One house too many

Having two houses is one damn house too many.

When I'm not painting or dragging boxes of hardwood flooring up the stairs, I'm trying to keep the previous house in order, as people are still looking at it despite it having a buy-contract on it already. Both lawns look awful now.

On top of that, I'm having the worst allergy problems I've had since grade school, and I've caught the ear-infection that Maggie and Shelly are suffering from. Probably gonna head over to the doctor tomorrow and get Shelly's ear-infection cure, which includes some antibiotics and a handful of Limbaugh pills to kill the intense ear-pain.

I hate taking pills. Ugh.

On the game front, I licensed Ernie's Honeycomb game and will be releasing it under my own moniker. I'll likely change the name to 'Baffle Bees', and put in some kind of daily play-against-others puzzle (along with an enhanced standalone version), but it'll otherwise be the same. I'm going the Corman route here --recognizing a quality, yet obscure, product and bringing it to the masses. . .or at least as many masses as I can muster. Corman made a pile of cash in the 60's and 70's bringing some high quality foreign films to the US. Before him, most foreign films were brought to the US by film-buffs, and they received almost no distribution at all.

Few even realize that many films by Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Werner Herzog and Ingmar Bergman were licensed and imported by the same man who gave us Humanoids From The Deep and Big Bad Mama :-)

I guess I'll have to see if I've got an eye for a good product. The first time I played Ernie's game, I played it for an hour straight, then I was playing the game in my head while trying to sleep, so that's a good sign.

Hoo Boy

Hoo boy.

I've recently gotten a couple of emails from a guy in Iran. He's beaten Bulldozer 1 and wants me to send him bulldozer 2. Problem is, no online vendor will ship the games there, and they're not available on the shelves anywhere.

I gave him my standard 'Due to an agreement with my publisher, I cannot make available for download' letter. He sent me back an email begging me. Funniest line, though, was.

'here there is no copyright law for them and there no one needs to know any thing.'

This guy actually thinks that I should be MORE likely to send my stuff to a country where they don't recognize ownership of intellectual property and I have zero legal recourse if he starts selling copies?

I repeat. Hoo boy. It's like a chapter outta Atlas Shrugged :)

House Hell Revisited

112 signatures and 56 initials later (we counted), we're owners of a new house in Southlake (see the 3/15 entry for pics).

And it wasn't as easy as it should've been. Turns out the existing owner was a complete creep, and he was half-hoping that we wouldn't qualify for the loan.

You see, the house had been up for sale for nearly a year, and we were the first people to make an offer, and that offer was quite a bit lower than what he'd been hoping to get. He needed to move, though, so he took it. Miracle of miracles, somebody else tried to buy the house (and likely for more money) the day after he accepted our offer. The only way he could get the house back on the market would be if we weren't approved for the loan, so there you go.

Worst part was regarding our taxes. We closed on 4/14, the day before tax-day. We'd already filed an extension through our CPA, so we had until August to get our 2003 taxes done, but the loan people wanted to see 'em anyway, even if they didn't exist. The only other solution would be for us to pay the bank $2,200 to change our loan to 'blind' or whatever terminology you hear on those mortgage commercials that refers to a loan given with incomplete information. We talked to the CPA, but they were up to their eyeballs in taxes and couldn't squeeze us in. We had three choices.

1. Bite the bullet and throw $2200 down the drain.
2. Beg our CPA to get our taxes done before 4/15 so we could get 'em to the bank.
3. Agree with the homeowner to push the closing date off a couple of days so that the taxes could get done and everything could get approved and everything would be hunky-dory.



The only remaining avenue available seemed to be number 3, so we called the homeowner. Given that I already mentioned above that he's a creep, you can guess what happened. He absolutely refused to move the closing date even one day. We then returned to our CPA and explained the whole situation. The CPA didn't wanna see us pay $2,200 due to circumstances beyond our control, so they worked a couple of late nights and got 'em done early for us.

