Archive for December, 2008

New store section & more news

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

Today I began building a new store section. This is a place where I intend to have free downloads. These will not be “samples” or some sort of partial or limited time downloads – these are the full version of the programs. You may download them for free and use them, but you may not sell them. I will probably be assigning some form of Creative Commons licensing to these programs and keep them free forever.

I am also contemplating having a “free title of the month”. These, if I implement this, will not be licensed under the creative commons in all likelyhood, but will be available for free download for that month. That seems like a good way to make things interesting.

I have decided to have this “Free Stuff” section for those of you who would like to try out my work and see if it works before buying it. I can certainly understand that sentiment.

There has also been on my mind question of how to make it possible for people to compare a “live subliminal” with an intentionally created “placebo subliminal”, as well as a “recording of silence”. I have had people conclude that I am “selling silence”, because they could not hear the ultrasonics. This experiment kit I am planning, which will include all three of these, should allow you to verify for yourself that subliminals do indeed work. I am not sure what I will have the live subliminal be of yet, but self confidence sounds good.

Obviously I wouldn’t be offering this if I did not have absolute confidence in my products.

December was a very hectic month, and continues to be busy. I’m working as fast as I can in a lot of directions, but as the car company used to say, “Quality is Job #1.” Quality takes time. So please bear with me.

I appreciate your patience and understanding, and thanks to everyone who has made December a great month for Ultrasonic Subliminals! Happy holidays to all!

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I’ve been busy! (And some answers for the curious.)

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Okay, so you may have noticed it’s been a bit since I posted. That’s because I have been busy. We had our main computer start going down, and I was able to diagnose it as a failing hard disk before it failed. The main computer is the one I do all the production work on, so it’s rather important. I immediately ordered a replacement drive for it, and when it arrived, I simply tried to restore from a current backup.

Oh, but that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? Sigh.

The main system is a Windows Vista and PCLinuxOS dual boot system. My backup software is supposed to back up and restore both at once, but there was a glitch. The restore program was unable to create a Windows partition big enough to hold the backed up data. Instead of 40 gigabytes, it ended up being 8 megabytes. Slight difference there.

So I was forced to call up Lenovo, who does our systems, and they sent me a set of restore disks. Shame they hadn’t come with the computer in the first place!

While I waited for them to arrive, I restored the linux portion of the disk. Then I started trying to make a more recent backup, and somehow the backup software – which had been rock solid reliable up to that point – failed. Naturally, it failed after the first disk of the backup disk set was overwritten. The first of nine DVDs in the set. I could not get the backup program to function after that, for some reason.

Then the restore disks arrived, and Windows Vista quite happily overwrote my entire disk (including the linux part) while “setting itself up”. This required that I resize the “C” partition, which naturally made it unbootable. Would this never end?!

After four hours of Vista’s automated repair efforts, it was bootable again. I went back to creating a backup of the linux disk from the failing drive. The only way I could get it to work was to use no compression at all. 8 hours and 11 DVD images later, I had a current backup set.

From there it took another 4 hours to burn those 11 DVD images to disk, and another 4 hours to restore them. Finally, I had my new hard disk up and running.

All this while I was hit by one of the worst colds I have had in five years. (Thanks, Sonni!)

All told, this operational transfer, which should have taken 4 to 6 hours, took nearly 14 days.

Now that I’m back, I have been working hard to get everything back online. It’s a task because I am still sick.

Speaking of work, some of you have asked why you don’t see the downloadable version of the program you are interested in. Well, in answer, there are a few reasons.

First, I haven’t finished making the downloadable version from the CDs yet.
Second, I’m having a bit of a problem with the place I am using as a download host. There’s a backlog of programs that would be downloadable, otherwise.

If you see anything you like, but you can’t find the downloadable version, all you need to do is tell me what you want. I will get it to you (and build it if need be), and we can do it a slightly different way. Instead of providing you a download link in my store, I can (until the download host problem is fixed) send you a download link in your e-mail. All you need to do is tell me what you want as a download.

As soon as I can, I’ll make the downloadable versions available for each program.

For those of you who have been patiently awaiting your order, thank you for your patience. I will have all orders out asap, if they’re not already in the mail.

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