New Blog!

Since Kazoo News doesn't really suit my more mundane life in Victoria, I have a new Blogspot, A World In A Grain Of Sand.

Long-distance house hunting

My sis very kindly offered to house hunt for me!

She and I spoke two days ago about a room available near her best friend Keira-leigh, which is in a nice neighbourhood around Mount Doug. It sounds good, so Pam was going to go check it out for me yesterday. In case it wasn't as nice as it seemed, I have sent her a list of a couple more places I found yesterday on Off-campus Housing.

So if anyone hears of a place for rent $500 and under please let me know... I am fine with a bachelor or an apartment or a shared house, so long as I'm not one of three or more girls in the house. I had enough of sharing with two other girls in Beckwith... My new place must also be on a bus route, preferably close to UVic and either the 2, 11, 14 or 27/28 downtown. In other words, it's a bonus if it goes through Oak Bay Junction.

Michelle thought I'd have to give up having a maid around after leaving South Africa... but apparently a cleaning lady comes in once a week at this Mount Doug house to take care of the kitchen. I know from experience that sharing kitchen cleanup duties are not fun!

Hey, bonus... I might be close enough to drop in on my parents if my cupboard is empty. Mom? Dad? There's still enough chairs at the kitchen table, right? You haven't rented out to International students while I've been halfway around the world? :)

Just now...

South Africans seem to have their own time period. They live in the now. Or the just now. Or the now now.

The SCA fighters tried to explain this phenomenon to us last evening.

Just now... can be any time. Whenever, sometime, in a bit.

Now... fairly soon, in the next couple hours-- or the next couple days.

Now now... very soon, in the next few minutes to an hour or so.

I'll write another blog entry just now. :)

Here is a funny sign we saw when we were out walking, of yet another South African phrase.

Nando's!

Nando's is yummy.
They are a fast food restaurant chain renowned for their flame-grilled peri-peri chicken. Apparently there's a franchise in Vancouver... yum.

So last night after dancing Jody and I picked up grilled chicken burgers and accidentally ordered the hottest instead of the second-hottest spiciness level... whoo. It was edible, it was just really spicy.

Maybe we can trick Dave B into ordering it while he's here... he arrives early Friday morning to take over for Jody. I bet he'd like it, though.

Two weeks to go!

In a mere two weeks I will be on board a plane to Heathrow... I really hope things will have calmed down enough by then in terms of airport security. The thought of 36 straight hours with no book and no writing materials and no non-airline pillow makes me very disappointed, to say the least. If they want to keep the liquid ban that's fine with me, though I had hoped to pick up some Clinique perfume at Duty Free.

Needless to say I still have a lot, and I mean a lot, of work to do. Hopefully now that my sections are organized better things will go faster because I have made up my mind now and I do not want, or have time, to change it. But I will be typing a lot and pressing Alt-PrintScreen for numerous screensnaps, as well as bugging my coworkers for help and decent explanations of what an editor is used for.

Jody and I had a really fun dance class tonight. We learned a very pretty waltz step... somewhere between elegant and sexy. Or at least it is when we get it right. Our merengue needs work, but Tamsyn could tell we'd been practicing our mambo and she was very happy with it. :) I should try to get some pictures at dance sometime before I leave. We have an extra class tomorrow, because I was sick last Thursday so we cancelled. We are also attending the social dance on Wednesday and our regular Thursday lesson, so there will be plenty of opportunity for pictures!

Today was Markus' birthday, and Friday there is a dinner for him, so we will be busy Friday night as well. Friday, Saturday and Sunday Jody is running a training course for RCP and UDig (the first one, I think, is a protocol; the second is the User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS, which is the application he's been working on with Refractions for over a year). So while I am not attending this training course, at least there will be other people in the office so I won't feel too horrible for working on Saturday. Sunday I'm taking the day off to go shopping! Requests, anyone?

And I thought I might be bored here.

The Joy of DocBook

I have been working very hard to understand DocBook and XMLMind to the point where it is useful. It is now beyond useful, as I am now able to make it do cool things! Well, ok, maybe geeky things. But still... I am thrilled that it is not kicking my butt anymore. I am working with it and I think my Help files are starting to look pretty good... if only my new way of linking to other pages in the file will work! (*crosses fingers that 'xref', 'xreflabel' and 'linkend' will play nicely together*)

My file got SO big, XMLMind refused to run it anymore; it didn't have enough memory to happily run a 200KB file. So now it is split into Intro, Tasks, Reference and Concepts. And those middle two files are still running between 75-110 KB each; the other two are small. You would not believe the number of applications and screens and buttons and right-click menus I have to document....

I only hope that when Devashnee gets back from her leukemia treatments, she can handle updating this stuff if I leave her explicit enough writing guidelines. And contrary to what I thought at the beginning, writing guidelines are not just about what tense to use and the most common grammatical mistakes. I have to note what XML tag I use for each type of link, image, table, title, section... everything. There's a tag for which mousebutton the user has to press, one for a guibutton, guilabel, guimenu, guimenuitem, and guisubmenu, just to give you an idea... I have no concept of how many tags are floating around in my head right now.

Even scarier, I am considering teaching this program to my dad when I get back... because not only does it automatically convert your style-free content into simple HTML pages, it can also put them into PDF format. So the content is completely devoid of style; you put that in using stylesheets, so you only have to update the stylesheet if you need to change something, rather than adjusting the background or header size and font on every single page on your website. So it's pretty useful. It would be even more useful if I was proficient with Cascading StyleSheets, but for now I'll leave that to Gerhard.