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Hoisted by your own petard
There are a few times in my life where I absolutely do not want to be interrupted. One is when I’m writing — more specifically, when I’ve found my flow writing. Lord knows I interrupt myself enough when my writing isn’t working. But when things are going well, don’t bother me!
This came into play a couple weeks ago, when I was in said flow state. I was writing in Q10, which hides everything from you while you work — windows, menu bars, and so on. Out of nowhere, a popup window appears from the free anti-virus software I was using (AVG) advertising some discounted upgrade to their paid product.
To quote Willy Wonka: “You lose, sir.” I closed the popup, kept writing, and uninstalled AVG when I was done. (Now I’m using avast!, which is at least more unobtrusive.)
All of this was fine until a couple nights ago, when I was writing in Twine. I was really happy with some edits I had made to my opening text, but I also noticed a small bug, . So I saved my work and closed the app, fixed the bug, and then re-opened the (newly fixed) Twine. My story changes were gone.
WTF?
It hurts when you get screwed by software. It hurts even worse when you get screwed by software you yourself designed. The Save menu item is sacred; it absolutely has to save your work or else you simply can’t trust the application to do anything serious with it. For a while, I thought about just switching to a regular text editor just so I could keep going. But mainly, I sat there being frustrated with myself. How could I have let a bug like this out the door?
Then… I finally figured it out. It was saving my work. It was just saving it somewhere I didn’t expect it to. Long story. So Twine and I are ok again. But still, it is a very bad place to be in, when you distrust your own handiwork.
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