Well, big news I guess. Firefly and I are heading to Edmonton to visit Tig and K. I’ll leave her there,
dumped on the side of the road no doubt, to visit her friend D, and I head back
here on monday. So, a long, long drive ahead…. fun fun fun.
I finally got my resume up to spec, and was sending it off until about 2:30am
last night. It’s still pending “approval” from a couple of people who I’ve been
testing it on, but I fixed most of the things they found and figure that was
pretty good for now. What I get to do now is sit back and wait for the jobs to
roll in. The online game may or may not go ahead… the work they are wanting
done is pretty intense, and promises of riches beyond my
wildest dreams isn’t going to pay rent or sustain my enthusiasm for that long.
Saw the movie Lilo and Stitch
last night (cheap night) and it was quite fun. It was a typical disney movie
with fun, love, a good message, and just enough bad stuff to get the little
kiddies all worried about how it would end (I wasn’t worried at all) before the
happy ending (phew!). Part of the plot involved the earth not simply
being blown up because the aliens belived it to be harboring an endangered
species, the mosquito. Well, after we got out of the movie the mosquitoes
swarmed! It was crazy, there were 5 or 10 of them going after me at
once, and I’m bit all over! The same thing happened going from the car to the
fog and suds to chat with my buddy Sean, who came out to see the movie as well.
It was crazy I tell you, crazy!
Well, I was almost impressed with Word
XP while I was using it. It seemed nifty, had nicely integrated (and
useful) help, and had a stylish new look. Sadly, under the hood it still sucks
big hairy sweaty pimply donkey balls. The way they deal with “styles” and
formatting is the worst I’ve seen yet, with characters getting formatting from
nowhere at all, then loosing it for no reason at all. You can create hyperlinks
in documents that show up as nice blue underlined
text in the same font and style as the rest of that part of the document,
but as soon as you apply another style on top of it, you loose the blue and underlined part, and even
though the style says that it’s “hyperlink” you have to retype the URL so that
it regains it’s hyperlink look. After this of course, the style still
says that it’s set to “hyperlink”. There may be some way to get around this or
deal with it, but I don’t know it. Their “reveal style” function had the
potential to be very cool as well, and let you get around things like this,
just like in the old wordperfect days. Sadly, it doesn’t give you nearly the
power, and again, their style system is on crack. Highlight one section in one
font and it’s set to “style foo”, move down a line or two (so you can apply the
same style there) and you loose “style foo” from the list of all styles that are
in use. When you get it back by selecting the show all styles available
setting, “style foo” is there, but when it’s applied it has a different
font/size/everything than what you want (and what the other text marked as in
“style foo” is).
I’d dump word like a hot potato in a second and use open office under linux, but
it seems to be on crack as well. My once working-perfectly install was giving
me errors, so I decided to re-install. Downloading the install files gives me
install and setup executables, one of which
gives me errors about “ln: when making multiple links last argument must be a
directory” followed by “Installation Complete” and the other pops up a nice
graphical progress bar, displays my LIBC version (2.2.5) in the console, and
exits. I even figured I’d try the source, but the 1.0 code requries all sorts
of strange shit. GPC files that it should be including in the tarball, the
requirement for TCSH, and it goes on crack if you tell it to use gcc-3.x.
double-sigh I’m downloading different versions just in case I got a
bad one or something.
Another reason to use it is it’s far superior doc->html conversion. For a
97KB document, Word XP creates an 87KB HTML file…. Openoffice creates a 17KB HTML document.
Oh, and yes, they do look the same (though not exact).
Oh, more pictures in the gallery.