Kaylin was 18 months old when we moved here, half of Maks’ age.  It’s amazing to see pictures of her from back then, she was all curls and crazyness.  Now she’s six years old going on twelve, skinny as a rail and still constantly full of energy.

Now we’ve got a second monkey jumping around the house (quite literally, I constantly hear them thumping around from one room to another).

Our house has grown with the finished basement, but we’re still constantly tripping over toys (today I nearly rolled my ankle on a lightsaber on our stairs).

I’ve made some amazing friends in London, and I get to see my childhood buddies whenever I want.

While I occasionally miss Toronto, and wonder what I’m doing in the alternate universe where we stay in the GTA (maybe we move down to the beach to be closer to my hip downtown job?), I’m pretty ridiculously happy here in London.

My Grandma Moo

Grandma was born December 3, 1920, but we grand kids wouldn’t get to meet her for another 50 years, until the 1970′s when we all came into the world.

The Muriel Thornton we all got to know was as warm as a fresh out of the oven cookie, caring, kind, and above all else, one of the most good natured souls I’ve ever known.

Sure, she could have a temper, and she could be stubborn as all get out…a trait that thankfully nobody in the family inherited, but by and large, Grandma Moo lived life with a smile on her face.

She was an awesome grandma, one of those people who was perfectly suited for the role.  She spoiled us rotten, gave us more cookies than we ever needed, hugged us (even when we were too old and cool to be hugged), and could make any one of us feel like we were the most special person in the world.

Many of my favourite memories of childhood involve Grandma Moo and Grandpa Ralph, who left us twenty three years ago this April.

Their farm was an amazing place to be when we were kids.

Every one of us who sat at the kids’ table for holidays could tell you exactly where the cookies were kept, how to get to the mints, which she seemed to always have with her, and how to watch late night TV through the grate in the bedroom that looked down on the living room.  I remember doing chores in the barn (it’s good for you, it’ll put hair on your chest), feeding apples to the horses, or just lazy days out on in the field wandering and exploring with Sandy the dog and whatever Tom or Tina cat decided to come out from the barn.

The farm is still an amazing place to be, and what Jay and Cheryl have done with the place is truly amazing.

Grandpa and grandma complemented each other excellently, him reminding her of the things she’d forget (I was regularly known as Brad/Jay/Eddie/bahhh Brian), while Grandma helped smooth some of RB’s…rougher edges.

I loved their affection for one another, Grandpa would sneak a hug in here or there, with Moo always squirming away, but still secretly loving it.  I remember coming downstairs early one morning when Grandpa was heading off to work.  Moo was working away at the sink when Grandpa came up from behind her and hugged her.  The second step from the bottom gave me away and moo said “Get off me Ralph”, her tone feigning annoyance.  Grandpa gave me a sly wink as I came into the kitchen.

Moo was a joker, always doing something to cause trouble, whether it was slipping a slice of cardboard in grandpa’s sandwich, or scaring us as kids by pretending to be asleep, and popping awake with a  BOO.

She was at her peak when she had a co-conspirator to plot with.  She and my mom scared the crap out of me one time by telling me that if I didn’t be quiet on the drive home they would drop me off at the farm where I was born.

Moo pointed out a particular farm, and together they agreed that was where my real parents were.

To this day I don’t like to talk in the car.

And I sometimes wonder about my real family.

Grandma Moo baked awesome treats too, watching Hockey Night In Canada would always be a good excuse for a batch of Fudge or Caramel Popcorn.  I had my first cup of coffee in Grandma’s kitchen, I don’t think anything holds a candle to her stove top percolator.

Christmas was always my favourite holiday not just because of the after dinner treat plate, but because of Christmas Pudding.

One of the smartest things I ever did (besides marry my wife of course), was help Grandma make the Christmas Pudding…so that I could figure out how to make her sauce on my own.  I’m pleased to say that after about a decade of experimenting, this past Christmas I perfected it.

