What's happened lately besides writing
Dec. 15th, 2003 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiper0. Had a long chat on the telephone last night with my little brother. He informs me that our grandmother, who had recently fallen and broken her hip, is now living in Maryland with our aunt Kim. Our brother Donnie is working at a drug/alcohol rehab counseling job right now--unfortunately, his band seems kind of dead in the water at the moment. Outspoken's management doesn't seem to be doing squat to support them or get them out there doing anything, and at least one member of the band is out touring with another band entirely right now. Sigh.
On the good side though, Marc's children are doing very well. His oldest, Meighan, is currently all about doing plays at her school; the second oldest, Amanda, has improved vastly in handling spelling words since the family moved to Richmond, KY; the third oldest, Charlie, is in preschool and has tested out at advanced levels in everything except social skills; and even the current youngest, Lydia, is showing signs of being quite smart. Marc says that like Charlie, Lydia has a HUGE HEAD! *giggle* We're talking greater than the 95th percentile in child head size here. She doesn't talk much, but apparently her older siblings fall all over themselves to do things for her, so all she has to do is point.
Marc further reports that his impending new baby is officially due on 1/25, but all of his children thus far have been early. So there is a nonzero chance that the kid may pop out on my birthday. This would please me.
And the older of my two younger sisters, Sarah, is working on getting a Masters degree. This pleases me. :D She will be the first person in our family to get a Masters!
1. Read some more of Digital Knight.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dementia42, you were right about the background of Verne not being quite as cheesy as it initially comes across once it's explained. I'm still not quite done with the book, but I've gotten close to the end now. 5 'episodes' out of the 6 in it.
2. Russell Crowe is going to be on Inside the Actor's Studio starting 1/4. YAY!
2a. I saw Cate Blanchett on same, or at least the tail end of the episode with her in it, last night. Gosh, she's lovely. I looked her up on IMBD.com last night and discovered that she is only a few months younger than I am. Which boggles me, as I feel a lot younger than she comes across to me, all statuesque and regal and such. Of course, maybe this is just because she is emblazoned into my brain as Galadriel. ;D
3. I futzed with my guitar some yesterday and had the pleasure of trying to pick out some chords by ear to one of my favorite old Elvis songs, "Thrill Of Your Love".
4. Have been futzing with the Two Moons web site again, to give it a general overall tweaking to get rid of the annoying problems it has right now with being hardcoded to assume certain browser sizes. This is a problem. It was a leftover artifact of the way Vale had set up the site to do the sidebars over on the right--so now I'm going through page by page and ripping all that out and just doing everything with stylesheets. At this point I figure few people out there are going to be using browsers that can't talk to stylesheets anyway. I am, however, running into problems with the perl scripts I am using to try to convert the Two Moons News file into HTML format--the problem is that all of the individual articles are fed through a different script that sticks in a bunch of extra stuff for headers and nice formatting for viewing on the MUSH, but that extra stuff is a pain in the ass when I want to make the file viewable on the web. It doesn't look good when a news article which is broken up into 13 pieces for viewing on the game is all glommed together into one big page that says "Part 1 of 13", "Part 2 of 13", etc. all down a single web page.
So I want to remove the extra formatting, but I am having problems using the right regexp commands to remove just the stuff I want to remove and nothing else.
5. Candy Legoesque blocks. I'm for them.
6. Still haven't managed to sneak in a third viewing of Master and Commander, but I still want another one! Though I'm not sure when I'll be able to do it before Return of the King comes out, and once that happens Captain Aubrey is going to have to arm-wrestle Aragorn for my attention. ;D
7. My arm's been hurting but only in the elbow lately. It's weird. I THINK that this is because I've got nerve reconnection going on right there still. The aromatherapy moose that Thomas brought me during his visit is very good for shutting up my cranky elbow, though. Mmmmm warm herbal moose mmmmm.
8. And OH YES:solarbird and I are going for that house in Lake Forest Park. No clue yet whether we're going to be able to pull it off; we have to sell our other rental property in order to be able to do this at all, but we also need to see if we can talk the current owners down a bit from their asking price on the grounds that in order to make it liveable for us we'll have to have a lot of work done on it. And we can't afford the current asking price AND the expense of all that extra work. More bulletins on this as events warrant.
On the good side though, Marc's children are doing very well. His oldest, Meighan, is currently all about doing plays at her school; the second oldest, Amanda, has improved vastly in handling spelling words since the family moved to Richmond, KY; the third oldest, Charlie, is in preschool and has tested out at advanced levels in everything except social skills; and even the current youngest, Lydia, is showing signs of being quite smart. Marc says that like Charlie, Lydia has a HUGE HEAD! *giggle* We're talking greater than the 95th percentile in child head size here. She doesn't talk much, but apparently her older siblings fall all over themselves to do things for her, so all she has to do is point.
