• On Life and Love

    Actually Kinda Clever

    Upon reading “The Biggest Stock Scams of All Time” (an ambitious title, perhaps), I decided to update my non-existent knowledge of these scams and failures—including the 2008 business failures. Holy crap. I know, I’m so late to the party. I get the housing market failure. As Elf says, it’s not rocket science. But when Enron occurred (2001), I was a junior in high school, immersed in the IB program, and only cared about grades and college, not about the business/financial world. Reading up on Enron and WorldCom/MCI (who blatantly put expenses on the books as income) was only the start. (MCI was taken down by a little team of auditors…

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    Initial story management plugin done

    My initial pass at the story management plugin is in place. It doesn’t do the fancy things I want it to do yet, but it can note the root page of a series, output a list of stories in story-date order on that root page, note the arcs, and give Next/Previous links using the actual story names in the individual stories. Not bad for about 3 hours of work. Especially having to code around my elbows in WP. Interesting note: PHP stores timestamps as integers, which means that to get dates beyond the year 2038, I used this nifty little Date class. Dropped in like a charm, doesn’t seem to…

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    Story engine

    I’ve always loved the simplicity and pleasantness of whatever must be under the hood of Elf’s stories — he seems to have easy management of story arcs, multiple sortings of stories, multiples sets of stories, next and previous buttons within stories, etc. I’m debating how I want to build my own little story engine. Right now, my stories are in WordPress, published as page. One avenue I could take would be to write a WordPress plugin to allow me to manage stories the way I want — keep them as pages, but add the fluff I want. Another avenue would be to roll my own — make a separate little…