As the big 4-0 approached last year, I started trying to figure out if there some meaning to life that I had overlooked.  I sought to be happier, I read a lot about zen, and buddhism, and while I’m far from a buddhist, there’s a lot that appeals to me.

I found a book on zen and the art of happiness.  In the book buddha tells the secret to being happy.

If one wants to be happy, the book says, One must simply be happy.

I tossed the book down, walked away from it, annoyed by such obvious advice.  What kind of hippie quackery is this?  Next thing you know they’ll tell me to put on a pair of Birkenstocks, go eat some granola and move to BC.

I didn’t go back to that book for several weeks, but occasionally when things made me angry, I’d just ignore them, smile, and just be happy.

It was this weekend, thinking about Moo that I realized she was more zen than I could ever possibly be.

Moo’s second family at the Liesure World where she spent nearly the last decade will tell you that she had such a great attitude, even though the years had worn her body down, and her memory failed her often, she still managed to have a smile on her face.  Rather than be annoyed and overwhelmed, she’d smile her little smile, and just enjoy what was happening around her.

When I’d see her I would ask her if she knew who I was.  Usually she didn’t (to be honest I look in the mirror occasionally and wonder who the old dude staring back at me is…also where did his hair go?), but she’d lean in and smile as if I was about to let her in on a joke, and when I told her she’d say “Of course you are.”, as if she knew all along.

So today I choose not to be sad.  I won’t mourn for the amazing lady who left us to go be those who left before her, instead I’ll smile her wry smile, and simply do what Moo did.

Be happy.

The best comics of 2011

I really cut back on comics this year, mostly because I simply don’t have room to store them, so only the best stuff makes its way into my house now. Then something wonderful happened. I got an iPad, and the ComiXology app really came into its own.

This led me to try a lot of new stuff. I’ve always liked indie movies, but I don’t necessarily want to own every one of them! The same with comics, and no surprise for the guy who’s favourite super hero is Starman, I dig some of the more obscure stuff.

Here’s the best stuff I read in 2011:

The Shade
As I said above, the 1990′s Starman series is my favourite comic series of all time, hell, I’ve got the symbol tattooed on my right shoulder, so when I read James Robinson was revisiting the city of Opal with Tony Harris’ studio mate Cully Hamner (who’s Blue Beetle redesign of several years ago is still one of my favourite costume designs ever), I was all in, and this series hasn’t disappointed.

Swamp Thing
Picking up threads of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, while still forging its own path, this has brilliant writing, and gorgeous Kevin Nowlan inspired art.

Batman: Knight of Vengeance
Brian Azzarello and Eudardo Risso can do no wrong in my opinion, this three issue mini-series starts with the conceit of “What if Thomas Wayne lived, and Bruce Wayne was the one who lived?”, full of some of the best moments of Flashpoint, and with some truly great Shock endings.

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man
Okay, it took 5 issues to get him in his new costume, but Miles Morales is a much more fleshed out character because of it, and he’s his own man with his own reasons of why “with great power must come great responsibility”.

Batman and Robin
Hands down the best concept of the last several years. Bruce Wayne’s artificially accelerated kid (who’s roughly ten years old) is a genius addition to the Batman Family. I think it’s a little bit funny that the guy who was orphaned has built a Michael Jackson-esque child posse around him, but it works. I like how different the dynamic between Damian and Dick Grayson was compared to Damian’s father Bruce.

Blue Estate
Wow, picked this urban crime noir up during Comixology’s recent .99 sale, and I am hooked! A great story with a constantly evolving art style.

Spaceman
Azzarello and Risso again. Again, the first issue was only $.99 on Comicxology, and I took a chance. It’s a future crime noir, with Azzarello’s typical panache with dialogue, and a really cool world.

Justice League
Right now the cool thing to do on the Internet is hate on Johns and Lee, but I’m really enjoying this series. Johns writing is solid, and Lee’s art is note-perfect. About the only thing I don’t like is the $3.99 price tag.

