Category Archives: ComicBase

Which Phone Should I Get?

Posted on July 1, 2008 | 14 comments

OK, I need some help here:

I’m currently using a Motorola Razr which was razd from the dead by Neil after Carolyn abandoned it as unsalvageable. It replaced my Palm Treo 650, which has been sitting in a drawer ever since it decided that it no longer wanted to transmit sound–a job requirement that, for a phone, is decidedly non-optional. (The Treo 650 I’ve got now is also the 4th of its breed–the previous 3 being warranty-repaired when they all decided to stop working in various ways. Unfortunately, the warranty on Treo 650 Mach IV had expired, and there just seemed to be no sense throwing more money down that particular rathole). Sorry, Palm, but I’m over you. Update: A hat tip to Palm Tech Support.

Anyway, my Razr, despite being a perfectly good phone, is getting decidedly long in the tooth, and a recent crack to the external LED screen (tip: don’t bike to work with your keys and your cellphone in the same pocket) made me decide it’s time to upgrade.

I checked my phone account at AT&T today, and to my astonishment, found out that my contract is up–meaning that I’m absolutely free to either re-up (including a new phone), or move elsewhere. So here’s my question to you: what phone would you suggest for someone who wants:

– Excellent phone performance (reception, call quality)

– Contact transfer from Outlook

– The ability to be used outside of the U.S.

– Light internet usage (I’m amazed by some of the things iPhones can do, but I don’t want to pay big bucks for an internet plan I don’t use often. The absolute max I think I’d ever consider would be $30/mo. for phone internet services).

– Music/GPS are nice, but not essential (I’ve already got a GPS in my car, and an iPod 160 with my whole library loaded up).

(As a bonus, whatever phone I do pick is likely to wind up with ComicBase export support for it (if it doesn’t have it already), because I definitely want to be able to keep my title lists on it!)

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So Obvious It’s Brilliant (Plus the Secret Origin of Atomic Avenue)

Posted on June 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

I love this story–not just because it points toward a possible way of fighting a devastating disease, but because of the sheer simplicity of the approach.

Now, I have no idea whether this sort of approach is the Next Big Thing in oncology, but I’m attracted to the story because it seems to be a great example of someone looking around, seeing how something (in this case, advances in cloning technology) has changed the game, and revisiting an old problem with a fresh set of eyes. Suddenly, an amazing insight like, “Hey, if this guy’s immune defenses are being overwhelmed by cancer cells, why don’t we just send in an army of cloned reinforcements from his own cells?” becomes almost blindingly obvious.

Of course, once the first person thinks of something like this (and it works), everyone in the audience can just sort of shake their head and look sadly at the other researchers who’ve spent decades trying to perfect other approaches and wonder why they were wasting their time on something that now looks like a hopelessly pointless and old-fashioned way to address the problem.

To wit: Obviously the way to stop dealing with scratches and crackles on record albums is to encode and play back record albums digitally! Obviously it makes no sense to haul around a huge, battery-sucking boom box on your shoulder to listen to music when a tiny set of headphones attached to a Walkman (or later CD or MP3 player) lets you listen to your tunes wherever you want without annoying everyone else around you.

Sure, we say “obviously” now, but until someone thought to use the decades-old technology of Analog-Digital converters and lasers to record and play back music digitally, all the “smart” audiophiles were spending countless hours trying to de-static and dust their record albums, and researchers were focused on devising avant-garde tone arms and improved, diamond-tipped record styluses. Similarly, before Sony introduced the Walkman, music lovers were more concerned with how big (and heavy!) the boom box needed to be in order to hear good bass, and whether Duracell or Energizer made the best batteries. Had the Walkman not disrupted everything, the next great area of research would no doubt have concentrated on making and perfecting rechargeable D-cells.

In the crazy world of computer software, the technology shifts come even faster. There are any number of fashions and fad involving feature sets, languages, and technology platforms. Often, the wise path is to hold your fire until the picture clarifies a little, or you really sense that a trend is catching on (otherwise, we’d have likely done a ComicBase for the Apple Newton or Pippin—anyone remember those?). At the same time, ComicBase has been among the first programs anywhere to embrace internet-driven software patches, CD-ROM data distribution, DVD (and dual-layer DVD). ComicBase is even down in tech history as the first software program ever distributed on Blu-ray Disc. Not too shabby for a program whose whole purpose in life is to keep track of comic collections!*

Still, all those technologies were years in development, and the uses were pretty much built into the technology itself. What’s really exciting is when someone takes an older technology (like Analog/Digital converters and lasers) and applies them in a game-changing new way (storing and playing back digitally recorded music on a CD). These are the shifts that take the world by storm and make being in technology so interesting. (Right now, my #1 hope is that there’s something in the works—somewhere—which is going to let me get where I’m going without paying $4.49 or more per gallon.)

