OK, so I’ve finally decided on a project that will expand the Scruby 30mm Colonial range. It isn’t big, as I will be doing all the sculpting, etc.

One of my war game projects is 30mm Colonials – Sudan, for historical games, and Mafrica, for non-historical games. Scruby had just a few Fuzzy figures in the range… Well I’m tired of painting the same two basic figures, so I’ve decided to update these a bit. I may stick with the standards of Sword and Spear, but I will branch out and make other changes.

The first thing I have in mind is to get rid of the Scruby shield and make something a bit more accurate – it will be a separate piece too. Perhaps I’ll do up a couple of different shields so we can have some variety.

The next will be to add a few different costumes. What I have in mind are: trousers, jibah and perhaps trousers and waistcoat. Of course we will keep the original kilt or loincloth that Scruby created.

From there, the only other thing I have in mind is an open handed version of the figures and an updating of the spear (give it a proper head). The sword could do with an update too, but I’m not too worried about that, the spear is just plain wrong, so it needs an update.

Oh, and I guess that I should update the camel rider too – but I may need to make this one form scratch, as I don’t have any dollies that will work…

No time frame on these, but I’ve got the bug now, so maybe I’ll have something to show before too long!

Scene: An email inbox – filled with many, many messages. Many of the messages are from evil doers – for fun, let’s just call them Vikings (they happen to wearing round horned helmets, if that matters to you). Some of the messages are from our valued customers… Whenever messages come in the Vikings begin singing or is it chanting…

Spam spam spam spam…

Well, yep, that is what our inboxes have been filled with (SPAM) for the past month or more! So much (the November count for my personal account was in excess of 20,00 pieces) that we tuned our filters to catch as much as possible, but still every time the incomig message alert goes “ding” those darn Vikings crank it up: Spam spam spam spam…

Where will it end? Will it ever stop? I’d guess (and safely so) that the answer is simple – Spam out last the world as we know it!

Vikings: Spam spam spam spam…

What to do? There has been so much of that icky stuff in our mailboxes that we have been loosing messages from you, our customers. Sometimes, it is just a question, but other times it is orders that are getting lost. Sure, some of the loss is our fault – I could tune my mail scrubber differently, but then I’d likely loose messages some other way (virus checkers, or crashed hard disks, or misbehaving mails systems not under my control).

HistoriFigs: Gee, I have a free hour, better check for new email messages.

Vikings: Spam spam spam spam…

HistoriFigs: Drat that spam! I’ll fix those guys yet!

In an effort to improve customer service and more effectively manage our mailboxes I’ve set to work on two projects. The first is a better routing system for electronic orders. The second is improved mail filtering. The first project is now in use on the production server. The solution is part software and part process. The process part was easy – a new routing system. The software part was a bit harder, but after squashing a few bugs it seems to be working. It really isn’t anything more than a very, very, very strict filtering system that feeds into our new processing process (we shouldn’t loose any more electronic orders, as they will be routed (manually forwarded) to our new order processing queue)

Anyhow, in case we haven’t responded to one (or more) of your email message to us, you now know why! We many not have actually received your message(s).

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that our current solutions will be a big help. So, if you’ve sent us a message in the mast few weeks and have not heard back from us, please try again.

PS. I really like Vikings; it is just that Spam and Vikings go so well together…

For those of you who missed our recent postings, we have been posting quite a few new articles over on the Table Top Talk site and a bunch of new material in the Wargamer’s Corner. Not only that, but the is a lot more to come!

I’ve seen a strange trend this past month – people searching for and buying 54mm Hula Dancers! OK, well maybe they haven’t been searching for Hula Dancers in 54mm, but they have been finding them and then buying them. No complaints here, we do like to sell figures…

Perhaps there was some recurring theme folks were dialing into? Or maybe everyone just wants a piece of Hawaii at home?

Anyhow, it was just an interesting flurry of activity – log files show a number of hits from folks searching for “hula”….