Yes, it’s a milestone build. Build 100!
But other than that, it’s relatively insignificant. Just some things to remember the state of things when you close and open projects.
But I found them so nice (for me) that I had to put them out instead of waiting until I had something bigger to deliver.
If you’ve poured your heart and soul, or maybe just a lot of blood and sweat into reaching 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo this year, visit NaNoWriMo.org and send a private message to mfassett, and I will give you a coupon for 40% off of StoryBox. If you didn’t win, you can still get 20% off through December 5th via the coupon code NANOWRIMO2010.
Congratulations to all the winners.
I was hoping to have a cool new feature for you for this release, however, someone reported a bug today that had to be fixed, so you get a build with a several bug fixes.
Yes, someone found one more thing that I broke. Originally, you weren’t allowed to delete ANY of the first 6 nodes created – Story, Characters, Items, Locations, Box of Notes, and Trash. Then, I decided to take up someones suggestion and allow you to create multiple story nodes. Turns out, when I added the new node types to allow that sort of thing, I had a subtle bug crop up – I was referencing the wrong enumeration when trying to figure out what I couldn’t delete, so now, you couldn’t delete the first 12 things! I’d never noticed before because the two enumerations had the same number of items.
Anyway, that’s fixed now. I also made quite a few other minor improvements, especially in the speed of applying styles like bold and underline.
Now, I’m going to go play WoW for a bit and then watch some poorly reviewed movies with my wife.
There’s a new song in the playlist, Piece By Piece, that I wrote and recorded today, while suffering from a mild headache and a croaky, phlegm filled throat. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing it when I get better, but I don’t think that really matters.
First, I want to say that I don’t participate much in political discussions, nor do I generally think very deeply about politics in general. I tend to avoid these things because I’d rather be thinking about making something, be it games, guitars, or whatever I’m doing at the moment.
However, the “mortgage crisis” and the “solutions” proposed by various politicians, really bother me, especially when none of them seem to address the real problem, and only seem to be bandaids.
The REAL problem, as I see it, is that lenders are allowed to advertise using direct marketing methods, including both paper and electronic mediums. Since we bought our house, we’ve been deluged with refinance offers from a large number of companies, all wanting to help us take the equity out of our house or save money on payments with a lower rate. People on the border of not having enough cash to cover their bills are, I suspect, very vulnerable to those types of offers.
What’s really unsettling is that, even in the midst of this crisis, despite being on of the companies in deep trouble because of their past lending practices, I’m still getting emails from Countrywide (who is the current holder of our loan) promoting a poor financial choice in the current housing market.
“Mark, your estimated home equity may be as much as $xxxxx. You may be able to refinance, possibly lock in a lower interest rate, and receive up to $xxxxx cash from your home’s estimated available equity!”
They say it like it would be a good thing to remove any cushion I have with regard to being able to sell my house if I wanted to. I also can’t see how this is good for them in the long run, as I bet many of the people that take them up on these refi offers (especially right now) will end up upside down on their loan.
For other types of debt products, the worst offender in my book are the credit card companies. They send you pre-approved application after pre-approved application until they find the combination of numbers that gets you excited about going and buying whatever it is you want. They send them to college students who HAVE NO INCOME! These behaviors are predatory, as far as I’m concerned, and should be illegal. Why is our economy teetering on the edge of a knife? We’ve tapped out our credit. Financial institutions won’t even lend each other money anymore because they’re afraid they won’t get it back. The people in this country can’t afford to pay their debts, plain and simple.
Imagine a world where lenders couldn’t advertise debt “products” (calling a credit card a product makes me ill) directly to the consumer. No more pre-approved accounts in the mail. No more loans that come disguised as checks (this one really makes me want to scream). No more refinance “opportunities” in your email.
I think our economy would be sitting on a much more solid foundation than it is today. The sub-prime mortgage crisis may still have happened. Go figure – sub-prime seems to me to indicate something along the lines of “risky fucking borrower”. But I suspect that it wouldn’t be near the crisis that it is, as people might only be in debt up to their waste, instead of up to their eyeballs.