Author archive - Cale

The Housing Market

Everyone has had their poor experiences with the current housing market in the US. I myself have been hit pretty hard by it. It is part of the reason why I haven’t left the state–because I’ve been job-hunting in other parts of the country.

I made my first home purchase at age 22, two years ago (October, 2006). I received a 100% financing on the house because I had recently gone through a divorce and was broke so I didn’t have the down-payment money for a house. This particular loan was structured so that the first 10 years of payments were interest only. I got a decent rate of 6.5% which is fixed for those first 10 years, then it will adjust. At the time of the purchase, I was feeling as if I was increasing my net worth by owning a home. I figured that in Atlanta, the housing market was going to go nowhere but up. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In two years, my home has lost roughly $8,000 in value and I haven’t paid a dime towards principal yet. I have no equity in it and the home is worth less than it was when I bought it. In my quest to find a bank that would refinance me at a 30-year fixed loan which wasn’t interest-only I discovered that banks no longer did 100% loans for homes. I can understand why, but now I’m really screwed. The banks that I looked at required at least 10% equity in the home. I have -6% equity in the house if you include calculating the market conditions.

Friends have told me to rent it out if I wanted to buy a new house. Once I explain my situation, they quickly hush up. If I were to rent out the house, I’d have to charge $1,000 per month to pay the mortgage (and make a very small profit of less than $100). Comparable homes can sell for cheaper payments per month, plus homes of this size and condition go for a little over $800 per month in rent. There’s too much competition for me to even bother trying.

So, I guess I’m stuck here for a while. Unless someone out there has any suggestions.

Warhammer Online

Well, any MMO fan has been recently drooling over the release of Warhammer Online. I myself was somewhat anticipating the release. Even more so, I was anticipating the giant 10GB download to finish. After a day of downloading, it finally finished and I’ve been playing on and off for the last couple days now.

And now for the bad stuff: I’m about to poke holes all over the place here… How can a game that was “three years in development” get released with SO MANY OBVIOUS BUGS?!?! I’m amazed at how this kind of stuff gets in the game. Is it the lack of a QA department, crappy development teams, or just deadline pressure that allowed for so many bugs to find their way into the game? I’d expect a few, yes, games are very complex pieces of software–I understand that. But the fact that so many highly-visible and “obvious to the player” bugs has me concerned. If their front-ends have bugs like this, I wonder what the back-end systems look like, hmm?

Now, the concepts of WH are great, and I love the gameplay. None of the bugs have completely turned me off of the game (yet), or maybe thats just my $50 talking. The bugs that I’ve found (and reported) are not necessarily show-stoppers, but they should have been addressed before release, they’re way too visible.

So far here’s what I’ve found:

1. At first login, or after a patch, the UI displays windows one by one on top of each other in very rapid succession. This breaks focus numerous times while the player is trying to school through the numerous terms pages to agree to the terms. This one is minor, but frustrating and annoying.
2. The cursor’s position doesn’t seem to be correlating to the cursor icon in some menus–namely the server selection menu. I clicked “Phoenix Throne” like 3 times but ended up getting different servers each time. This may have been an attempt to get me to go somewhere else because PT was getting really full. If so, there should have been a message about that, I got frustrated as hell.
3. The AI can walk through a f@&king stone wall when in a foot-chase with you. The wall was only about half-height of the character, but the character walked straight through it and chased me down. I sure can’t walk through it, why should he be able to.
4. On first spawn, I encountered a couple of cases where my character window wasn’t drawing correct colors for the hair, tattoo, and skin. It simply appeared default until I actually changed my equipment.
5. Throwing a weapon (like an axe) won’t render the axe in the air roughly 80% of the time. The character plays the “throw” animation, but the weapon won’t appear to go flying through the air. The target still takes damage, but it looks like they took damage from some phantom force.
6. I don’t know if this happens to anybody else, but this one was a bad one. I was using an item in the world, near heavy agro. I was interrupted by battle during the use process, which took the progress bar away; which was normal. However, I couldn’t draw my weapon, I couldn’t attack, I really couldn’t do anything but run and hope for the best. My character even continued to play the “using” animation (which was reading a book). When I’d move, the legs would stay still so it looked like I was sort of just gliding around. Then when I finally was able to draw my weapon, it drew my weapon and shield but kept the book there too. So my character magically gained another hand to hold a sword, shield, and a book at the same time. This one pissed me off heavily because it was completely not fair to the player. I had to run near some NPCs and let them take care of the mob of 10 following me because I couldn’t attack.
7. The “Social Menu” button doesn’t capture mouse events roughly 50% of the time. It takes some serious effort to bring up the social menu. Sometimes when I scroll over it, the tooltip won’t popup and the button won’t highlight. It takes a couple of tries of mousing over until you see those visual cues before the menu will actually come up when you click.

The WordPress Bandwagon

Alright, I’ve never used WordPress before, but I figured the fans of it must be seeing something good, because it seemed to have caught on and stuck. I’m going to start using it for any random thoughts, code snippets, and other interesting findings I come upon.

I don’t care if you read it or not, its more of a public journal anyway.

-Cale