Category Archives: News

Life update

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Been a while since my last blog post, hasn’t it? Sorry about that!

This morning, Mrs E and I helped deliver packages of gifts and food to needy people as part of the Operation Blue Santa program. It was nice to see such a huge turnout–so many volunteers showed up at the local police substation to help deliver the goodies that there was a long line of cars spilling out of the substation’s parking lot, and by the time Mrs E’s truck reached the loading zone, we’d already unloaded half of the big truck that came from the warehouse. We delivered to 7 households ourselves in 2 trips (big boxes!), and when we loaded up for the second trip, the warehouse truck was practically emptied and there were several cars behind us. It was very heartening to see so many volunteers. Lots of them even brought the kids and made it a family thing.

We took a break to eat breakfast at home after our second delivery run, and it was at this point that I broke into a little old lady’s house with a screwdriver.

Well, actually, I just wanted an excuse to say “I broke into a little old lady’s house with a screwdriver” with a straight face. The little old lady was our next door neighbor Mrs Grace, and she and her husband Mr John were locked out of her house.

Anyway, we went to the central Operation Blue Santa warehouse after our breakfast. I was expecting to make at least another delivery run, but there were apparently so many volunteers there that it was practically emptied before noon. They were bringing back undeliverable boxes at this point, and they started the volunteers’ barbecue early. The line for that took nearly half an hour to get to the food itself, and they had some entertainment to keep the volunteers amused while in line.

There was a local boy band which I’m told put on a good show, a screen/projector showing video footage from earlier in the operation, Blue Santa and Mrs. Blue Santa (yes, exactly like it sounds), and my favorite part of the entertainment: the spangly blue-suited Elvis Presley impersonator. That was hilarious–the man had the pelvic moves down pat, some seriously impressive sideburns, and he had a bunch of silk-ish scarves that he was handing out to women who caught his eye. Mrs E was one of them, and I nearly died laughing when he danced up to Mrs E and put a pink Elvis scarf around her neck.

The barbecue was good. Nice brisket and awesome sausages that had a nice spicy afterbite to them. We came home, passed out on the sofa from the ensuing meat coma, and came to about an hour ago. It was a pretty good day, and the sheer number of volunteers who showed up really did a lot for my flagging opinion of the human race as a whole.

I mean, there’s so much negativity and sensationalism in the news that you’d think we were a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in dire need of a visit from a bolide of significant size, but that quickly gets put into perspective by something as simple as visiting a local charity or taking part in one of these programs that help other people. You see how many genuinely nice people there are out there, and you get to see the faces of the people who are being helped by these programs. It makes a guy feel pretty good.

What else have I been up to…well, besides our modest little part in Operation Blue Santa today, not much that’s newsworthy. 2 birthdays in November (Mrs E and her dad), Thanksgiving with the stepkids, a wedding reception (My stepdaughter Sara and her husband Alan got married in South America a while ago), I turned 37 earlier this month, I added 6 new items to the Ebbles Labs section of the WWG catalog, and…I think that’s the entire remainder of the list of notable events.

Okay, on the hobby/work front: Mrs E also introduced me to one of her friends back in November, who is a dollhouse miniatures enthusiast. I came away from that conversation rather taken with and fascinated by that hobby. I’m planning to dip my toe in those waters, because I see intriguing modeling possibilities in the much larger size of 1:12 and 1:6 scale items, and I think it’d be a fun thing to do. I mean, can you imagine the amount of detail I could pack into a model that big? It’s a good thing I have a printer that can feed up to 13×19″ paper.

This is also the time of the year where my fascination with whimsical toys resurfaces and I find myself experimenting with one of my longtime projects. I’ve been working on a sort of paper minifig (think of a little block person like Lego people, Kubricks, or Minimates, except made of paper) for a few years now. Normally, I complete the holiday quarter without being fully satisfied with my efforts for any number of reasons, but I’m getting very close to something that I’m happy with this year. In particular:

  • I lucked out with a combination of size and proportion that allowed me to do distinctly recognizable and separate male and female bodies.
  • My experience and comfort level with round wheels and cylinders, over the past year or two, has allowed me to make certain parts of those minifigs pleasingly rounded without being fiendishly difficult to assemble.
  • My experience with the Ares Vulcan, M722, and UD-41 has provided me with the engineering solutions I needed to make the individual parts modular, interchangeable and poseable.
  • The tools I have now made some things possible that weren’t very easy to do before, like being able to “sculpt” hairstyles out of a common master hairpiece without having to model, unfold, and export every unique hairstyle separately.

I’m hoping that I finally nail it this year. I’m planning to start a separate part-time side business selling preprinted paper toys and dollhouse furnishings sometime in the new year. It’s a different market and a new challenge for me, and it lets me scratch a creative itch that I can’t in my current line of work.

