Recent blog entries for gnudist

16 Aug 2000 (updated 26 Mar 2003 at 04:52 UTC) »

It's hot. Damned hot. Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot. Welcome to August in Maryland. It hasn't rained yet today, but it will. It rained yesterday. Amazingly, it didn't rain on Saturday, and I was able to get out into the big room for a while. Highly recommended. (I didn't make it to the shore, though. See, I live just off route 50, which is the only road to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which leads to the shore. The first day with no rain in weeks and everyone else wants to go, naturally. When traffic is backed up 10 miles to the toll plaza, it's generally a good idea not to get in line.)

Spent the rainy Sunday continuing with DocBook and figuring out some DSSSL in general and Jade in particular. I'm getting to like this, actually, to the point where I've archived and thrown out most of my LaTeX and moved it over to DocBook. After that, dinner with some friends at Hard Times. More DVDs this weekend: Don't Look Back, the classic Dylan documentary, with some good D. A. Pennebaker commentary and a few bonus uncut audio performances; and Galaxy Quest, which was a decent movie but includes some quite silly DVD features, such as an alien language track and an Omega 13 menu item which, well, does what the Omega 13 does (you'll have to see the movie to understand.) I kept waiting for the Tim Allen character to start dropping Priceline plugs ("...then you know what to do, dogg... Bust A Move!") but it didn't happen.

Also read up some more on the various GTK+/GNOME widgets and whipped up some more Python code to try them out. Hmm, I could get used to this. The closest thing I've ever done to GUI programming is some old Hypercard stuff on Macs (hehe, those were the days.) But it makes some small amount of sense to me, so perhaps my coding skills aren't completely lost. We'll see.

Well, I thought that Sun order looked a little big. Thanks to a procurement snafu, it's double what we ordered. No comment. Absolutely no comment.

And now for something completely off-topic: it has rained every day and/or night for the last two weeks here in Annapolis. It is getting really old. I'm glad my UPS battery is fully charged up.

Spent some time last night learning DocBook - since I know HTML and LaTeX, the concepts are pretty familiar; the syntax is just different. I went back and converted some of my old LaTeX stuff; I've almost got the hang of it. Just gotta start thinking in super-anal SGML parser mode. Spent the rest of last night watching the Stop Making Sense DVD. After watching (and hearing) Chris Frantz's turn on "Genius Of Love", I'm glad to know I'm not the only geeky-looking drummer who can't sing to save his life.

A few nights ago, my network connection at home went down. I called up $ISP who confirmed that they had router problems again. Tasty. It was fixed the next day, but I got home today to find five, yes, five voice mails from their tech support telling me I should be back online and could I please call back to close the ticket. Well, I suppose this better than their previous no-we-don't-know-anything mode, but really, if I don't call back and yell at you, the chances are pretty good that I'm satisfied. Now if only they'd fix their DNS.

If it ever stops raining, this may be the weekend I get out to the shore. If so, see you Monday.

I hear rumors from down the hall that our new shipment of Sun toys may be over at receiving, so I may be busy for a while.

Joined the GNOME docs list last night, said hello, haven't been back to that mail account yet today. The journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single "hmm, I think I might want to do something."

Small world dept.: in the days before the web, before AOL.com even (if I remember right) I was one of a few people who ran something called the Indie-List, a mailing list for fans of indie-label records. I was, for quite some time, the I-L head honcho of sorts, before burning out on the whole thing somewhere around the time I went back to school and the Internet became the world's largest bookstore. One of the people who took it over was a guy named Eric Sinclair, who nursed it along for a while before it apparently ran out of steam (not his fault.) Where is all this leading? Eric is here. So there you go, and Eric, a hearty and warm-hearted FSHEE! to you, sir.

Rumors confirmed... time to go unload the truck...

Well, now that I have managed to recoup a life outside of my work (something that was missing in my previous incarnation as a consultant) I'm thinking over ways that I can contribute to the free software world. Given how rusty my programming is (though I've recently picked up Python, and I'm really liking it) perhaps documentation may be the best thing for me to start with. I'm taking a look around to see where I might be most useful. I scored A- in my one technical writing class in college, which I think was better than any of my grades in CS classes... anyway, you may see me peeking into various documentation projects here and there; if you've got any to suggest, by all means let me know.

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