Napa, Thanksgiving, and a New Theme
Not much activity in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d do a little update post. I made another game. I’d say it’s around 95% done (just need to do a bit of visual polish and grab some sound effects), but I’ll save that one for a post of its own once I get some sponsors ironed out (or publish without). A friend was in town a couple of weekends ago, so my roommate, her, and I all headed up to Napa Valley. Two of my friends had birthdays on Monday, so I thought some decent wine would be a good gift. I ended up joining the Beringer wine club (which, for the $20 tasting fee back and 25% off of a $150 purchase in return for buying another ~$100 of wine, seemed like a pretty good deal).
Rather than return home for Thanksgiving (going Christmas), I decided to do Thanksgiving here. My best friend from high school lives in L.A. now, so I invited him and several other local-family-less friends over for the works–my first turkey (~11.5 pounds), gravy, green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. So what if the gravy was out of a jar, the mashed potatoes were instant, the stuffing was stove-top, and the pie was store-bought. We felt pretty darned authentic.
I got up at 4:45 a.m. on Black Friday to hit Circuit City and Best Buy. After standing in line for about an hour, my friend and I made it into the store. There was a similar wait to check-out (they only had 4 registers open for some reason). I definitely spent more than I should, but I’ll be well-stocked for things to watch for the next 6 months or so. Between the two stores, I got the entire James Bond ultimate edition for ~$20/pop (vs. the $70-$80 list price for each), three seasons of House, two seasons of Rescue Me, and four seasons of Nip/Tuck (all for $15/season instead of $50). I haven’t tallied the total number of hours, but it’s a lot. Just in time, too–the post-football-pre-baseball doldrums are just around the corner.
Other than that, the last week has essentially consisted of a lot of chilling out, playing Asassin’s Creed, watching movies (No Country for Old Men is excellent, Hitman not so much–but entertaining nonetheless), and sleeping in. I haven’t touched my current game for a week or so (waiting to hear from sponsors) and Bike vs Car is stagnating a bit, but I’m starting to feel that tinkering urge again. The first manifestation of that is the new ad-enabled skin. I don’t plan on taking this whole blog thing tooooo seriously, but I figured if I’m sticking MochiAds in my flash games that get < 1000 views, I might as well do the same for the blog.
[…] Then my next issue: management fees. Somewhere in the paperwork I filled out, I remember reading that they charge you $30 a year to manage your retirement account (though, as far as I can tell, it’s still up to me to make all my own trades and pay trading fees of $4.50 until my balance hits $2500). The yearly fee hits in February, and if you fund your account after February they charge you immediately. It’s now December. I called their customer support (and, to their credit, actually got a real person within 5 minutes) and asked if this fee was pro-rated or I was really going to be charged $30 so they could manage the couple of hundred or so dollars I’m likely to put in before February. Their response: full $30. I asked them if it was a specific date in February (I’d hate to put money in Feb 1st only to get charged again Feb 10th) or if I could safely put money into the account any time in the month. He didn’t know. He said it was usually a certain week in February, so if I wanted to be absolutely sure it was best to wait until March 1st. So I’ve got a Roth IRA now. I’m just not going to put any money into it until March. That’s not so bad, I guess. I’ll just have to do a good job of mentally earmarking money in my checking account as “IRA money” and not “shiny new toy” money. The game I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post got a really great sponsorship offer, so once I polish it up to their specs and finalize the deal I should have a pretty nice chunk of change to act as seed money (though I still don’t see myself maxing it out for 2007). […]