What’s inside? Data from 18 social games across different platforms, crunched into learnings. The titles includes the obvious popular games like Farmville and Travian, but also interesting other titles like Ninja Saga and Ravenskye City. I’ve personally played about two thirds of the games but not to the point of having gotten all the data contained inside, so the report had a few big surprises.

As part of pricing items for Habbo when I was working at Sulake, one of the hot topics was how to price items. You don’t want to offer things too cheap, but then pricing items too high also makes you lose sales. The max price we ever charged for a single item (that I can remember) was 75 credits, or about 11 euros, which a lot of people thought was insanely expensive and generally all the purchasers of the item were deeply engaged big spenders. Looking at the report, the most expensive item in the list costs a whopping 650 euros! Color me shocked.

Another piece I found incredibly useful is analysis and data on the distribution of vanity vs functional items in various titles. Which one works better has been a big discussion point in the industry for years, where people seem to be segregated into the vanity and functional camps of thought. This reflects itself in the titles being analysed, where quite a few are 100% functional item driven (yay Travian) while some are very much driven by decorative vanity items. This itself is useful as a piece of data, but Vili and Eino have gone as far as analyzing the pricing differences between vanity and functional items AND how different games offer you discounts based on volume purchases.

The bundle includes an excel sheet with all the original data for one’s own digging. I’ll have to remember to ask Vili if I can publish any of my own findings here. :) Anyway, go get yourself a copy of the report, so we’ll get more excellent analysis from the guys in the future.

The kids and the dog took a few days to adjust to their new friend. Kerttu immediately named the robot wally (or wall-e) and talked to it the first couple days but then mostly lost interest. I think the dog still sometimes thinks the vacuum’s out to get her.

The algorithm the robot uses to navigate floors is interesting and watching wally do his job is strangely hypnotic. I’m noticing I’m starting to learn to predict where the robot will go next, even though I don’t know how the robot works. Subconscious pattern processing is pretty amazing, I guess.

I’m positively surprised at the efficiency of the robot. It’s not perfect and if I vacuumed by hand, the rooms would definitely be cleaner. On the other hand, I’m getting a 95% vacuumed flat with the touch of a button, which is completely awesome. I don’t think our floors have been this clean in a long time. To be fair, the real test for wally will be when Luna the dog starts dropping hair in a significant manner during the summer heat. If the results are as good then and the vacuum doesn’t choke, I’ll be pretty darn impressed.

It’s pretty clear that in order to get real value, you need to establish a routine for clearing the floors from toys & random junk every morning and turn on the robot for daily maintenance vacuuming. This seemed a bit of an effort the first few days but I’m getting hang of the routine and I’m feeling good about the results.

Two complaints this far.

First, the unit we got feels noisy. I know it’s silly to assume a vacuum would be silent, but the unit looks somewhat graceful so I somehow expected it to be quieter based on the looks. I’d definitely prefer to be out of home when wally is working, but I work from home right now, so that’s unfortunately not an option every day. It does sound like half the noise is the motors though, so I’m sure the unit could be made quieter.

Second, the dock supplied with the unit is just silly. The dock is super light weight and the bottom of it is slippery, so I can’t see how it’s supposed to really work. After wally failed to dock the 50th time due to the dock slipping away, I just put some two sided tape onto the bottom of the dock so it doesn’t move anymore, and the problem was solved. I suspect rubberised bottom with more friction would fix the problem, but Roomba decided to save costs and give me a cheap piece of slippery plastic instead.

And a couple improvements.

Firstly, I suspect the navigation system of the robots hasn’t improved hugely despite the product having been on market for a fairly long time. The robot definitely doesn’t remember the flat’s layout. Given today’s tech, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t possible to create significantly better system that was still cheap enough to manufacture, so from this perspective it looks like Roomba is resting on their laurels, waiting for someone to come to market with a superior product and eat their lunch.