Batwoman
Wow, I have loved J.H Williams since Chase (which just got collected), but he’s at his absolute artistic peak on this series right now. The only proble I have with it is it’s impossible to read digitally. You genuinely have to read this in print because of the double page spreads.

The Red Wing
One of the few non-digital books I read this year, this time travel tale by Jonathan Hickman has art by Nick Pitarra that evokes both Frank Quitely and Geoff Darrow, and a story full of paradoxes and big action pieces. It was terrific.

So that was my list of favourites. What were yours?

With that said, there were a handful of books this year that I really loved, and that make my “Best of the year” list.

The 10th Circle Project – The First Circle $.99 (limited time only)
This one’s by my buddy Ryan McFadden (a local London boy no less), it’s an anthology of 4 stories, he co-wrote the framing sequence, and writes the main story “One Small Job”, which reminds me a lot of a more violent, more intense Lee Child by way of Hunter S Thompson story. Hope and Glory, twin cities that share a bloody history in the heart of North America. After generations of conflict, the mysterious 10th Circle Project promises a new era of cooperation and peace; if it doesn’t plunge them into the abyss of total war first.

If you end up liking that, there’s a second book out already. The 10th Circle Project is going to be 10 ebook editions as an experiment in publishing.

The 10th Circle – The Second Circle – $2.99

The Hunger Games – $4.34

It’s the first part of a trilogy, and soon to be a major motion picture.
In a world not much different from ours, the United States has collapsed into 12 districts, and the all powerful Capitol. Every year the districts send 2 children between the ages of 8 and 18 to participate in the hunger games. 24 enter, and only one will survive. The event is televised, and the districts are forced to watch to remind them of the power of the Capitol.

Ready Player One – $10.79

In another not-too distant future, the world is bleak and people escape to OASIS, a virtual reality world where you can play, go to school, earn money, and meet other people. The creator of the world, James Halliday, has passed away and bequeathes his entire Bill Gatesian fortune to whomever can solve an elaborate series of puzzles locked away within OASIS. Full of 80′s pop culture references, the book is funny and smart at the same time.

Grumby – $7.96

A bunch of hacker geeks create a whole new trend when they add state of the art electronics to a bunch of old Furbies and re-christen them Grumbies. The story traces the meteoric rise of a fictional start-up that begins in one guy’s living room. If you’re interested in start-up culture it’s a great read.

The Thank You Economy – $11.49

This is where the puck is going folks. In it, entrepreneurial guru Gary Vaynerchuk discusses the resurgence of the word of mouth economy, and how our grandparents are more prepared for the way the world is starting to work than we are. This really helped me to understand the importance of customer service, and has given me enough ideas for improvements to the website to last until Vaynerchuk writes his next book.

Letters to Steve: Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple’s Steve Jobs – $2.99

An interesting read looking at some of the letters one of America’s most popular CEO’s would send back in response to questions from regular people.

Yes, his name is really Al

2011 marked several significant milestones for me.

I turned 40, Charlene and I celebrated our 10th anniversary, December marks 5 years at Info-Tech for me, our basement, begun October 2009 will finally be fully finished

Also, my hands-on, day-to-day involvement with All New Comics ended.

It’s been six years since I joined up with Peter to form All New Comics, Canada’s Online Comics Superstore. In that time a ton has changed for me.

Char and I had two kids, moved from Ajax Ontario to London (where I’m 10 minutes away from two great comic shops,and a lunch time walk from two more), I have a new job with tons more responsibility, and I have less and less time for other stuff, all the while I’m trying to figure out what my next challenge will be.

Meanwhile the industry has changed, with stores closing, entire lines of comics being rebooted, and of course digital

We did some pretty super-cool things and I think it’s safe to say we changed the Canadian Comic Shop landscape in several ways, most significantly by servicing remote areas like Nunavut, where our lone customer there was 6 hours away from the nearest shop!

I am not gone, far from it. I’ve been transitioning with Pete since June, and he handles about 90% of stuff now. I will keep my hand in the marketing stuff (monthly updates, Facebook and Twitter stuff), and I’ll make sure the site’s code stays humming along, but the days of me responding to emails at 2am are likely over.

