Rough Few Weeks

I've been working on trying to get the Alpha 1 ready for release to my test team, but several things have blocked me. First was that I was in the process of interviewing for a project manager position with Examiner.com. The position sounded very exciting and challenging, so I thought I'd pursue it. I ended up spending quite a bit of time preparing and interviewing it - longer than I expected - but it was a good choice and I start tomorrow. Yay me.

The second thing is that I ran across some unfinished functionality in the app when I plugged in quests, mana pool regeneration, and leveling up. MP regeneration went as quickly as I expected, which was nice. Quests took a while longer because even though I was able to write the back-end code quickly and had it working where I could test it thoroughly, integrating it took far longer than I expected. Part of it was the UI, which didn't work the way I'd hoped, and the other part was that I ran into some memory issues.

The third and most major of the entire blockage has been my MacBook. I bought a MacBook in November to do iPhone development and it was working fine until just recently. I began seeing major slowdowns - to the point where it was unusable - and had trouble copying files and building properly. I was a bit concerned when I couldn't even boot it up one day. I took it into the store and they think it's a bad HDD so they've ordered a replacement. In the meantime I hit Best Buy and bought a MyBook external HDD (1 TB). I managed to back up everything manually - although I can't actually do a Time Machine backup. :( Regardless, when they replace the drive I can get things working quickly again, I hope.

So, I hope to have things ready this weekend. We'll see how that goes, of course. More to come!