Okay, that’s it for now. 🙂

Ouch II: The Brainhurtening

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I’m surfacing for air briefly so you guys know what I’m up to. 2 biggies:

First, the USSC gunboat has actually been more or less finished for the past few days. 15mm and 28mm sizes both. Second, there was a good reason for that post a while back about online shopping being unnecessarily sucky. 🙂

I’ve spent the last several days up to my elbows in some pretty cutting-edge stuff. HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, PayPal’s brain-hurting APIs for Express Checkout and Digital Goods, and more. I wanted to see, as an experiment, what I could do with that kind of power at my fingertips. So, it’s not really a production environment, it’s more of an experimental testbed that pushes the envelope.

I don’t want to bore you people with another textwall of dry technical details, so let’s just go to a couple of screen captures and go over the high points. Below, you can see a snapshot of the partially completed front page, with placeholder graphics. Just to give you a sense of where things will be visually.

Nothing too special there, just some news posts on the left side and what will eventually be a list of the last X new releases ordered from newest to oldest.

Okay, here’s the part that really made me work for it. This is the product page–ignore the placeholder graphics. I basically just grabbed the first promo on my hard drive and used it as a placeholder all over the place. This is where the fun stuff starts.

Below the header, on the right side of the nav strip, is a location widget. Instead of filling in crap at checkout, you just set your location on the nav strip. The first thing you’ll see is a dropdown selector for countries, then if you happen to select a country that has states or provinces associated with it, a second dropdown selector will magically appear next to it. That’s all it needs from you, a country and sometimes a state or province.

Below that, on the right side, you’ll see a price and a PayPal button. This deceptively simple looking arrangement required a staggeringly disproportionate amount of work to set up. Here’s why:

When you click it, the next thing you’ll see is a PayPal dialog right there on the same page.

When you click the Log In button, it pops up a secure mini-browser:

Then once you’ve logged in, it takes you right to the confirmation step:

Clicking on “Pay Now” returns you to the store, immediately displaying a summary dialog with a download link:

Note that I did NOT leave out any intermediate steps. What you just saw is literally what a PayPal account holder will see, step by step. I’m not kidding. That’s all there is to it. No forms to fill, just a simple PayPal login and a couple of simple button clicks. In fact, if you let it remember you, you can collapse the purchasing process into two clicks. Well, three, if you count closing that last confirmation dialog.

Okay, here’s another surprise. There is zero user account management. You don’t register or log in or anything like that. This part makes use of some pretty fun HTML5 functionality. Your download links, when you buy something, are saved to local storage on your own machine. It starts right after you buy something (note how the buy button has been replaced by a direct download link):

It’ll stay exactly like that, and the links don’t disappear unless you happen to delete your cookies and flush your browser cache. You don’t log in at all, you just visit the page and it’s all there for you. Now, if you deleted your cookies and flushed your cache, or you’re just accessing your stuff from a different computer, this is what you would see:

Uh-oh, no downloads found. However, here’s the other fun bit: syncing your downloads. All you have to do in order to sync your downloads is enter your PayPal email address and any invoice ID from any previous order:

Bam, just like that, your download shows up in your collection again:

Anyway, this is all a work in progress, and it’s very much an experiment. I don’t know how much of it is going to be practical in a production environment, and I’m pretty sure it won’t play nice with older browsers and what have you. But if you’re using a current version of a modern browser, it’s a fun peek into the future.

Some of the stuff under the hood, mostly to do with the PayPal API backend, will likely make it into the next version of the WorldWorks storefront, and having a separate experimental storefront lets me play around with some ideas and prototypes that we wouldn’t normally dare implement on a production storefront. 😀

Chez Ebbles has a new home…

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Some of the stuff I wanted to do in the future requires a real webhosting package, and Blogger doesn’t really cut it in that respect. So, I set up a new subdomain on ebblesminiatures.com and pointed a shiny new domain name to it.

I’ve imported all of the old Blogger/Blogspot posts, but the formatting is wonky on several of them, especially the older posts. I cleaned up a lot of the more recent posts, but I still have to work my way through the rest of the old stuff. I’ll be doing that in batches of 10 or so posts at a time, just so you know it’ll all be sorted out eventually.

Don’t forget to update your bookmarks and let me know if you run into any issues. 🙂

September Ebbles Labs releases

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I’ve added 6 items to the Ebbles Labs section of the WorldWorks catalog.

First up, 3 oldies-but-goodies from 2007, all of which have received a bit of a texture refresh and now offer full machine-cutting compatibility:

  

Next, we have 3 new bundles for the Saga of the Uppity Robots models. There’s nothing really new here and half the planet probably owns these models by now, but I’m mentioning them because I thought you guys might like to see the shiny new promos and little backstory nuggets on the product pages.

  

Here’s an example of one of the new promos:

You can visit the Ebbles Labs section here: Ebbles Labs