One of the big new changes in our life here is the much faster internet pipe that was part of our new office location. Computer folks like ourselves are always after more speed, but what started as an imperative to keep up with the growth of Atomic Avenue has already turned as well into a way for us bring in on-demand cover picture downloading (part of the Archive Edition of Atlas), new online services like renewals and product downloads, and more.

But as cool as all this is, what I really wonder is: What’s the next “blindingly obvious in retrospect” innovation whose components are already here…and we just don’t know it yet?

*Probably the biggest “Blindingly Obvious In Retrospect” moment for us was Atomic Avenue itself. After a decade or so of doing ComicBase, we were bemoaning the largely theoretical nature of guide values for comics, along with the paradox of a comic market that seemed almost entirely dysfunctional in that most store inventory would never actually sell, while comic fans would drive themselves crazy looking for rather ordinary comics they needed but which nobody was bothering to bring to conventions or post at auctions.

Suddenly, we thought to ourselves, “You know, there are tens of millions of comics that have been entered into ComicBase—all with prices. What if we just gave everyone a big button marked “Sell” which would let them post their comics to a central site. Then, anyone looking for a regular comic like Hellblazer #85 could not only find it, but probably find a dozen copies in various conditions. And whoever sells their comics on the system would be able to put their books before the entire world and just wait for orders to roll off their printer!”

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We Love Robots…But Not on Our Forums (Sorry!)

Posted on June 10, 2008 | Leave a comment

Even though I was in the middle of More Important Things (which, by definition is sort of…well, everything), it was that fourth forum spam message in six hours which sent me over the edge. Suddenly, the idea of retro-fitting our third-party (and incredibly hard to decipher) forum software with a CAPTCHA to help deter spam robots went from the “sometime where I get a few hours after Atlas’s release” timeframe to Right Bloody Now.

“CAPTCHA’s (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) are those squiggly, hard-to-read sets of letters which are popping up more and more frequently in order to make it difficult to overwhelm forums and other systems with automated attacks. The theory goes that by requiring a human being to actually pause and decipher such letter codes, the spammers out there will find their productivity cut from being able to attack millions of systems per day to at best hundreds. More commonly, the automated scripts they employ will simply fail in their efforts and move on to the next system on their list.

I’m not in love with filling out CAPTCHAs myself, but I was really getting tired of deleting spam. On the bright side, it seems to have (temporarily) stopped cold the flood of new, patently bogus accounts which we’d see piling up in the forums as “pending approval”. (We’d always required new account owners to activate their accounts by clicking an email link–a simple measure which by itself would stop hundreds of bogus spam accounts per month). Adding a simple CAPTCHA at registration seems to have at least temporarily helped stop even more.

So, although anyone who knows us at all knows that we love robots here at Human Computing and Atomic Avenue, Spambots (and their dirtbag owners) are not at all welcome. There’s no stopping determined spammers who want to spend a lot of time posting messages, but when being a professional spam-creep depends on posting millions of bogus messages per day, it doesn’t make any sense to do it where it’ll take you longer to post the message than it will for the board owners to delete both the spam and your account.

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Holy Cow! Big Updates and Big Praise for the Editors!

Posted on June 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Have you guys been checking out the last couple of updates to ComicBase? Thanks to a trove of comics we brought back from Germany and England (as well as new submissions from customers), we’ve managed to add almost 15,000 comics to ComicBase in the last two weeks alone. To put that in perspective, that’s about 3/4 as many issues as existed in the entire first release of ComicBase some 15 years ago!

I also wanted to give some much-deserved praise to Shiaw-Ling for all her amazing work researching and pricing thousands of comics written largely in German, with publishing histories that would be befuddling to even the most experienced native speakers. It’s difficult, important work, and unfortunately, some of the worst of it (I’m thinking of “Illustrierte Klassiker” — “Classics Illustrated” in German) is yet to come. But it’s been an enormous undertaking, and I, for one, am very impressed by what she’s accomplished in just a few weeks. Well done, Shiaw-Ling! (And not to be outdone, thanks to Mark for handling thousands of additions and corrections to the database this week as well! [and thanks to all of you for sending them in!])

