He Lives!

Wow. Has it really been 2.5 weeks since I last posted here? It seems like even longer than that! Hopefully my readers haven't totally abandoned me. I'm not dead folks. I do live!

So where have I been since March 5 and what's been happening?

Rhino Software

Well, for starters, I have been mega mega busy with work at Rhino Software for the past month. Being that our flagship products involve fantasy baseball software and a weekly baseball stats service, the preseason (especially late February, March, and the 1st half of April) is always totally crazy for me work-wise.

On the plus side, orders for software and stats services have been steadily rolling in these past few weeks. I'm very grateful for the business, but of course, I wish there was even more. The fantasy sports business is extremely competitive nowadays, and it's tough for a tiny company like ours to compete in a world that's dominated by the giant media companies such as CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, and MLB.com. But we offer products a little outside of the mainstream, and our customers are a little more experienced and do-it-yourself than the typical fantasy sports fan. The really great thing is the nice batch of repeat customers who have stuck with Rhino with many long years. I've lost track of how many folks are in our Gold Club; it has become quite sizeable. Serving these people, who have become my friends in many ways, is really what makes all the thankless years of hard-work worthwhile. Thanks for keeping me going guys!

Rhino Baseball

Despite the fact that Rhino Baseball has been around for 10 years, I know that it could still benefit from lots of added exposure. Perhaps I'll eventually force myself to make the time to create some updated video demonstrations of the software via YouTube or another online movie/demo tool. Rhino Baseball takes some time to learn because it's a pretty deep program, but man, it is a very cool program once you learn what it can do. I wish more people could really see that by having an expert user like me show them all the neat stuff it can do.

I obviously love fantasy baseball, having played in and run a league for 22 years now. But I can honestly say that I probably would have given up on fantasy baseball many years ago without Rhino Baseball. It just really adds so damn much to my enjoyment of projecting player stats, doing draft prep in the preseason and tinkering with plans/strategies, tracking my picks & progress at my annual player auction, running my HARL league in a smooth fashion, and being able to provide my league-mates with some fantastic analytical reports such as in-season dollar values, impact ratings, team point graphs, top-30 roto leaders, and other neat reports during the regular season.

Blecho Sicko

The flu bug has really bitten my family and friends hard this year. Just about everyone that I know has suffered through some bout of illness this winter. I was healthy up through March 10 and then BLAMMO! On March 11 it struck. I came down with some nasty bug, which knocked me on my tookus for almost 2 weeks. I'm still dealing with the tail-end of it as we speak.

Needless to say, being sick in bed for many days, with occasional forays into the office to take care of some pressing business needs, put the kabosh on my blog-writing for awhile.

I had planned to do some reporting on my experiences at the Cold Wars convention in Lancaster which I attended on March 7 and 8. Those reports will be coming real soon -- they'll be part of one of my next 2 blog posts. It was a great weekend. Perhaps I caught "wargamers disease" from the teeming masses of damp gamers (it was rainy that weekend)?

The Blog is Back!

So although the blog was on hiatus for the past few weeks, the Six Sided Rhinoceros still lives. Over the next few weeks, you can expect:

• A mix of miniature wargaming stuff as I report on my adventures at Cold Wars 2008, share some pictures taken by my friend Kevin (and some of my own), and discuss the cool toys that I bought there. It was a very good con for painted minis!
• A few words about the coming fantasy baseball season. I've got 2 weeks to prepare for my upcoming draft (HARL Draft Day is April 5), so my head is swimming with rotisserie thoughts right now.
• Some fresh boardgaming stuff. I've also been on a tabletop gaming hiatus for the past 5-6 weeks, simply do to lack of time and being sick. Once early-April rolls around and my fantasy baseball draft ends up in the rear-view mirror, I'm hoping to get back into the swing of board gaming and wargaming again.
• Some thoughts on Sword of Severnia playtesting. Spring sees the kickoff of playtesting of the much anticipated computer-assisted miniature wargame that I've been developing for Rhino Software for the past 2+ years. I'm probably going to go ahead and share some thoughts on that process and the wargame's development progress here. Maybe I'll even share some designer notes as well, although I've got to be careful not to reveal too much before the game is officially released (hopefully later this year).

So stick with the blog and come back often as the posting frequency should increase now that I'm healthy again!

Cheers!