Second, it feels like the product would be greatly improved by adding some more personality traits to it. The couple little quirks the robot has are great – when you activate it from the dock, the robot makes the same warning beep sound as if it was a truck, as it backs out from the dock. And apparently you get some quirky talking when you try to steer the robot with your foot a little too much. But I’d like to hear the robot tell me about how full it is. Or maybe occasionally speak out how many meters it’s traveled in the flat. A bit of Genuine People Personalities and I think I’d love the bugger a bit more. And a talking piece of kit would probably make the product more viral. Having a switch to turn off the personality might be a good idea though, with related snarky comments when you turn it back on.

Anyway, summary. Yes, after two weeks of use, I’d say the €250 was well spent. Had I paid €500, I’m not sure if I’d be as happy. If you’re contemplating getting a robot vacuum, I suggest you only get one if you get a good deal and are willing to keep your floors clean. With those caveats, it can be a great investment. :)

Update: I’ve been informed the current models are incredibly good compared to the Roombas that first came to market. Myself assuming they’ve not improved dramatically is a testament to how good a job Roomba has done on the robots – the current model Just Works, so the user gets an impression that creating the product must have been effortless. The truth seems to be a massive amount of iteration has happened, even if the product still looks similar to the first models that came out.

Above thought came about as I was just hanging the laundry and smelled it. What clean laundry smells like is wet cloth, an almost nonexistent but perceptible smell. And clean here means the item of clothing doesn’t have anything on it including stains and chemicals. Just water.

Readability should hire someone to work full time in creating a database of who owns each site they owe money to, going through domains in order of how much money they ought to pay the owner of that domain. Once you reach the person who owns a domain, just tell them how much you’ll give once they’ll sign up. If the content publisher refuses the money, it’d be a conscious choice, not oversight due to not knowing Readability exists.

There, most objections to Readability’s business gone.

I’m amazingly well adjusted to the 10 hour time difference this time, which is probably due to two things I did. Firstly, I fasted for about 16 hours after landing, timing it so that the first thing I ate after landing being the first breakfast. Second, I went to Walgreens and popped a melatonin pill before going to bed. It’ll be interesting to see how the sleeping goes for the rest of the trip, but I got a good uninterrupted eight hours of sleep last night timed correctly to the clock here, so I’m hoping the week isn’t going to be a massive jetlag bomb.

The conference week will be incredibly hectic with meetings, but fortunately I have tomorrow free. We’re planning to go to Muir Wood for a visit. It’s the woods where Endor scenes were filmed, and I have a Makie with me dressed in a Jedi robe, which will be a fun little photographic experiment. I’ll post some photos immediately when I can. :)

I have an Apple TV box hooked to a Sony HDTV. My dad has a pretty new Samsung “SMART” HDTV. Of these three devices, Apple’s is the only one that’s easy to use and blazingly fast. The Sony and the Samsung have annoying reboot time. The menus stop to think too often. The Samsung’s smart capabilities seem like a value add-on that wasn’t allowed to cost anything, judging by how poor the software is and how slow the UI is. The first time I set it up (because it was too obscure to use for my dad), it took about 15 minutes to download and install software updates, and the first boot of the YouTube app took something like a minute. After going through some apps, I figured the user experience is simply so poor that I’d rather go do the laundry than frustrate myself more with the confusing, slow menus.

So, based on that experience, if Apple releases a TV with iOS capabilities in the tune of the Apple TV box, I assume I’d be very tempted. What they have now is a TV add-on that’s lightyears ahead of the competition in the few things that it does. And if the iPhone taught us something, a simple but super well executed solution is better than type of a diluted crap experience the Samsung is.

Little background – I noticed about three years ago that my left eye’s vision degraded quite significantly over about six months. I didn’t think it was a biggie at the time – I’d had glasses since I was a kid, and I’d figured it’s a matter of time before the eyes would turn for the worse. I got new glasses and the problem mostly went away. Then about a year ago, I noticed the right eye was getting worse, too, and that happened faster.

I went to the doctor to get a referral to a specialist, which took a couple months to arrange. In the meantime I started developing easily tiring eye which made it harder to work the way I’d used to – on days I was really tired (partially from having a baby in the house) my vision was getting way too blurred in the afternoons to be able to write fast.