Next week: cracking the 400,000 issue mark?

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The Last to Know: Quebec and Newfoundland

Posted on June 8, 2008 | 1 comment

I obviously need more Canadian friends to give me the 411 on things like this, but in tracing down an ordering problem on the system today, I figured out that PayPal was resenting that “Quebec” had a state code of “PQ” (“Province de Québec”), even though that was exactly what the official database maintained by the International Standards Organization had for it as the abbreviation.

So why was PayPal’s API treating the state as invalid? It seems that sometime around 2000, Canada officially changed the abbreviation for Quebec to “QC”–and for good measure, changed Newfoundland from NF to NL (“Newfoundland and Labrador”) . The ISO database I’d loaded in some years ago was a bit outdated, it seems, and as a resident of “CA” (California) all my life, it never occurred to me that the state/province abbreviations would ever change, barring a war or civil uprising.

Garr… or, rather, C’est la vie…As the French (and French Canadians) would say. Perhaps this little bit of trivia will come in useful for someone else someday…

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Erlangen: The Photos

Posted on May 31, 2008 | Leave a comment

(trying this out as a PDF slide show. You’ll need Adobe Reader (a.k.a. Acrobat) to view it)

erlangen

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Travel

Comic-Salon Sighted. Booth Paid for. Bags Still Lost.

Posted on May 21, 2008 | 2 comments

After an amazing breakfast (German cuisine seems at times to consist primarily of fresh bread, fantastic meats and cheeses, milk, beer, and chocolate–it’s like they invented a whole country just for me!) — I set out to (a) Charge up my “burner” cell phone (“Handy”) so that people could reach me, (b) Find out where the heck the Comic-Salon actually was, (c) Change a couple thousand dollars I was forced to bring with me to pay for our booth, and (d) Find out where my missing trade show display went.

The progress report went something like this:

Quest A: Charge up Phone
———————

Asked hotel clerk if he knew how to accomplish this. He suggested I go downtown (bis Zentrum) to find a place with Vodafone stuff. Walked around Erlangen in strange concentric circles buying first (a) A Cola Light (German for “Diet Coke”), (b) A Skype headset I saw at a computer store I walked into, (c) Another Cola light. and (d) A strange variation on a Kit Kat bar (with peanut butter!) that I was curious about next to the register. Without having said a word to the cashier, I apparently got clocked as an American as he said “THANK YOU!” to me he handed me the change.

Potentially overbroad insight: I’ve noticed that I can struggle my way through long conversations in German with government-types, bankers, and travel agents all day long, and they won’t say a word about it, and seem happy to nod, smile, and apparently never notice that I’m missing every fifth word they’re saying in rapid-fire German. Shopkeepers, on the other hand, are near-psychic when it comes to guessing your nationality (and you know you’ve been “made” when they try switching part of a conversation or greeting to you in English. If I were ever playing the male, German, version Eliza Doolittle, it wouldn’t be the embassy ball where I’d fear not being able to “pass” — it’d be the corner Fleischer (butcher).

Eventually, I stumbled across a huge shopping center, which led me to a Vodafone store, where a stylishly dressed clerk topped up my phone for me. QUEST COMPLETE!

Quest B: Find out where the convention actually is:
—————————————-
Asked stylishly dressed cashier where the Comic-Salon was. Mumbled too much. “Comicland?” he asked out loud. “Nein! Comic-Salon!” corrected a bystander. Bystander pointed me out the door and down a block from where I was standing. There, huge banners, a line of cars carrying comic books, and… Beer trucks(!)… announced that I’d found the right place. QUEST COMPLETE!

Quest C: Change money, pay for show
——————————
(Background: The Erlangen Comic-Salon is put on by, or at least in conjunction with the city of Erlangen. Which means that–unlike any comic show I’ve ever been to–it’s a government thing. And governments don’t believe in Visa. Or PayPal. Or, as it turns out, any form of currency transfer I could use from the States. This left bank wire transfer–or at least it would have, had the Erlangen bank code not been done in such a way that left my bank unable to wire money to it. So I brought cash. Lots of it.)