Marc further reports that his impending new baby is officially due on 1/25, but all of his children thus far have been early. So there is a nonzero chance that the kid may pop out on my birthday. This would please me.
And the older of my two younger sisters, Sarah, is working on getting a Masters degree. This pleases me. :D She will be the first person in our family to get a Masters!
1. Read some more of Digital Knight.
dementia42, you were right about the background of Verne not being quite as cheesy as it initially comes across once it's explained. I'm still not quite done with the book, but I've gotten close to the end now. 5 'episodes' out of the 6 in it.2. Russell Crowe is going to be on Inside the Actor's Studio starting 1/4. YAY!
2a. I saw Cate Blanchett on same, or at least the tail end of the episode with her in it, last night. Gosh, she's lovely. I looked her up on IMBD.com last night and discovered that she is only a few months younger than I am. Which boggles me, as I feel a lot younger than she comes across to me, all statuesque and regal and such. Of course, maybe this is just because she is emblazoned into my brain as Galadriel. ;D
3. I futzed with my guitar some yesterday and had the pleasure of trying to pick out some chords by ear to one of my favorite old Elvis songs, "Thrill Of Your Love".
4. Have been futzing with the Two Moons web site again, to give it a general overall tweaking to get rid of the annoying problems it has right now with being hardcoded to assume certain browser sizes. This is a problem. It was a leftover artifact of the way Vale had set up the site to do the sidebars over on the right--so now I'm going through page by page and ripping all that out and just doing everything with stylesheets. At this point I figure few people out there are going to be using browsers that can't talk to stylesheets anyway. I am, however, running into problems with the perl scripts I am using to try to convert the Two Moons News file into HTML format--the problem is that all of the individual articles are fed through a different script that sticks in a bunch of extra stuff for headers and nice formatting for viewing on the MUSH, but that extra stuff is a pain in the ass when I want to make the file viewable on the web. It doesn't look good when a news article which is broken up into 13 pieces for viewing on the game is all glommed together into one big page that says "Part 1 of 13", "Part 2 of 13", etc. all down a single web page.
So I want to remove the extra formatting, but I am having problems using the right regexp commands to remove just the stuff I want to remove and nothing else.
5. Candy Legoesque blocks. I'm for them.
6. Still haven't managed to sneak in a third viewing of Master and Commander, but I still want another one! Though I'm not sure when I'll be able to do it before Return of the King comes out, and once that happens Captain Aubrey is going to have to arm-wrestle Aragorn for my attention. ;D
7. My arm's been hurting but only in the elbow lately. It's weird. I THINK that this is because I've got nerve reconnection going on right there still. The aromatherapy moose that Thomas brought me during his visit is very good for shutting up my cranky elbow, though. Mmmmm warm herbal moose mmmmm.
8. And OH YES:
solarbird and I are going for that house in Lake Forest Park. No clue yet whether we're going to be able to pull it off; we have to sell our other rental property in order to be able to do this at all, but we also need to see if we can talk the current owners down a bit from their asking price on the grounds that in order to make it liveable for us we'll have to have a lot of work done on it. And we can't afford the current asking price AND the expense of all that extra work. More bulletins on this as events warrant.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-15 10:27 am (UTC)I am, however, running into problems with the perl scripts I am using to try to convert the Two Moons News file into HTML format--the problem is that all of the individual articles are fed through a different script that sticks in a bunch of extra stuff for headers and nice formatting for viewing on the MUSH, but that extra stuff is a pain in the ass when I want to make the file viewable on the web.
Can't you work from the original source, before the extra stuff gets added? or even hack the script so it generates the HTML at the same time?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-15 10:38 am (UTC)Here's the current process I do with the news file:
1. I write the raw article and put it into its own file.
2. I run that file through 'newsformat' and get a formatted version of that file.
3. I plug the formatted version into the overall news file.
4. I upload the formatted news file to the MUSH.
5. I run the news file through 'IMnews2html' to get the web version to put on the web page.
This does seem clunky though, so I'm open to suggestions on how to best streamline this process so that I have to put out minimal amounts of time and effort. What would be REALLY nifty, I suppose, is if I had just one raw news file as the source and I could EITHER feed it through the script for formatting it for MUSH viewing OR through the script to format it for HTML... but right now the 'newsformat' script assumes it's being fed only a single news article and not an entire file, and I'm not quite clued enough with the perl to figure out how to tweak it so that it could go down through the entire file and do its thing.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-15 02:25 pm (UTC)How long has the house been on the market? If the work needed is maintenance repairs, you should easily get allowances for it. Well, I hope. Hah!
Good luck.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-15 03:22 pm (UTC)And while some of the stuff we'd need to do to it is maintenance, there's a considerable amount of outright remodeling that we'd want to do as well.