Fitness

P90X Update

So, we’re half way through P90X, and while we love it and what it’s doing for us, there are some other life issues that are getting in the way, and we’re going to have to put P90X on hold, I think, probably until February.

I’m really torn about it, because I don’t want to quit, but the workouts are long, and we just can’t fit them in at a reasonable hour and still get enough sleep.

“But,” I can hear you say, “There’s lots of time in the day!”

You’d be right, and all of that time right now is taken up by a few things. We get up at 5:45 in the morning, so that Wendy can get to work on time, and then I work until 3:30, at which time I pick up the kids from school and watch them until Wendy gets home from work which would normally be about 5:00.

Except for the issues she’s dealing with because of the four idiots over the past year that couldn’t drive their way out of a box and totalled two of her cars. Right now, she’s seeing at least one therapist of some sort each day, which means she typically doesn’t get home until six or six thirty, then it’s time for dinner, which leads us to 8:00 or so, and then getting the kids to bed and making sure they get some time with her, and she doesn’t get a break until 9:00 at night. To then have to exercise for an hour and fifteen minutes or more means we’re often working out until 11:00 at night, and we can never get a solid nights sleep except for two days a week.

So, until she can dump a few of these physical/massage/accupuncture therapy treatments, we’re going to go back to doing workouts that are more in the 30-45 minute range so we can get a good nights sleep, which, in many ways, is just as important as the exercise.

Creativity, StoryBox, Writing

Some Updates On StoryBox and Other Things

I just uploaded version 0.3.6 of StoryBox, with a new “Preveiw” mode so you can see how any portion of your story will look when all it’s parts are combined. It also fixes some scrollbar issues, and a couple other things.

Also, after a year and ten months of off and on reading, I finally finished Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, and it was worth the effort in the end. But man, those first couple hundred pages are hard to get into. Too many disparate things going on for my simple mind. I always have problems with novels that start out with a large number of POV characters. Keep me with one for a few chapters, give me some background on the world, then switch. At the very least, do that in the first book.

Software, StoryBox, Writing

StoryBox Somewhat Weekly #5

4 Comments

So late on this update. Been far too busy with the contract work. It’s getting close to the end of the project, and the time frame for it is getting tight, so it’s taking more and more of my time.

In any case, I’ve just uploaded Version 0.0.30 of StoryBox, with some changes and fixes to support some of the people that have actually started to check it out. The usual crashes and things to be expected when first real users get their hands on it, and some other insights, too. It’s really nice to be getting some feedback.

Most of it is coming via the “bug” button on the UI, which is probably the quickest way to tell me what’s wrong. It’s making it easy on my side to keep track of things.

If you haven’t already, check it out on the StoryBox Downloads page. You can see everything I’ve fixed, added and changed as well as the frequency of the updates.

I just hope I don’t spend so much time working on it that I don’t have time for NaNoWriMo (which I’m very intent on winning this year).

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox Early Adopter

7 Comments

Check out StoryBoxSoftware.com. Yes, it’s a little plain (understatement of the year), but you can now download a very early version of StoryBox. It’s got all the major features I want in it for the first version, except for export to rtf, and support for image type documents. Lots of minor features are still missing, though, but in my very biased opinion, it’s at least usable.

Please, try it out, tell me what you think.

Oh, and what the heck do I mean by “Early Adopter”? Well, if you like it a lot, you can buy it now for $25, which is at least a $15 savings over what I will be selling it for when I call version 1.0 done.

Software, Website

StoryBox Weekly #4

This week has been a little slower, though still productive. I’ve had a lot going on with the paying gig, and that takes precedence, unfortunately. I alos received notice that my host was shutting down my server, so I’ve had to quickly move everything to a new host. This included recoding some of the Laughing Dragon Games site to use MySql instead of Microsoft SQL Server.

Progress on StoryBox, though included a new home at StoryBoxSoftware.com. It’s not linked because it’s just a placeholder at the moment.

I added a single level outliner, so if you don’t like working with index cards, you can work in the outline. It will become multi-level eventually, but I wanted the basic feature in so I can start getting some feedback.

Project wide search went in this week, also. Eventually, I will add options for only searching document bodies, synopsis, notes or tags separately or in any combination, and the option to search in any particular set of documents.

One other last change was to swap out the ribbon bar for a regular menu and toolbars. Why? Well, it turns out if you want to use that ribbon bar UI, you have to get a license from Microsoft, and then follow a bunch of guidelines. You also can’t use it on anything that directly competes with any of the Microsoft Office products, including Word. I do not know if they would consider StoryBox as a direct competitor to Word, and since I’m in a hurry to release this thing, I don’t want to go any further with the ribbon bar only to find out later that I can’t use it at all, even if I did want to follow all their technical requirements.

I’m on target, I think, for an October 1 pre-release release. What that means, is that you’ll be able to buy it early for quite a bit less than what I’ll be asking once I tag it with Version 1.0. I haven’t settled on exact final numbers yet, but the pre-release will be right around $25. Once version 1.0 rolls around, it will be significantly more.

So what’s the plan for this week? Mostly tightening up the features that are already in and working on the website.

Software

StoryBox Weekly #3

Yeah, the title says it all. From here on out, I’m going to try to give you a weekly update on StoryBox. Once I can come up with the money to license certain components I’m using, I’ll have this thing up for early sale.

So, what went in this week? Lots of little changes.

I’ve added Character, Location, and Item nodes and put them at the same level in the binder as the Story and Box of Notes. They are now primary containers for the appropriate document types. I’ve also added a context menu to the binder tree that will allow you to create new items, which are dependent upon which item in the tree you’ve selected.

I’ve added blacking out additional screens to the full screen mode for those of you that, like me, have multiple monitors. You can also now change the background color, the paper color, and the font color of full screen mode.

I’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, added a splash screen, made it store the rich text instead of plain text so you can now use bold, italics, and underlines in your text. There are now cut, copy, and paste buttons and context menu items.

I keep trying to use it to start working on this novel I want to write, but every time I sit down to do it, I find some niggling little thing I want to fix first, which ends up in a couple hours spent working on StoryBox instead of my book.