For our customers, nothing really changes, other than Pete responding to more emails than me. He’s handled most of the business for the last three years. You can expect the same quality of service, and the same awesome comics will still go out with the same attention to detail in the packing of orders.

What’s next for me? The New Ninjas and I are working on something cool that we hope to tell folks about soon, and I have an idea or two of my own up my sleeve, and of course Char says I should relax as well

I guess the best thing to say is stay tooned!

So I sat down and figured out what matters the most to me at work.

Don’t Do It Unless You Can Make It Awesome
I love Captain Pike’s line in the JJ Abrams Star Trek Movie. “You know, your father was Captain of a starship for 12 minutes, he saved the lives of 800 crew including your mother’s and yours. I dare you to do better.”

My goal is to make everything I touch better, no matter how small that improvement is. That should be your goal too. Everything you do should be better than it was before you touched it.

If you can’t do that, stop touching things.

What You Do Is More Important Than How You Do It!
The minute you have written that last line of code you will figure out a better way to do it. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve finished a project, looked back at a bunch of the CSS classes I declared, and said “Well whoever did that was obviously stupid.”, that whoever was me…and at this point…who cares? Get it done, refactor through iterations, and move on.

Just Get It Done!
Seriously, get it done. Don’t spend endless hours wondering what you could do, writing intricate specs, and trying to figure out exactly what user base will use exactly what feature.

Experience tells me that we’re wrong 90% of the time anyway.

Users don’t use your product the way you think they will. They’ll hack it into new configurations, and figure out new ways to ruin it. Just get it out there, refactor it through iterations, and move on.

Just Ship It Already!
It’s good enough. You have no idea what users are going to do to it anyway. Why are you optimizing the network code if you don’t even know that 5 people are going to use it? Get it out, and if 1000 people start using it, throw up a “Oops, you guys are kicking our asses” post and get busy refactoring it…then refactor it further through iterations, and move on.

Make sure you know who you’re coding for
This is where “As a (type of user) I need to (do something) so I can (gain a benefit).” comes into play, if you’re unsure of exactly what you’re doing, make sure you look hard a the user type, what they want to do, and what benefit they get out of it. If you’re missing any one of those you’re probably doing something that doesn’t need to be done.

A system is NOT a type of user
Don’t ever say “as a system I need to do something”, systems aren’t actors, and if you’ve identified a system level task, congratulations…you just discovered a task. Figure out who the person is who gains the benefit, and you’ve got a task.

Know when to throw out the rules
As a (type of user) I need to (do something) so I can (gain a benefit). It’s a great way to remember all of the actors and benefits, but frankly if “The publishing tool needs to PUBLISH A GORRAM BLOG POST WITHOUT BREAKING” gets the point across…WHO CARES (besides the Scrum Police ™).

Jeffery Zeldman at DIG

The DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming) conference in London Ontario added a Web Development stream this year to compliment the gaming streams. With an opening keynote by Jeffery Zeldman’ and a closing one by Derek Featherstone, there was world class content being offered in my own home town. These are my slightly edited notes which I took during the talks. There’s some great insight in here, and some really cool links for reference later.

Jeffery Zeldman – @Zeldman’s keynote was everything I had hoped for, like a little synopsis of a bunch of a Book Apart books, with great examples of real world examples. He’s an engaging speaker, and he managed to get quite a few chuckles out of the very reserved London crowd. His Q&A session had loads of great crowd questions.

It was so nice hearing that Happy Cog is doing things like I want to move towards. Things like content centric design, and user centric design (to me, the most important person I have designed for is not the loud person in the room who may be signing my cheque, but the end user who I may never meet). He also said that Happy Cog has moved to the designer/developer model.

Cool Links:
Adaptive Web Design – the book (I’m happy to say I bought this from my seat).
HTML5 Doctor – Helping you implement HTML 5 today.

