February 9, 2006

When people care …

A few weeks ago, I talked about how people seemed to care only about money sometimes and not about the things that mattered. If you rant about the bad, you must also talk about the good 🙂 During the last few days, I had some very positive experiences with people who cared as well, so let me share.

I had gone to Soft Interface’s site a while back because I was interested in their Diff Doc software which does a great job at comparing two Word documents and letting you merge the changes. There are other such software around but Diff Doc is probably one of the more cheaper solutions and they do a great job. Unfortunately, the price tag of $400 was a bit too much for me since I don’t do any professional work using Word. I simply use Word to write my stories and Diff Doc was great for comparing changes between two versions of my manuscripts. Now if I had a writing contract and making money, I would have had no problems with paying the $400 but since $400 is more than a lot of people make a month here, I just couldn’t afford to. A few days ago, I received an e-mail from Soft Interface’s Allen Segall and he wanted to know if there was anything they could do to interest me in purchasing Diff Doc. I told him the situation and told him that if it had been about $50, I would have bought it immediately. Allen came right back and told me that they could drop the price down by $300 for me! To be honest, I was stunned. Not many people would care enough about a potential customer to do that. Of course, the price was still too high for me and I can’t afford to go for it but I still like how nice they were.

Then there is Eugene over at Add-in Express. I’d written a Word macro recently that would highlight often used (and misused) words and phrases as an aid to writers. The macro was a bit clunky to use since it didn’t have a nice user interface or anything. So I was looking around for a way to turn the macro into a nice user-friendly add-in when I came across the Delphi Add-in Express component. It was just what I was looking for! I wrote to Add-in Express and asked them if there was a possibility of getting a free copy to use in a freeware tool. I heard back from Eugene a couple of days later and he gave me a license, for free! For a piece of software which sells for at least $150!

These are just a few of the good people I’ve run into. There are more. There’s the nice folks at ElevateSoft, Addictive Software and WP Tools who have also been kind enough to donate software. Then there are people like Joana, Mary and Gino Sion who have been kind enough to agree to do covers for my book. These people are doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they are genuinely nice people. So while I might rant about there not being enough care in the world, I do acknowledge that there still *is* care in the world – care for something other than money 🙂

Tags: Internet, Personal, Reflections
Posted by Fahim at 7:13 am   Comments (2)

2 Responses to When people care …

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#1
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janine 09 February 2006 at 8:58 am

yeah, good folks, they are out there but i couldn’t help but think as i read your post that *you* are one of those people. that’s why you’re running into them. you get what you give. isn’t that karma, physics, “what goes around, comes around?”

your fan ;D
janine

#2
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Fahim 09 February 2006 at 9:29 am

Thank you for the kind words, Janine 🙂 All we can do is do our own bit and hopefully, all of us can make a difference collectively.

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