Septemer - T-shirt-a-geddon and other misfortunes.

Well, September has gotten off to an odd start.  I planned this month to be my big "Commodore" series, and hopefully get another 8-Bit Keys episode produced as well.  I had the unboxing video finished on August 31, so I figured I had the whole month to work on this series.  

Well, that hasn't worked out so far.  

Over the labor day weekend, I had planned to tear down all of the sound-deadening foam on the walls of my studio and mount shelving brackets.  (I needed to be able to find the studs, so the foam was in the way) Once that was done, I could mount the foam in between the brackets.  My plan was to put my T-shirt inventory here, since after all, piles of T-Shirts make excellent sound absorbing materials as well.  

Well, when I released that unboxing video, I figured I'd probably get about 20 T-Shirt orders the first day and I'd sell one every day or two for the next year, judging by my other merchandise sales.  

Boy was I wrong...

I sold 400 T-Shirts over night. (I only had 466 in total) I spent the next 2 days from morning until bedtime shipping them.  I had to refund probably 40 orders because I had run out of stock to fill the orders. I had to refund another 30 or 40 international orders because I discovered a problem with my website not charging people the correct amount for shipping.   I was totally unprepared for this.  Sure, I could have had my website track inventory so that it wouldn't have oversold the items (I'm sure plenty of you were about to suggest that) but in the past it has just not been necessary because things sell so slowly that I have plenty of time to see when something is getting low on stock.  

And make matters worse, I came down with a bad cold a few days ago, which pretty much put me out of commission for 2 days.  In fact, I feel bad because I was still shipping T-Shirts some of the time with my cold.  I tried to keep my hands washed, but I hope I didn't transmit too many germs around the world.  Hint: if you bought one, wash it before wearing it!  

I did order some more T-shirts.  It appears the 6502 design was the most popular. It sold out in all sizes after just a few hours.  Which is good because I also had a similar looking 6581 SID chip design that I decided not to get made originally because I wasn't sure it would be popular.  Well, I went ahead and ordered a couple of hundred of those too.  So, I hope you like it when it comes in.  

So what's the plan now?  Well, I'm not finished with my shelving, (that photo is from this morning) but it is good enough that I can start filming again.  So I'm starting work on the Commodore PET episode.  This episode is going to be huge and is probably the most important episode in the Commodore mini-series I'm doing because it's pretty much the foundation that all of the rest of the computers evolved from.  So there's a lot to cover!  In fact, the script is huge.  I'm going to be working on it hard for the next several days, but this one might take a week to finish.  

I do also have a video planned for this month (possibly after the PET episode) that is not Commodore related, it will be on the old late 70s Coleco mini-desktop arcade machines and their modern recreations.

So stay tuned.  Unfortunately, I don't have any videos coming out until the PET episode is done.