Double-checked that the show needed Euros, not Dollars, and was pointed to a street with a lot of banks on it. The third of these was able to accommodate the conversion of Dollars, albeit with a 5-Euro fee, and a conversion rate that would make Steve Forbes cry (.62 Euros/Dollar). Still, it was a darn sight better than the .57 Euros/Dollar and 5% fee they wanted at the Airport). Discovered that Germans do not say “Wire transfer” — they say “Bank Transfer”. Wondered why Americans don’t say “Bank Transfer”. Got money. Walked three blocks back to Comic-Salon without being mugged. Paid for show. QUEST COMPLETE!

Quest D: Find Missing Bags
———————-

Here, I discovered that in life, like so many adventure games, it matters which order you do your quests in. For, having promised me that my bags were no doubt delayed only by an hour or so, and would undoubtedly arrive the previous night by courier, I got the following update from the airline: They didn’t really know where the bags were, but they were probably at the airport. In Customs. Or perhaps at lost baggage. But probably in Customs. The British Airways web site was more blunt: “No information available.”

Pressing the matter through repeated phone calls (I got a chance to work out both my cell phone minutes and that new Skype headset!), I learned the terribly interesting cultural fact that Thursday (tomorrow) is not just the start of Comic-Salon, but also a German national holiday: Fronleichnam, or the Feast of Corpus Christi. Unfortunately, according to the grumpy-sounding German lady on the phone at the British Airways lost baggage call center, this also meant that my bags wouldn’t be delivered until Friday morning, “or perhaps evening.” “But the show, which I’ve just paid for, starts tomorrow. I’ll be out thousands of dollars if I don’t get those bags tonight!” I protested. Grumpy German Lady (GGL) suggested that they might have more information in 90 minutes or so, and the call ended on a defeatist note.

After re-checking Google Earth and confirming that yes, Erlangen was halfway across Germany from Frankfurt, I still felt that if my choice was either to spend several hours and $150 or so on trains today in order to get my bags and set up for the show, or miss out on 2 days’ exhibiting time at this increasingly expensive show, that the Smart, Resourceful Guy I hope to be most days would be getting on a train to Frankfurt. (Defeatist Weasel Guy (DWG) appeared briefly and encouraged me to go back to Comic-Salon, beg for my money back, then catch the first plane back home). But SRG decided to call the airline again.

“OK, I understand that the bags are in Frankfurt, in Customs (or maybe Lost Baggage). Can you tell me: If I go halfway across Germany by train to pick them up, are they definitely going to be there? And when does Lost Baggage close up for the day?” Happy Italian Lady (HIL) on the phone was very sad that my bags had been lost, and wasn’t Terminal Five at Heathrow just the worst, and that she would check for me if I would just hold for a while. After which, Happy Italian Lady was less happy. “So very sorry, ” she said, “but I don’t know the hours of the lost baggage…err…and the baggage may not be there right now. But we’ll definitely have it there for you by Friday night.”

Words expressing my great concern and displeasure were said. Promises to call me back were made. But two hours later, my phone had not yet rung.

Finally, I called once more. “Look,” I said, “I’m getting ready to head down to the train station, and I’m going to be super-unhappy if i travel all that way and don’t get my bags. Are they definitely–no fooling around, definitely in Lost Luggage?” “Oh absolutely!” was the reply. Followed by a “Let me check on that” to my question to when Lost Luggage closed. The phone went silent for a very long time. “Oh!” said German Lady to Whom I Could No Longer Ascribe a Particular Temperament (GLTWICNLAPT), “It seems the bags aren’t there anymore. They’re with the courier. But he won’t be delivering them until Friday because tomorrow is a holiday…”

“So I can’t even pick them up myself?” I asked, incredulous.

“That’s right.”

“But the courier won’t deliver them until two days into the trade show?” I asked.

“Yes that’s right.”

“This is a disaster!” I groaned, wondering whether DWG had it right all along.

“If it’s important, perhaps I could arrange to have the courier call you to see if they can be dropped off on an urgent basis?”

“Yes.” I chirped. “That would be really good if you could make that happen…”

To be continued…

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Posted in ComicBase, Travel

Episode 1: Arrival*

Posted on May 20, 2008 | 1 comment

(* Points for the first person to get the reference. Clue: old British TV)

I woke up this morning, blinked several times to clear my vision, and saw that that there were antlers hanging from the chandelier in the middle of my room. “Oh right!” I thought. “I must be in Germany.”

Twenty four hours earlier, I was saying goodbye to my wife and kids at San Francisco International. The following is a count-off my day:

– Number of times spent passing through airport security: 3

– Number of movies watched on plane: 3-1/2 (Sorry… fell asleep halfway through “Dan in real life.”

