Fugu Talk

There are many reasons to write online reviews. For instance, because you can – remember how many online reviews you wrote fifteen years ago? And it’s an easy way to practice writing. I wrote a bunch of reviews on Epinions several years ago while I was trying to get back into a writing groove (I use the term “back” loosely – it’s not like I was resurrecting a screenwriting career). You can write to show off your expertise (I noticed on Epinions the book-critic community was noticeably snobbier than the vacuum cleaner or even movie critic groups). You can review to show your displeasure or to express appreciation. You can review to help out your friends (I have a couple of friends with albums on iTunes – if you think selling apps is tough, try selling music). And you can review because someone asked you to.

That last one is tricky. I started reviewing on TripAdvisor because a pretty hotel clerk asked me to, and then I figured since I wrote one, I might as well review every other hotel I’ve stayed at. But usually review requests don’t go over so well. I don’t mind seeing my dentist award a free teeth cleaning for a Yelp review, but then are you encouraging people to write false reviews? Or what if the review is honest, but unfavorable? Awkward (and I’d be nervous if I was collecting on that teeth cleaning).

Those review requests are easy to ignore. The ones that pop up in apps are a little bit annoying. I admit I have one in HyperBowl but that’s only if you click on the About HyperBowl button (and I only have it there because I wanted to try out that function in the Prime31 Etcetera plugin – otherwise the button would just go to the App Store description anyway).

These impersonal review requests are really a variation of the automated “please fill out this survey” emails you get after staying at a hotel, attending a conference, and sometimes buying a product. Besides the impersonal, automated (i.e. spam) feeling they impart, they conclude your customer experience with paperwork. Thanks for buying our product! Now fill out this form.

But it’s the personal review requests that drive me crazy. As opposed to Facebook, where I try to stick with real friends, or at least people I’ve met, on my friends list, on Goodreads I’ll accept friend requests from just about anyone, figuring it’s more of a like-minded interest group type of thing. But one “friend” kept pestering me to write a review for his book on Amazon. He wanted that review so much he offered some consulting time for any of my “real” friends who might be interested. First of all, I don’t like reviewing on Amazon because they reserve the right to edit your review (and I’m under the impression they exercise that right frequently – they’ve changed all my app descriptions on their app store), I read that guy’s book when I borrowed it from the public library, so I didn’t remember and couldn’t access it. And some friend he turned out to be – now I feel like he friended me just to get that review.

I don’t know why he wanted the review that badly anyway (he already had many complimentary reviews – one more couldn’t make that much of a difference). But I empathize – the Long Tail smells of desperation. The key though, is empathy. With rank and file customers, sure, you can’t do much beyond say, hey, if you like it, please write a review. But if you’re asking me for a review, take a look at what I’m doing, check it out, even if just the free stuff, write a review (unless you don’t have anything nice to say), and then you can say to me, hey, love your stuff (hmm, sounding a bit Hollywood there), I wrote a review, if you’ve got the time, check out my new app/book/product, here’s a promo code, please write a review if you like it.

So that’s another reason to write reviews. Write them if you want them.

I’ve avoided messing with Unity Editor scripts until now, reasoning that I should be spending my time on using Unity, not programming it. But recently I got tired of going through the multistep process of selecting a game object, clicking on its mesh in the inspector, then clicking on that mesh in the Project pane, just to see the mesh properties. So I wrote this little menu item that just lets me select the game object, invoke the menu item (right-click would be even better) and then debug print the information in the console pane (there’s another example in the Unify wiki that displays similar info in a popup window). So here’s my first Unity Editor script (if you want to try it out, put it in a Javascript file and place it under the Editor folder then wait for a while for the menu to show up in the menubar, Refresh the Editor folder if necessary).


@MenuItem ("Technicat/Mesh Info")
static function MeshInfo() {
if (Selection.activeGameObject !=null) {
var mf:MeshFilter = Selection.activeGameObject.GetComponent(MeshFilter);
var sm:Mesh = mf.sharedMesh;
if (mf == null) {
Debug.Log(Selection.activeGameObject.name+" No mesh");
} else {
Debug.Log("shader: "+Selection.activeGameObject.renderer.sharedMaterial.shader.name+" normals: "+sm.normals.length+" tangents: "+sm.tangents.length+" colors: "+sm.colors.length+" uv: "+sm.uv.length+" uv2: "+sm.uv2.length);
}
}
}


Now I’m thinking for all those people who aren’t sure how to get started in programming, this isn’t a bad way. You can start off with simple scripts, get instant results, and learn about the API and the data structures (in this case, what’s in a mesh).

On my deathbed, I might regret watching too much TV, but more likely I’ll rue all the hours I’ve wasted on my resume. Years ago, I wanted both a PDF and HTML version of my resume so I spent some time trying to create an XML definition from which I could generate those formats by applying XSL stylesheets, and then because recruiters always want Word format, I ended up dabbling in the JFOR open source project so I could get RTF output. I also had some vision of some mobile compatibility so you could walk around with a Palm device (that lets you know when I was thinking about this) at a job fair and sync resumes with a recruiter. I still think that’s a cool idea, that I just didn’t execute on, and maybe it’s doable or done already for iOS (if you want to run with this idea, please send me stock options, or a promo code).

I also have a vision of some kind of deluxe web resume, more like a portfolio really, in which you can embed rich content (photos, videos, even Flash and Unity webplayers), way more interesting than the bland LinkedIn portfolios, and maybe some kind of social networking (yeah, bandwagon, bandwagon…) – but not “friend me” stuff, but more project-centered, so you can see who worked on the same project or at the same company. And personally, I think it would be fascinating to visualize the flow of people from and through projects and companies. I even had a domain I will use for this super site – workedon.com.

But for now, I’ve wimped out and placed my PDF resume generated from my LinkedIn profile on workedon.com. It does solve one current problem, where recruiters contact me on LinkedIn, say they love my resume and can they have a copy of my resume, I say hit the PDF button, they say I can’t find it, can you add me to your network, or can you give it to me in Word? The site does technically have a PHP script, redirecting you to the PDF (it’s a step up from my previous use of the HTML meta refresh tag, which I now realize from wikipedia is considered “legacy”):

<?php

header( ‘Location: http://workedon.com/PhilipChu.pdf’ ) ;

?>

A while ago I listed a bunch of stupid recruiter tricks, and one of the unnecessary attempts to be clever involves not asking, for whatever reason, if you’re interested in the job, but instead saying, hey, do you know anyone? For example, I receive this last week via LinkedIn:

Congratulations on your successful career! Do you know anyone who has a strong right and left brain :*) ? Codes in object oriented languages and is user interface centric?

It’s kind of weird, and kind of rude (and by the way, I hate that left-brain right-brain crap). It’s as if someone asked you, hey do you know someone who’s good-looking? I mean, what if I contacted this recruiter and said, hey, do you know a good recruiter? Or if I called that company’s HR department and asked, do you know any companies that are good places to work?

I did reply, asking if he was asking me to find candidates for him, and he actually kept going with it, saying sure, unless you’re interested, have them contact me and please add me to your LinkedIn network. Yeah, right.

Here’s a Unity tip – don’t disable the wizard. A long time ago, that startup window bugged me and I disabled it, but that inconvenience is nothing compared to getting stuck with a project that won’t load and then trying to remember the key combination that forces Unity to start up with immediately opening the last-opened project. It’s especially important if you’re trying out a new version of Unity and don’t want to automatically upgrade the last-opened project (or if you’re still switching between old and new versions of Unity like I am).

Do this:

And you’ll see this again on every Unity startup. Much safer.