sequoia Services Group has been doing well. We have had a great variety of interesting projects to work on. From a one of kind “trail-blazing” web services to bread and butter ASP.NET work, its all good. Of course being as busy as all that, our own site has been suffering from neglect. I hope to be able to tweak a bit in the coming days.  In the meantime I want to relay an anecdote that is very telling of the times we live in. 

I needed a logo for a business card. Basically its supposed to be a variation of the header image on our website.  Having had graphics artists working for me at SkillJam during my stint as VP of Server Development, I thought I could cut a deal with one of them. No dice. I must have really mistreated my people (I didn’t) -  because my former team-mate wanted to charge me $500 for a logo. Too rich for my blood. In a moment of inspiration I decided to post the request as a gig on craigslist, and promptly had my very first experience with the craigslist economy. It was pretty amazing. Within 3 minutes I had 7 email replies. After 15 minutes I had selected a good candidate and within 2 hours I had the final product - exactly what I wanted…. for - wait for it…… - for $45.00. Now that’s what I call e-commerce.