– Number of times I visibly annoyed my seatmate by laughing loudly at “Enchanted”: 5

– Number of flights: 2

– Train trips afterward: 2

– Meals served on plane: 3

– Edible meals on plane: 2

– Amount of luggage misplaced by airline at Heathrow’s infamous Terminal Five: 2

– Number of free mini-Mars bars eaten from bowl at British Airways lost baggage counter: 4 (see “Edible meals” count, above)

– Number of checked bags, now lost, containing our entire trade show display: 2

That last item threatens to be something of a damper on the whole trade show experience, unless British Airways manages to somehow locate the bags and get them to Erlangen today. If not, our fantastic foray into the world of European comic shows threatens to become somewhat less impressive… perhaps just Joe and me, along with a suitcase of software, standing outside shouting, “Tollisches Comic-Datenbank! Spezial Preis!” Yeah… that would not be good…

Off to scout out the show setup and load up my German cell phone with minute so that the nice folks at BA have a chance of reaching me…

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Interface Band-Aids

Posted on May 12, 2008 | Leave a comment

A good human interface designer can usually work out a workable solution to an interface problem in short order once the problem becomes visible. The problem is usually spotting the problem in the first place.

User testing’s real benefit is spotting problems that the designers overlooked. Another way to get feedback on how well your human interface is working is to be the one who answers the tech support email. In this sort of small-shop scenario, an interface designer who wants to stay sane has a powerful motive to fix badly designed features–fast!

Every once in a while, however, a problem comes along which defies any sort of elegant solution. The underlying cause is usually conflicting design goals, or even a split in the way different groups of users view or use the system. More rarely, there’s a very lovely and elegant solution that’s possible, but for technical reasons, it can’t be implemented. Rare on desktop applications, I’ve come across this latter problem all too often in web design.

Take the following, very simple dialog as an example (and for now, I’ll break the cardinal rule of Interface Guru-dom and actually criticize a real product that I had a hand in designing: in this case, the web-based ComicBase registration screen):

On one hand, I quite like the sheer minimalism here, and if you can momentarily forgive that the “Save” button would be better labelled “Register”, at first it seems like a nice little screen.

The fatal quirk comes as a result the peculiarities of the registration system. ComicBase FREE doesn’t require (or have) a serial number; other versions of ComicBase do. The system figures out which product you’re registering using the serial # you’ve entered. In some cases, the user will have to select between a few related versions of ComicBase using the drop-down, but usually the drop-down’s list can be populated with the one or two choices that apply. As such, the user’s path through this screen is:

1. Enter a serial # (or select ComicBase FREE)

2. If a serial # was entered, click the “Check” button to validate the number (and populate the product drop-down with the list of possible products).

3. Choose which of the possible products you are registering

4. Click Save

It sounds reasonably simple, but you may have noticed that there’s a rather interesting set of dependencies and modalities implicit in all this—none of which are communicated to the user.

If the product being registered is the FREE version, the user is meant to ignore the Serial # field altogether and just click Save. While that’s a bit inelegant, the real problem that users reported on the tech support lines was that, “I can’t register my program, because I have ComicBase <x> and the only option is the FREE version!”

The culprit is the “Check” button (indeed the very need for it). The Check button is there to cut down a very long list of possible products—many of which have very similar-sounding names—to just the list of valid products for that serial number. At the same time, it ensures that the user isn’t entering invalid or garbage data. While it’s performing a very important function, however, many users never think to press it, so the drop-down list is left showing just ComicBase FREE.

And they call tech support (bad) or just give up and don’t register (worse).

What’s the solution? It’s hard to say. There are any number of possible redesigns that solve all the process problems by making the dialog much larger, breaking the process into multiple steps, and so on—all of which can be worse than the original problem.

What breaks my heart as a designer is that there’s a fairly effective and reasonably elegant solution that gets used all the time on the desktop, but which is hard to implement in a multiple browser-supported way on the web: simply get rid of the Check button and do all your checking in real time as the user types (or when they exit the field).

If we could do this, then—like magic—the list would always have valid data in it. If we could further control the Save (err… I mean “Register”) button to be dimmed once the user started typing a serial number, but enabled it again once they finished typing a valid one, we’d have the whole thing worked out. As a bonus, we’d have lost an interface element in the process, adding to the overall flow of the already minimalistic design.

