Two things to report: (1) yet another change in Eileen’s book; and (2) after nearly twelve years at Creo (and later Kodak) I’m leaving.

Eileen’s book will now be titled In the Stars and will be published in February 2007. I think I liked the last title (Predicting Mr. Right) better but I’m definitely not the target audience. On the other hand the publisher’s marketing department are paid professionals and likely know what they are doing, so they get many more votes than me.

The second bit of news pales by comparison but is still significant enough to report. Way back in December 1994 Eileen and I moved to Vancouver so that I could join a 200 person company named Creo Inc. The company grew (eventually to 4000 people worldwide before being acquired by Kodak) and I was always able to find new challenges; however the last year or so has not been quite as exciting or challenging or rewarding as I’d hoped.

Last week I accepted an offer from Sophos Inc. here in Vancouver. I start at the beginning of April. I’m really looking forward to the change; it’s an entirely new market and new company with a family of new products to learn and work with. I’ll be writing software again, I find that part very exciting too. I’m nervous in a very excited way!

Jay points out a blog article from Guy Kawasaki about this article over at Salon about naming.

The Salon article is amazingly humorous. Guy’s is good too, but not nearly as funny in my opinion. Go read both now then come back here.

OK welcome back. A few years ago I was working on a new, big product at Creo that was code-named Araxi (after the restaurant in Whistler) but everyone knew this was just an internal name and when we got to the point of shipping we’d have a real name. Everyone looked forward to having a really cool name that would go down in history as the best name ever.

During the development of the product Creo established a business venture with Heidelberg that made this product a joint development to be sold by both companies. This made the eventual product name even more important, especially to our new partner, the style-conscious legendary giant of the printing world.

Creo hired one of these naming companies. I don’t recall which one but probably its one of the companies described in the article. Some of the more memorable but not-so-weird potential names: Metro, Rally and Vivex. The development team also invented their own candidate name: Horse Choker (in the spirit of enough features to …).

There were rumors about this mysterious naming company that went something along the lines of: tens of thousands of dollars paid to a group of people who took a lot of drugs, sat in a darkened room, and invented names without knowing anything about the product or company. Those stories are just a little bit more believable after reading the article. :^)

After what seemed to be the debate that would never end a product name was finally selected: Prinergy. It was sold internally as a fusion of the words Print and Energy and the logo was dressed up with weird little lightening bolts. It didn’t matter, after a dozen weird and not-so-weird names nobody had the strength the resist. Even so, the Prinergy product is still going strong and survived the dissolution of the Heidelberg relationship, merging with Scitex (the originators of a more established competing product), and the eventual acquisition by Kodak.

The Netherlands has released really cool new animated stamps. Yes, these are regular postage stamps that can be attached to letters and sent through the post.

They use a technology called Lenticular Printing to achieve this affect, and you’ve probably seen it before. It uses small slices of different pictures printed next to each other, with a plastic lens cover that only reveals one set of slices (all from the same image) at any particular angle. As you tilt the picture you see a different image. Do this tilting rapidly enough and you’ll see animation that mimics live video.

Creo Kodak has several customers involved in this type of printing because our device’s ability to image 10 micron features onto a printing plate. Given good enough press conditions, these 10 micron features will show up on paper. Small accurate feature placement and printing means you can do things like lenticular printing on a large scale. I have no idea if these stamps are done with Creo’s imaging technology or not, but its likely.

This is probably the start of a new trend in producing stamps. Even better that the topic is related to the Olympics.

I’ve spent this week in Rochester, NY for work. According to the locals its abnormally chilly this week. Its below zero (Celcius) and I’m very much unaccustomed to this sort of weather. Vancouver is wet but warm in the winter, although you wouldn’t know it from talking with people here. Around Wednesday I lost count of the number of people who said things like “Well you’re from Canada, you must be used to this kind of cold”. Bah!

More uplifting news to report: the cold weather reminds me of growing up in Michigan in the winter time, and this leads to thoughts of Christmas. Its hard to get into the spirit of Christmas when its warm and rainy. :^)

Other than a few hours of work next week, I’m now off for Christmas holiday until the New Year. This schedule has left plenty of time to shop for gifts as well as enjoy time around the house for more robot projects and hockey. We have tickets to the World Junior Hockey Championships as well as the Canucks over the next few weeks. Sometimes we’ll be seeing three games per day!

I was recently introduced to the tile game Carcassonne at work; we’ve now started playing over lunch once a week or so. If you aren’t familiar with Carcassonne, you might want to peek at the site for the French city by the same name that served to inspire the medieval city-building theme. Then immediately visit Board Game Geek to read up on this wonderful little game.

Generally we play the Inns and Cathedrals expansion but last week we played with the Traders and Builders expansion for the first time. Its ok, but I believe I enjoy the game without that new expansion as the complexity of the rules; I was first drawn to Carcassonne because its simple to learn but complex to play but this new expansion introduces a few complex and bizarre rules that appear to be out of place. But the new tiles with Traders and Builders are really excellent.

We are going to play again today over lunch. Should be a lot of fun.

[cross fade, time passes, its now much later the same day that I started this post]

Eileen and I just got home from tonight’s Canucks hockey game; 5 – 2 win against Colorado and a very respectable showing. The team worked hard for the full 60 minutes – sort of a new thing for them. Tomorrow they travel to Edmonton for another game. If they keep it together for another good game this might just be a turning point for the team. Not a moment too soon.

Anways, yes we played Carcassonne today at lunch. I won by about 20 points or so: a very respectable win considering the competition. We played with the Traders and Builders expansion again (as well as Inns and Cathedrals) except we played with modified rules: three resource chips can be used to take another turn rather than simply being accumulated as points at the end of the game. This is sort of the same as the builder meeple, except you turn in your chips for a one-time opportunity. The pig was used to negate the effect of other player’s farmers unless they also played their pig in the same zone. The resource chip modifiication was really good; the pig modification didn’t really work for me. The person who proposed this new method of using the pig really hates “farm warfare” so he tried to invent a cheap and easy way to defeat it. I don’t think its wrong to have players pouring meeples into farm warfare, its just a different strategy.

Another game I can recommend is called Ticket to Ride. Check it out on Board Game Geek. I prefer the European version vs. the North American version but both are really good.