40...
I've now lost 40 pounds, which was my official "first goal". Doing pretty good on everything, I've gotten up to a half hour on the treadmill each night at a 3% incline and have decided to increase the incline a bit to try to up the intensity. Now that I've gotten into the habit of using the treadmill each night it's a lot easier, and I've been using it at least 6 days a week for the past month.
I'd like to continue losing at least 20 pounds a month and do what I need to do to continue that rate of weight loss until I've reached my target weight. 40 pounds may sound like a lot, but I still need to lose significantly more to be back to my college weight. On one hand, I'm enthusiastic that I've made good progress so far, but I don't think I have to worry about losing my perspective at all, the amount of weight I need to lose is sort of hovering around there in the background like an ominous cloud of poison green gas.
Game News: With Brett's help I switched the game to the new Dell server last Wednesday, and it seems to be doing well. I decided to move the game over to the new server first, and then make the major code upgrade because I figured it was the wiser course of action in that it would overwhelm me with fixes and things all at once.
The upgrade went pretty well until for some strange reason the DLINK switch chose that exact moment to stop working, which sucked because I was handling the upgrade remotely from an undisclosed location. Luckily the tech guy at the ISP colo facility borrowed a switch from their customer service room and put it in my rack for me to use until I got there the next day with the new switches.
I ended up replacing the $1100 DLINK switch (well, it was about 5 years ago, anyway) with a $50 unmanaged Netgear Gigabit switch. I also hooked up the secondary ethernet connections on all the machines to a second Netgear Gigabit switch, so I can have much faster database access/etc. at gigabit connection speeds.
We're pretty close to finishing the work on Pirate ships, as well as a shitload of other updates to the game that I've been slowly adding over the past two months. I haven't done much lately besides come home from work and work on the game engine the past three months, as well as spending half my weekends working on it as well. I'd like to release the new code, make whatever fixes/tweak I need to make (there's always some), and then relax a bit, maybe go out and see a movie or something.
I am also planning on designing a pirate ship t-shirt/hoodie and giving away a bunch of them to the players as a promotional marketing item. I'll paste the design here once I've finished it.
Incidentally, I recently had a chance to snap up some advertising space on topwebgames.com at a reduced rate for three months, and ended up creating the ad shown here for it.
It's a combination of three pictures I bought from iStockPhoto, plus some rather significant editing in Photoshop and Fireworks. I think it turned out really well.