Next up was “Extreme Usability” with Derek Featherstone – @feather talked to a packed Salon B. Look at the extremes, if you address the needs of accessibility, you’ll make everything better for the majority, because you addressed the extremes.

Cool Links:
Derek Featherstone’s company Simply Accessible

Ideo The Deep Dive video.
Ideo’s Human Centered Design Tool Kit.

Casey McKinnon – @caseymck – of Freshbooks, talked about Gamifying a Web App, in this case changing the way that FreshBooks converts free users to paid, by going through the phases of, learning what the problems are, designing a solution, and measuring the impact.

Learn, don’t go it alone, set goals, and define what success will look like. Get a consultant.
For Freshbooks the goals were: Increase conversion, help customers be more successful because successful users convert better.
What makes a successful user? Who converts, and why?

Design, top tips for on-boarding.

* First minute is most important.
* Slowly reveal complexity.
* Minimize choice
* Create quests
* Reward completion
* Promote customization
For the game, once you’ve logged in 5 times, or have completed it, the game goes away.

Some other notes:
Freshbooks uses MixPanel to look at their metrics.
Customization, is a large indicator of engagement.

Cool links
Gabe Zichermann (the guy who Freshbooks had consult for them on Gamification)

Ahmed AL Tammi 3 mushrooms
Not a great presentation, he talked about Amazon’s Web Services and running a business off them. It’s interesting content (and how we run at Info-Tech), but his presentation was very boring, and I left early.

This seems unfair, but he did several things that speakers should avoid.  1: Stood behind the lectern and just read. 2: Had all of his words on his slide, and read the slide.  and 3: Spent an hour self-promoting his company.

By all means use your company as a case study, or as an example, and even give yourself a shameless plug or two, but don’t shill when you’re a speaker.

Finally it was time for the closing talk, once again Derek Featherstone (@feather) came back to talk about Designing Better Websites.

The key question you should ask yourself is “How fast can I go?”
Given that you have constraints, what is the best possible website you can make?
How do we define better, given technical, resource, budget, and time constraints.

Stephen Anderson @stephenanderson
Small improvements that make a difference. If you behave a certain way, why not create an interface that conforms to that behavior?

What about mobile?

What resolutions do we design for?

* Less than 220 px
* iPad
* Full browser window
What ranges do we design for?

UX camp, how do you change a site to respond to content changes (schedule only for day of event).

Content strategy should change based on what’s going on with the content.

Does content priority change when you consider time, state of mind, or location?

What technological challenges are there?

Concern: Diminishing returns. Sure we can do this, but we should consider the effort that’s involved.

Cool Sites:
Boagworld. A case study in responsive design. Interesting story about responsive design.
A collection of sites using Media Queries.

Seize the Room

Steve Jobs

Today the world is a little less beautiful, because yesterday, Steve Jobs died.

I have no profound story of how I met Mr. jobs, or how I’ve used his products for decades, the truth is I hated every experience with a Mac I’d ever had until a couple of years ago (except for editing…Macs always rocked at editing, and Final Cut Pro was a joy to work with).

I was a late convert, it took a long time, and it all started with an MP3 player.

We were all given iPod Mini’s at TSN as an annual gift, it was a nice little device, and I used the hell out of it, discovering podcasts, and remembering my love for non-mainstream talk radio.  Suddenly I could listen to two hours of tech news every week, or a weekly video games show.  I was given an iPod video, and loved seeing how video could suddenly be in your pocket (plus 30 gigs was enough to keep my entire music library with me).

My habits changed and soon I was no longer buying CD’s, why bother when in 3 minutes I could have excellent quality audio files on my iPod?

I strayed a little and experimented with a Microsoft Zune (still ahead of its time doing things like wireless sync and social media connections 3 years before anyone else) , but soon moved to an iPod touch and then an iPhone.

I haven’t looked back, the iPhone is the most amazing, ubiquitous device I’ve ever touched.  It is always with me, and is everything from my camera to my diary.

