Seriously Cool Darwin Product - Coming Soon (And Back From Vacation)

After a weeks worth of camping in British Columbia I'm back from the 80% humidity and raring to go - at least for the next 48 hours at least.

I worked my way through Seth's 'The Purple Cow' for the second time and made notes, so that all gave way to lots of exciting new things for the upcoming six months of Floating Point fun and entertainment. I made a start on 'The Big Moo', but didn't finish that up before the rain set in. BTW - Palm 700p's - not waterproof. They do not like being in a pair of shorts that's soaked by a downpour. However, you can remedy the situation with 1 hours worth of low-heat hairdrying action.

I digress.

The biggest thing is that I have a seriously cool idea for a new Darwin product, which I've been prototyping like a man posessed for the last few hours. Once I've got it 100%, I'll put up a post, link to the store and start assembling a newsletter announcement.

More, probably tomorrow - along with photos...

Darwin Disclaimer Stickers - Coming Soon!

Attention 'Darwin has a Posse' fans! The full set of Colin's 'Schoolbook Disclaimer Stickers' will soon be available from Floating Point.

The decals (as featured here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/evolk12/evoops.htm) should be available in decal form over the next couple of days from Floating Points site - here:

http://www.fpdimages.com/html/StoreEvolutionSmallDecals.htm

Later!

Website Revamped - ish

After a couple of days of effort I've reworked most of the pages on our website to take advantage of 'layers'. That is to say, the days of having the bizzare effects of 'frames' plaguing URL references - are no more!

All URLS are directly accessible and in the process some of the more complex pages have been entirely reworked away from stupidly tricky tables. All in all, a step in the right direction. This should be the last rework of the site for a loooong time, or at least - I really hope so - I hate website editing.

By the way, this was no mean feat - believe it or not there are almost 60 pages that make up the FPDI website - so, stop by and if you spot a problem please let me know!

Thanks!

Back on the tape-gun fettish

Hey :) Glad you could join us.

Exciting things afoot at Floating Point - we've just ordered our first batch of CUSTOM Floating Point 2" packing tape. Yes - we've hit the big time now! All shipments will have our name and fetching logo all over the tape. Wow-wee! Custom tape to load into our tape-gun - it doesn't get much better than that.

We've also ordered a whole whack of letter-size card mailers to satisfy the demand for the free 'Decal The World' fall-out, which is rather nifty.

The Darwin sticker project took a bit of a lift when I met IN PERSON Jay Ingram from Discovery's 'Daily Planet' - I sent him a whole bundle of stuff that may or may not one day grace the screens of the TV - here's hoping.

I think that's just about it for this post... Later...

Meetup.Com Badge - Let's See if this works...

Click here to check out
The Calgary Nintendo DS Gaming Meetup Group!

Help - Please!

Hi there,
I'm about half-way through Seth Godins' 'Small is the New Big'. To summarize, he advocates going in the opposite direction to the way that your competition works, or at least - doing things differently. Now, while I don't think he means that literally and that Floating Point should suddenly start making everything from glue and macaroni, what I think he's getting at is that Floating Point should at least go about reinventing the way that signage shops work.

So - I'm throwing this open to suggestions. To get the ball rolling - Floating Point has instigated the 'Free Decals For The World' - which I mentioned in the last post. If you've not read that one, what it basically means is that I'll print and ship to you - absolutely free - a set of graphics of your own design. If you like them, and want to buy more you can - but there isn't any obligation. I have yet to hear of any other signage shop doing that.

I'm hoping that the Floating Point fans out there will have some ideas for me, or at least suggestions on what you want a signage shop to be. What will help? What is important? What can I do to turn Floating Point into something considerably more 'remarkable'?

Thanks in advance...

Free Decals For The World!

Seriously cool news. I've just updated the website to now offer up free decals from Floating Point. I've dropped a handful of templates to get the ball rolling, but basically all you need to do is design your decal, send it to us and we'll print and ship it for free!

That is really all there is too it. No catches - have at it people! Can't wait to see what you come up with...

FPDI In Sponsorship Excitement!

OK, so that headline might be a little over the top, but FPDI has sponsored it's first 'thing'. The 'thing' in question was a junior hockey tournament held here in Calgary. So, we kitted them out with banners, and name badges, and door signs and everything and it looked great. Thanks to Neal and Janice @ Professional Sign Supply who donated the material.

Once I get the pics off the camera I'll upload them to the gallery.

The great decal give-away hasn't gone entirely to the dogs, it's just a case of getting around to it - so still stay tuned for that.

Lastly, Floating Point has moved it's mailing list provider to 'Constant Contact' because it appears that bCentral is being knocked on the head by Microsoft.

Oh, and our laminator has broken down. Right now it's in lots of little pieces, but thanks to the nice people at Daige a new 'bit' is on the way.

S'all I've got right now, take care, people...

New Pricing, New Pics, New FTP Instructions! Aye aye aye

Well, it's been a full on exciting weekend full of the joys of spring. Here's some of the wonderous delights now awaiting at FPDI...

Probably the biggest thing is that I've finally got around to updating all the 'Pricing' webpages with the new, well, pricing. In a nutshell I've abolished all of the $65 set-up fees as well as introducing 'Print by the square inch' for artwork printing. This makes the math a bit easier to do.

Secondly, the gallery has been updated with some more new cool projects - most of them in the fractal area but also a couple in the banner section too.

Thirdly, I've finally made up some 'official' instructions on how to use our FTP site for image upload. This is pretty exciting for me since up until this point I've been sounding like a broken record each time I've needed to send the information to someone in an email. These instructions can now be downloaded from the 'Support' section of our website.