Perhaps at some point, I’ll get clever enough to work out an implementable solution like that. In the meanwhile, however, I’ve been forced to use the Mark of Shame for interface designers: Help Text:

(As a nod to interactivity, the help text disappears when the user enters a valid serial number and clicks Check (an “OK” appears next to the Check button to indicate that the serial # is valid and the product list visibly changes).

The redesign hasn’t been user-tested yet, but I’d be willing to wager that it largely—if inelegantly—solves this particular problem. Even so, this particular interface bug won’t really drop itself from my mental “to do” list. Guideline to all interface designers: whenever you solve an interface problem by adding instructions, you haven’t really solved the problem.

Using help text to paper over an interface problem like this is like the folks who tape red cellophane over their tail lights after a fender bender so that their brake lights once again appear red. Yes, this sort of Band-Aid approach handles the most urgent problem and prevents disaster, but you’re not really fooling anyone. Unless you’re planning on ditching the car (or program) soon, you’re going to have to eventually scrape enough resources together to solve the problem properly.

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Goodbye, Bunker Hill…Hello, Market Street

Posted on April 30, 2008 | 2 comments

It’s official: we’re now moved out of the old offices at Bunker Hill Lane and have now taken up quarters right downtown at 95 S. Market Street #500, San Jose, CA 95113. (Note the way I slipped in the address update: subtle, huh?).

Anyway, the move went as well as can be expected when some two dozen computers, 50,000 comics, and countless boxes containing everything from network switches to voodoo dolls are involved. Big thanks go to everyone who helped out—as well as all our customers for bearing with us through the relocation.

As it stands now, we’re largely operational again, although (as usual) we’re having some drama with the phones. For now, the best way to reach us is by email or, if you have a technical question that isn’t too pressing, post to the forums. It’ll likely be a few days before everyone has their desks unpacked and start getting caught up on everything. That said, we’re still anticipating pushing out an update this week for ComicBase.

Initial impressions on the new place: I like it–a lot! Let me count a few of the ways…

1) Location. It’s about five miles from my house, which means I get an hour of my life back each day just in commuting time. Or, if I want, there’s actually a way to bike back and forth. Doing so involves going through a pretty crazy bike path that runs alongside highway 87, but at least it saves gas and gives me a chance to get some exercise.

2) Location. Downtown San Jose is getting cooler all the time, and we’re right in the heart of it. At our old place (on the outskirts of Santa Clara, in an office park), the best you could do for lunch without driving was a Togos up the road. From where I am now, I’m within walking distance of dozens of great restaurants, hot dog stands, take out places, and a nice park to have lunch in. There’s also a concert series in summertime in the park across the street, as well as the famous Christmas in the Park displays come wintertime. Oh! And we’re two blocks from both The Tech Museum and from Adobe’s headquarters.

3) Private Offices. I made a terrific mistake last time I chose offices when I went for “open plan” and didn’t ask the landlord to build in at least one private office. As programming guru Joel Spolsky warned so long ago: programmers need offices. It’s not for status—it’s simply that when you’re programming, it takes way too much time to mentally “load up” the program and get down to work—and all that can be shattered in an instant by the sort of interruptions that go on constantly in a cubicle environment. I’d actually gotten to the point at the last office that I was intentionally coming in late and saving my important work until everyone had gone home just so I could have uninterrupted time. Now, I have the option of just closing my door. I admit, I’ll probably miss out on a lot of good office banter this way, but I’ll also be a lot less stressed out about getting my work done.

4) Friendly Neighbors. Carolyn has a great blog entry on this one that made me laugh out loud. I’ve also probably had more friendly chats with neighbors in the building in the past four days than I did with all our neighbors in the old building in two years. I still don’t know what two of the companies on my old floor actually did… So far at this location, I’ve discovered a music magazine publisher, a nightlife magazine publisher, an internet firm, and met the folks at the law firm next door who (gasp!) are not only incredibly nice, but actually like comics. (They also were kind enough to receive a couple of our desks for us while we were out schlepping stuff from the old offices. Thanks, guys!).

5) Faster Internet. For years, we’ve been champing at the bit for a faster internet pipe, but there was simply no way to get one at the old location without laying out ruinous amounts of money (and we were being quoted low to mid four-digits per month for colocation as well). Thanks to the better connectivity downtown, we’ve already got more than twice the bandwidth as we used to for just a little more than we’d paid previously, and there’s the possibility to scale it higher as business demands. All this means that not only is our site faster, but we can do more with it as well (as the folks checking out the development builds of Atlas found out in the d3 release last week).

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