We bought a 27″ iMac at work, and I fell in love with it.  Editing was a breeze, and I had to admit that OSX had come a long way.  Shortly after, I bought my first Mac, a used white MacBook.  I’ve never looked back, and while I own a couple of PC’s in the house still, Apple has a prominent place in my home.

When the iPad came out, I immediately coveted it, but I swore to wait until the v2 came out. In the mean time I bought an Apple TV, and got Char an iPod touch.

In the spring I bought an aluminum 13″ Macbook Pro, I’m not one to “love” my computer, it’s a tool, but I actually love my MacBook Pro.  I had always heard Apple converts say “it just works”, and that’s the case for me.  Every now and then I have to log into a Windows box, and I dread it.  Things are slower for no reason, and you can tell that there’s always a ton of overhead going on.  When a window stops responding on my Mac for some reason it’s totally isolated and never takes down the system.

The iPad has been a revolution to me.  I answer 90% of my email on it, read all of my news on it, and consume most other media through it.  Plus I do weird things like take notes, manage my server, and do a little drawing.

It truly is magical, and what Mr. Jobs made his company understand was that technology is an enabler, and the best technology moves out of the user’s way.

Steve Jobs has made beautiful products, and he has challenged the rest of us to not settle for good enough.  I think it’s fair to say that a lot of my desire to deliver awesomeness and never settle for “okay” or “mediocre” is because of the inspiration of Steve Jobs.

Without a doubt Apple’s products command a premium, but they should, I sat for five hours with my laptop on battery power last night, and my iPad regularly gets 8-10 hours of solid use.  They don’t overheat, they don’t crash randomly, and the touch experience is so simple that Maks has been using an iOS device since he was one and a half! Both he and Kaylin can navigate around on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad easily.

The fact that he had the vision to create these products has allowed others to iterate on them and create new versions, which has inspired Apple to continue to be better. They were catalyst products that boosted us forward decades in innovation to the point where science fiction and science fact are the same.

He may not have hewn the brushed aluminum, or coded the interfaces that make everything Apple touches awesome, but all indications are that he micro-managed the CRAP out of the organization to get them to where they are. He built a company that will go on and do amazing things because of people like Jony Ive, and Tim Cook.

Apple will survive and thrive long after Steve is gone, and the world is better because of it.

Amahi Media Server

About six months ago my MediaSmart Home Server started acting strangely.  I did quite a bit of research and my conclusion was that the new software I installed about a year ago (which gave it a ton more functionality) was kind of bloated for the underpowered hardware.

What to do?  I love my home server, I love the fact that it did backups and all kinds of nice little things, but honestly in the 4 years I’ve had it, I’ve only used the backup features twice (once to save a corrupt hard drive, once to save Char’s computer from a virus).  Other than that it worked as a NAS and a media collector.

As a NAS it was wonderful, until a hard drive failure made me lose a few files.  That was irritating.  As a media collector it was horrible, duplicating files and creating a labyrinthian file structure that hurt my face.

Plus my needs have changed.  I don’t like having a separate PVR in my house sucking up power, I have a Boxee and an Apple TV in my house now, and I’m sure there are wonderful things they can do as well.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a cheap secondary NAS to do all of my backups to (maybe 2TB of RAID1 duplication), and on top of that have a second NAS that could do media collection and PVR everything?  What would be extra cool is if it could do it with my extremely power conscious hardware and maybe take 2-3 computers out of our equation here in the homestead.  As an added benefit, if I can figure out how to do all of this via the internet, I can probably cut the cord.

The first part was to buy a DLink DNS-323, it’s a little NAS box that has 2 drive bays, is incredibly hackable, and has a bunch of different little features in it.  It’s Linux based, so in order to do cool things, I’d need to break out my long dormant bash skills, but I love a challenge.

I mounted the box, got a hard drive in there, and went out to find some of the features I’d need to make the box better.  I added the FireFly media server, a dynamic DNS server, and an update to create better SMB (regular networking) shares.  It was dead simple, and probably the best $100.00 I could have spent.  I moved my files over without much effort and then looked at my Home Server.