The unusual project of the month award goes to an aircraft decal. I'll put pics up when it's completed, but it's a 2' rendering of 'Scamp' from 'Lady and the Tramp' (Disney) and will be eventually mounted on the underside of the wing on a Cessna 152. Very cool, traced from a teeny gif.

That's about all the news for the moment, other than if you've signed up for our newsletter, the service will now be coming to you from ConstantContact since Microsoft is retiring their bCentral product.

Later people...

No News Is Good News

Not much to report here, other than the excitement of now being able to do my own shipping on Canada Posts' website. It's truly wonderous.

At ease, people...

New Gallery Bits and Bobs

It's been a while since I updated the gallery, so I've cleaned up some of the photos I've taken, along with photos sent in very kindly by clients and now they're in the respective areas of 'The Gallery'. Queue theme from 'Vision On'. Don't worry if you don't get that little joke. ;)

This weeks monumental discovery was that I can now address, pay for and label all my outgoing work thanks to Canada Posts online Business Centre. It's great. The rates still seem almost random, but at least now I don't have to stand in line-ups at the Post Office.

That's about it for this little update, later..

Small Business Ownership - Losing Ones Marbles

Today I found myself lusting after the 'deluxe' tape-gun in my local Staples. I think I've finally lost my mind. The fumes from the ink in the plotter have finally caught up to me. My life, as I know it has suddenly taken a very sad and tragic downturn.

Please, a moments silence for my dignity...

Calgary Nintendo DS Meetup.Com Event Launched!

So, I decided that Calgary need a Meetup.com event for Nintendo DS enthusiasts like myself. I've already got some Mario stickers on my site that I produced originally for my neice and nephew - so I guess it was only a matter of time before something larger took off.

The problem of where to host so that everyone in Calgary could get to it was solved when I hit on the idea of hosting it on the C-Train, so that's what I've decided to do. On April 10th (if anyone shows up) we'll meet on the C-Train @ Dalhousie and game all the way down to the last south stop - Somerset. Then, we'll game all the way back to Dalhousie which I figure should take about 90 mins. The theory being that we might pick up people as we go along. On Monday I have to start letting the media know about this, but it's late and I need to get some sleep.

Anyway, you can read all about it here. Please let people know!

Congratulations to the Glenlake PeeWee 4 Hawks!!!

We're dead pleased that the Glenlake PeeWee 4 Hawks are now the Division 5 Champions, Minor Hockey Week Finalist, Division Points Leader, Jingle Bell Classic Tournament Winners!! Congratulations to all of you! Their goaltender, Julian Bentivegna is also up for the Mike Vernon Goaltender Award, which we can only conclude is good.

We do their banners and decal work - incase you were wondering, since the rest of this blog is entirely void of sport related material :)

Again, congrats to the team and support crew!

Ooooh, Toys...

Time for an update. all go here - we've bought a huuuuuuge trimmer for slicing wide sheets of 'stuff' and we've now also got a sweet grommet press. Ok, so it's not massively exciting but big news for us.

Other news is that the UltraFractal roundrobin has now finished so we're now in the process of printing off the resultant images as the sponsorship we contributed.

Right now the plotter is flat out in 'trade show' season - so that's great.

Lots of other ideas here and we're still trying to get our free decal give-away sorted out. Oh yeah, and stay tuned for news on revised and simpler pricing.

Later, people... :)

Almost There With Free Stuff!

Well, it's been a bit of work, but the plans for the Give-Away are finally coming together.

Coincidentally, I've been able to tie this together with a massive overhaul of how custom high-resolution printing is priced, so I'll be announcing those via the newsletter - which, if you've not already signed up is located here:

http://www.fpdimages.com/html/NewsletterFramed.htm

Our hosting people have been hard at work preparing and 'Upload' area for us, so we're now able to accept files dropped directly onto our server. This will remove the need for us to be so reliant on YouSendIt who insist on fluctuating between requiring registration and not - which is most irritating for our clients.

Anyway, I must get back to FreeMind to finish off putting all my thoughts down before I forget.

Later, people...

Ultrafractal Sponsorship

FPDI is pleased to announce that we're sponsoring the community fractal project that's currently taking place on the ultrafractal mailing list. Each contributor will receive a high res. print of the final fractal, mailed to them free of charge.

Free stuff coming up!

It's always been a goal to make the FPDI newsletter a vehicle to give away stuff to the dedicated fanbase. So far this hasn't exactly happened but things are in the works - might have some news by the end of the week...

Back at it

Ok - so, I have a swanky new Palm Treo phone which is working wonders for me. In theory I should now be able to update this blog more often because now I can do it while sat on the bus!

So - almost new years resolution - update blog more... better late than never...

Help Me, I'm Melting

Oh the humanity. It's +27c at Floating Point right now. It's so hot that the plotter barely has to warm up.

Anyway - enough of that whining.

The overhaul of the 'support' section is just about complete but as with most things it's always a work in progress. I've taken down a lot of the really dull and uninteresting PDF files. I don't know what I was thinking when I originally wrote them - but I guess they served a purpose. So, the content has either been removed entirely or it's been transformed into HTML.

The Gallery has been updated to include new and interesting projects. As the projects have become more varied over the last 18 months I've now broken out a couple more categories of gallery to include outdoor banners, indoor 'Special Event' banners as well as small decal projects. The standard categories of vehicles and buildings still exist. The only project that I really want to get pushed to the web are the funky flowers that I'm making to go on the Floating Point picnic table that sits outside of our workshop. As it stands, they flowers have been ready to go for about two years now but something else has always 'come up'.

That's about it, it's getting late here so I'm gonna turn in for the night - take care,