And you can bet we sent 'em a bigass fruit basket that day :)

The capper happened on Friday. The homeowner's wife (who has a job in Chicago and stays there most of the time, go figure) called us up on Thursday to tell us that they were moved out and that the house would be vacant on 9 AM Friday. Around 9 AM Friday, our realtor showed up with house keys. I'd been boxing up stuff all week, so I loaded up the car with boxes and headed up to the house. Upon unlocking the front door, I heard 'I'M TAKING A NAP HERE!!!' He was still there. He yelled that since he said he agreed to be out by Friday that he was gonna take ALL of Friday.

This guy was friggin' unreal. We complied with all contracts. We did everything right. We qualified for the loan. We closed on the day we promised. The loan went through and his mortgage account was closed. And he still wanted to fight. He probably stayed until midnight just to make sure that we didn't try to get in 'early'.

The next day Shelly went around the neighborhood to introduce herself. Not surprisingly, the neighbors were happy to see him go.

. . .and he smokes, so we've gotta paint the whole place before we can unpack

. . .and Maggie's been sick the whole week, so we've had the grand pleasure of doing all of this with a sick kid around.

On a similar note, we just got a contract to sell our existing house, and they wanna close in a hurry. Our last payment on this house will be in May, and our first payment on the new house will be in June. Our biggest worry was that this place wouldn't sell and that we'd be stuck with several months of holding two mortgages. We rule.

What I need!

What I really want is a Flash reference that documents everything, including all of the quirks.

For a while I'd been using Colin Moock's ActionScript reference, and that was quite nice. I wanted to get something that covered ActionScript 2.0, so I just got the new Macromedia Press ActionScript 2.0 Dictionary (which has the best price/page ratio I've seen in a while at $17.50 for 1080 pages, but I digress). Neither book, however, did a very good job of covering some of the little sneaky bits here and there that JUST DON'T WORK RIGHT!!!

For example, suppose you want to see if a key's pressed. Flash has a nice little callback already set up, so you simply do the following:

onKeyDown = function()
{
if (Key.isDown(Key.SPACE)) trace('you just pressed the space bar');
}

Simple, eh? Now, suppose you want to check for a tab key. The Key object has a TAB defined, so you think you could just check for Key.TAB. Right?

WRONG!!!

All of 'em work except for Key.TAB. Checking out Google and the newsgroups, it appears that Key.TAB doesn't work because Flash's component model has reserved it for tabbing through Flash components. If you press the tab key, It'll automatically highlight the next button on the screen, and that tab gets absorbed. Far as I can tell, there's no way to shut off tabbing through components, so there's no way to check for a tab-press if you've got components on the screen.

O'Reilly used to have a great series of books called 'Annoyances', like Windows 98 Annoyances, that documented all of the little bits of a system that didn't work quite the way you think they should. At best the books documented how to get around the annoyance, and at worst they confirmed that you weren't going crazy and that something that should be blindingly obvious (like above) indeed doesn't work like you think it should.

I need Flash Annoyances, and I need it soon :)

Good Java Freebie

I found an outstanding freebie that I've been meaning to post, but always had something different to say.

This one's JCreator, and it's a great Java IDE. For the longest time I'd been using Kawa as my Java IDE. One thing I'd always liked about Kawa was that it stole its user interface motif almost completely from VC++. Since I was familiar with VC++, the learning curve for Kawa was almost nonexistent. It was a good little cheap IDE and, unlike bloated slow monster Java IDE's of the time like JBuilder and VisualAge, it had respectable performance and didn't fill half of your hard drive. It didn't have any visual interface builders or anything like that, but if you just wanna hack together a quick little applet or Java application, it was perfect.

But all good things must come to an end. Kawa was purchased by Allaire, then Allaire was purchased by Macromedia. Kawa went neglected for a year, then was dropped entirely. I kept using Kawa for quite a while, but as the Java folks changed up the interfaces to their tools, it became more and more difficult to use Kawa with the newer compilers.

But then JCreator came along and solved my problems. Just as Kawa had borrowed the interface of the VC++ of the time (version 2 or 4), JCreator borrows its UI heavily from Visual Studio.NET. It performs very well and is a great product. There's a free version that's got some limitations (the biggest being the lack of interface to the Java debugger), but even the full version's price of $69 is pretty reasonable. Since I can't debug my stuff anyway without setting up a server on my machine, I'm running just fine on the free version.

So, if you need to work with Java (and I pity you if you do, frankly), check out JCreator.