spazquest spazblog

Now it can be told.

For the last 5 months I’ve been working with the development team on the new Timex website. We launched on Tuesday afternoon [EDIT: October 24, 2006] at 4:00 pm Pacific time, and it was kind of cool being in the "war room" listening to people report in on the speakerphone as the DNS entries propagated quickly across the net. "It’s picked up on Guardster already." "E.U., I can see the site." "Arizona here, looks good." Kinda like WarGames.[1]

Ironically, amusingly, the only people who had trouble seeing the site initially were Timex back in Middlebury, Connecticut. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out how long it took for the changes to reach their corner of the world. Being a front-end guy, there wasn’t much for me to do after they flipped the switch and went live (it’s not as though their drop-down menus were going to suddenly blow up).

Anyway. I’m relieved, and happy with the end product. Obviously a lot of people deserve credit for the successful launch, but it’s nice to know that I’ve made my mark on the world.[2]

EDIT (20061220): If you don’t believe me, look at my comments in the CSS.

So my dad, he sez, how’s it goin? And I’m like hmmm.
Haven’t updated the weblog in a while. We are launching a merchant site in about 2 weeks, so we’re doing all the typical last-minute bug fixes. Everyone seems to like my work, which is still somewhat of a shock. (Talented programmers seem to think they’re either at the top or bottom of the heap, and I’m not arrogant enough to choose the top ;-)
(Thanks to Dad for the post title.)

So why wasn’t Sinistar [for Atari 400/800] released? Around the time Sinistar was being completed (mid 1984), the video game market was crumbling fast and many games were canceled. Apparently marketing decided that the game wasn’t going to make enough money and canceled the project… without telling the programmers! Jeff and his team continued to work on the project for almost two months after it was canceled, due to lack of communication between marketing and the programming department. Incidents like this were not uncommon, and just goes to show how badly out of touch the managers were at the time of Atari’s collapse. [AtariProtos.com]

“BEWARE! I LIVE.“
(MP3 audio)

That game was hard, too. With the adrenaline flowing through your veins as you scrambled to evade the warrior ships, the voice of Sinistar — preparing his attack — was enough to scare you out of your wits. (I can personally attest to this :) Being overtaken by a taunting, screaming, giant space head is just plain unsettling; when it happens while a random six-year-old is tugging at your pant leg pleading for game tokens, death is swift and certain.

This must be how it feels to be a 70-year-old starting at McDonalds.

I’m the only webdev on a team of engineers. They don’t talk down to me, which is awesome, but they usually don’t have to explain the things I ask about. Maybe it’s okay. I just hate to bother people. Hate. When I have a question, there’s this irrational part of me that wants to stay very quiet and not upset anyone while they’re busy. It can be hazardous to upset people. But sitting on a question is like twiddling my thumbs, except more likely to cause stomach ulcers.

This is a recurring pattern of behavior. When I was at Fenwick & West, there were occasions where I didn’t report a serious problem until it became critical. 100% irrational behavior, and the focus was making sure no one was mad at me. It would be wise to remind myself that only the visceral danger is avoided. People are still angry at the consequences of my inactions.