Best Customer Experience Ever!

I had a lady today use Easy Shop, the scan-as-you-shop experience our store offers to shoppers. Randomly, we are required to give audits. The attendant's Easy Shop gun will go off when it wants to audit someone.

I went to give this lady an audit, and she seemed fine at first. I found she didn't scan the eggs, and I told her about this politely by suggesting my gun wasn't seeing the eggs on her order. She insisted she scanned them. As I continued, she asked if I was scanning every item. I told her I only had to scan some of the items out of each bag. She thought that was obsurd.

She got more angry as I went on, and at one point she requested a manager. I didn't hear her clearly, so I politely asked her what she said. She replied "I said I want to speak to a MANAGER!", yelling really loud! I called the manager up, and he came on by. She was dumping all the groceries out of her bags by this point as she was yelling at the top of her lungs about how she was never shopping there again and how she's spent thousands of dollars there in the past.

We discovered that she had apparently done something wrong (mistakenly or intentionally, we don't know) at another store because her Easy Shop status was blue, which is one step from red (where the customer is banned from using Easy Shop). It was the very first time she had ever used it at our store. We don't know why it was blue, but the manager is looking into the matter at this time.

Anyway, that was the craziest customer experience I have ever had. I'd say it was pretty epic!

4.5 Years Later: My First Google AdSense Check

Last week, I received my very first check from Google Inc. I've been part of their Google AdSense program since February of 2006, and I finally made enough back in July to get paid. I can't say how much I got paid since that would be a violation of the Google AdSense Terms of Service, but it's not anything to brag about when you take into consideration how long it took to meet the threshold.

The YouTube Partner program has dealt a modest amount of help to the revenue I earn each month, but it's hard to come up with videos that will go viral. I have had plenty of hit-and-miss moments, and the videos that have proven to be revenue generators are of a minority. My latest video for example hasn't done anything, even though I've done most everything I can think of to get it to pop up in the YouTube search results:



The experience I have had with YouTube and the Google AdSense program in general has taught me one thing -- no matter how much you think you know about how to get people's attention, you don't yet know enough. At least, that's true in my case. I would love to sit back and watch the professionals do their stuff and see videos go from nowhere to everywhere like magic. There's a method to it, and I haven't yet mastered it.

So, will I have to wait another 4.5 years to get paid again, or will I get this video thing truly figured out before then? I think my biggest problem is I never know who I want to be or what I want to be about when I do videos, and that isn't helping my efforts any. Maybe someone can help guide me in the right direction.

I Have A Car

After my '99 Ford Contour was sold for scrap, I was officially out of a car. I had to drive my brother's old Chevy for two months, and that thing was ready to die itself.

Last week, I finally got myself another car. For $2500, I was able to get a '97 Ford Escort LX with 88,857 miles on it. For the short distances that I drive, this car should last me a number of years. My dad played a big role in me getting the car since I had not been able to find anything I could afford that was even halfway decent. The loan I had to get to help pay for the car should help my credit so I can borrow more and get a nicer vehicle down the road.

Needless to say, I'm a pretty happy person right now.

ProSonic Public Source Code Release

Here's what I wrote on some forums:

PROSONIC PUBLIC SOURCE CODE RELEASE
AUGUST 17, 2010


Here it is, the entire source code to the ProSonic engine. This by no means is an indication that I have stopped work on this engine forever. However, I also have other interests that need my attention, so I decided to go public with my source code to this project.

You will need the Allegro, Zlib, and HawkNL libraries to compile this code. The DOS version is the exception, where all HawkNL references are ignored.

My goal with this project was always to make the perfect game engine for Sonic games that everyone would want to use to make their very own Sonic game. I am hoping with the release of this code, someone will come along and make this the engine I always envisioned it becoming. I have laid what I feel is a good foundation for beginning something big in terms of a quality Sonic fan game.

There are things that could be improved. The object manager could be tweaked to be more flexible with moving objects. The PROCODE scripting support could be improved to allow more complex routines and arithmetic. The 68000 code support is only good enough to allow a certain number of objects to run in ProSonic, and no VRAM emulation is implemented.

I am granting permission to everyone to use this code in any way they see fit. It would be great to get credit for anything that is used, but I won't try to sue you if you don't, because at the end of the day it's only a video game!

If you plan to use my source code for anything at all, even if it's just a portion of it, I'd love to hear about it. Send me an e-mail about it. My address is ymtx81z ata yahoo dotod com.

Enjoy!


—Saxman

You can download the source code here.

Ke$ha's Drug is My Love

I don't even like Ke$ha, but I have to say that I have had "Your Love is my Drug" in my head now for a while. It's a catchy tune with a great hook. It's very reminiscent of the '80s sounds I have loved my whole life. I see this as a possible trend that is slowly happening. Maybe todays music scene is transforming into something more upbeat like this song is. I sure hope so, because this song by Ke$ha is a real winner in my book.