When it came to seeing the specialist, he noted a couple things – the vision measurement done using one of these fancy machines opticians use, and him checking the strength of glasses I should wear using the traditional method of making me swap between lenses and looking at a Snellen chart didn’t correlate. Also, he found a fairly large range of lenses produced the same amount of correction, where nothing would make me see as well as I’d used to. He didn’t tell me what to expect really, but gave me a referral to the Haartman eye clinic, which is apparently the best Finland has to offer for corrective eye surgery.

This being public medicare, which in Finland is usually cheap but on the slow side, it took about six months for me to get the appointment. The eyes actually felt better for most of the time of the wait, so I had no idea what to expect when getting to the place. When I finally got there, two fancy laser-based machines were used to measure my eyes, after which the doctors gave the verdict – I had a form of epithelial erosion syndrome, meaning the outermost layer of the eye was uneven and hence refracting light as if I was wearing dented eyeglasses.

The good news was, the epithelium is the only part of the eye that renews itself, so the problem would be fixable with little chance of permanent effects. Bad news? It’d be massively painful. The nurse took me to the side and said some patients compare the post-operation feeling in the eye to labor pains. “You’ll be given three days of sick leave which you’ll spend in bed with crippling pain”, she said. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I felt. We’ll send you a letter when you can come in for the operation, I was told.

I finally got the letter three weeks ago, telling me the operation would be done in a couple week’s time. I notified my awesome business partners of the thing happening and my dear wife started to prepare mentally for nurturing me.

Once I showed up at the clinic the day of the operation, I was rescanned and met with the doctors. “It’s got a bit worse. Do you really want to do this? We don’t have to, yet”, asked the doctor. “I need to see really precisely to work” I replied and off we went. A couple pills to relax a bit and then off to the operating table.

The operation itself was amazingly quick. A few drops of effective local anestesiacs were applied to the eye, after which I had to stare at a freakishly bright light without moving the eye at all. The doctor performing the operation removed the entirety of the front epithelium with the eye using manual surgical equipment which was freakishly weird. Feeling someone cutting away parts of your eye is not what I exactly what I had in mind waking up the morning, and seeing the vision blur as the layer was lifted off was just odd. “Yup, this was in pretty bad shape allright,” the doctor said as he surveyed the piece.

Some shaving of the eye with lasers and that was it. I got prescriptions for antibiotics, two types of eye drops, tranquilizers and painkillers and a bit too generic instructions on how to take care of the eye for feeling really reassured I’d do fine. Riikka picked me up, we went to the drug store to pick up the prescribed meds and off I went to spend the next three days in bed. The last thing I did before the anestesiac started to fade was to get the Steve Jobs biography as an audio book, so I’d have a few hours of entertainment.

The pain that hit the evening was deeply uncomfortable but not quite as bad as the nurse’s description. This could be due to myself having done contact sports in the past – the SCA training sessions used to leave be with nice bruises all over the body, so I’d learned to deal with pain as something I register as happening, but which doesn’t overwhelm me. Same happened here – with the help of the strong painkillers, at worst the eye felt like something between the one time when I’d put chili into my eye accidentally and the feeling of dropping salt into an open wound. This was pretty bad, but was containable and slowly focusing the pain away worked.

In the next two days I could feel the cutting wound get better and the constant feeling of having something gone to the eye started to go away. I had the post-operation check two days after the surgery and everything was healing as planned. The two subsequent days both felt like great improvements and I indeed had a bit of an epiphany moment today morning when the eye felt almost as good as prior to the operation, despite the doctors warning it could take up to two weeks. A couple more months of eye drops and I should be sorted. But now I’ll have to hit the bed, the eye can’t take all this writing anymore. I’ll let you know how it’s worked out in a couple weeks.

Update: It’s now been 12 days from the operation and it feels the eye is fully recovered both in the sense of the optics working as expected, but also the focus having adjusted and the brain now being able to grasp the additional information flowing in. Yesterday was the first day the eye didn’t get tired, and today I feel I’m seeing things even crisper and perceiving things faster. Feels awesome, can’t wait for the the other eye to be fixed.

Interestingly, now that the right eye is ok, I’m starting to notice the little itching and occasional tiny pain in the left unoperated eye, which is apparently caused by the disease. I didn’t really notice it when both the eyes were poorly, but I can definitely notice the differences between the two now. One more reason to get operated, I guess.