So now I have this beautiful piece of hardware that is essentially a brick.  What to do with it?  Enter Amahi.  I’ve been reading about it for a while, it’s a lightweight server based on Fedora Linux with a slick web interface.  It does regular NAS stuff, allows for automated scheduled backups of computers, and has some extra things like SickBeard (automated download of TV shows) integration.

I downloaded and installed it according to the instructions on How To Geek: Upgrade Your MediaSmart Home Server, and everything worked pretty much as advertised.  I then put the drive in my Home Server, and had it configured to do some cool things.

SickBeard

Up first, SickBeard, which schedules downloads of TV shows.

SABnzbd

Up next, SABnzbd, which goes out to (***some place special on the internet***) downloads the files, unpacks them, and stores them in a file.  The average TV show takes about 3 minutes to download.

So how does it work?  After the first week it’s recorded all of our TV shows, saved them to the network share, and we can watch them in the basement on the Boxee Box.

Where do we go from here?  Well first up, I’m getting a new internet connection.  While I have no problems with Rogers, from a technical point of view, I HATE doing the constant mental calculations about how close to my limit I am and whether I can download that ISO from Technet, or if I can download that game on the PSN.  I’m going with TechSavvy, and I’ll probably cut the cord once we get our HD Antennas working properly.

Action Comics #1

I still get my comics from All New Comics, but because I get quite a bit less than I used to they come at the end of the month.

There was quite a bit of press about Grant Morrison’s Action Comics #1 (buy it now at All New Comics), and after reading some of the reviews online, I decided that I wanted to check out some of the other new books.

So on a whim I went to a local comic shop on my lunch break. The store is by far London’s largest.  The bearded proprietor asked me what I was looking for. “The new DC books” said I. “Sorry man, I can’t sell them to you until I have pulled them all for my regular customers. Come back at 4pm.” said he.

Seriously. 4pm?

So let me get this straight. At lunch you see a customer come into your store. He’s not a regular who normally buys from you, but he’s wearing a dress shirt, dress pants, and dress shoes. Without stereotyping, he’s likely got some money. He’s offering to pay you money for comics. Specifically he’s offering to pay you money for the new comics which everyone has over-ordered SPECIFICALLY TO ADDRESS THIS AMAZING NEW MARKET WHICH WE ALL ASSUME WILL BE COMING INTO OUR STORES (online at All New Comics we have LITERALLY ordered twice our normal subscription numbers to sell to people who visit our site…normally if we sell 20 copies of a comic, we’ll sell 2 online, but we’re gambling that a bunch of new faces will be checking stuff out, and so far that’s paid off).

I went back to my office, turned on my iPad, and downloaded Action #1, Batgirl #1, and Swamp Thing #1. Later tonight I think I’m going to buy a few more new comics from the DC Comics App (even though it irritates me that I’m paying full price to basically rent a comic book).

Now let’s be honest, I COULD have pressed the issue.  I could have told him that I own an online shop and really just wanted to check some issues out, I COULD have told him I used to work in that very store years ago (and there’s a good chance he was a customer of mine at some point), I could have name dropped any one of a half dozen people who would have been able to help me out.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that this store failed the most basic principle of this new launch.  Sell to people you don’t normally sell to.  These guys should have been TRIPPING over themselves to help me out.

I’ve bought a few things in the shop from time to time.  I bring my kids in, and buy them stuff, I buy supplies like boxes, which indicates I have comics from SOME source, and am likely a good “mark” to try to convince to buy from them, and they can’t even make the effort for me.

I wish I could say this is an isolated incident, but this same treatment has happened to me at pretty much every single comic shop I’ve ever visited.  I’ve been irritated, overlooked, or otherwise ignored time and time again.

People have all sorts of excuses for what is killing comic shops, I’ll tell you right now that the problem with most comic shops is right behind the counter.