Advogato blog for drake

15 Aug 2002

Thu, 15 Aug 2002 03:08:05 GMT

Emacs Drivel

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No Nothing

This past week a lot has transpired in my life. My sister's birthday was yesterday. I found a decent job working as technical support for clueless people. I was accepted as a member of the GNOME MEC (Membership and Election Committee). The second draft of the GDP Handbook was released and I received a lot of good comments. So a lot has been happening lately. Hope some of it slows down because I have a handbook to write!

20 Something

My sister's birthday was yesterday and our family had a good time celebrating it. We all went to Red Lobster for a crabby dinner of fish and other fishy stuff. The whole point of this venture was to indulge my sister in snow crab legs. It was a good dinner and the legs were especially fine to munch on... especially my sister's crab legs. Back at the house she opened her presents from us family with mom and me on either side of the couch. My dad was taking close up pictures of who knows what. He likes the zoom a bit too much. The day ended with strawberry and chocolate frozen cake treat. A sweet day to remind her she is no longer a teenager.

Working Stiff

I found a job working as technical support for a dedicated hosting company. Rackshack runs RedHat Linux boxes and a scattering of Cobalt servers from Sun. My first real job in IT and the first day I get rules concerning customers. Needless to say the customer is always right is not one of the rules. Anyways there are actually some pretty knowledgable people I work with. I'm still learning the characteristics of the different GUIs on top of a fine RedHat box. The GUIs always screw up the RedHat boxes, but a lot of our customers would not survive without one.

Acceptance

I am happy I have been accepted as a member of the GNOME MEC. The previous team did a stellar job holding elections for the past two years and processing all the membership applications the first year. Now our job is to renew all the original members of the GNOME Foundation. I hope elections will run better than last year. If anyone who reads this is thinking of running for the GNOME Board send your application in early!!! All the late applications last year did not allow enough time for discussion I thought. Apply early!!!

GNOME Stuff

Well I spent so much time writing this long journal entry, mainly from self guilt that I signed up for an Advogato diary and am not using. I think I need to go and write a third draft of the GDP Handbook. A big thanks for the two people who wrote me comments. Anymore are also welcome.

30 Jun 2002

Sun, 30 Jun 2002 00:16:08 GMT

GNOME 2

It's finally out and now there's still a lot more work left to do. Maybe trying to get Scrollkeeper to integrate nicely would be a good thing. Anyways, I got the User's Guide from Sun converted to PDF using FOP actually. I ran it through both passivetex and FOP. This time FOP won the nicest looking PDF from DocBook award. Had a little trouble with the pictures but that got straightened out with the help of syngin.

Reading

Finished reading the Cryptonomicon from the local library. It was a good book, but kinda predictable. I'm still trying to figure out if it was a murder mystery book or just some random SciFi book about crtypography. The ending really disappointed me though. I was expecting the same excellent writing the beginning of the book displayed. The book ended out in no man's land with some moral which does nothing to the book. Cut out the last two chapters and the book would be vastly improved. Other than that I enjoyed the book.

5 Jun 2002

Wed, 5 Jun 2002 01:56:19 GMT

GNOME

After recieving lots of comments about the GDP Handbook I'm completely reordering, adding and deleting sections. I'd say that the best comments were from Sasha and am very appreciative of his editing skills. So there is going to be one section about building the docs and one section about the help system and one section about DocBook basics. Between this and finding a job all my time is occupied.

Life

Oh, I'm also looking for a job in Houston, TX. If anyone might know of something for someone with little work experience in computers. Lots of GNOME and Linux experience, but employers don't jump at that. I guess if worse comes to worse I'll go back being a machinist, but I don't relish that thought.

1 Jun 2002

Sat, 1 Jun 2002 02:06:07 GMT

GNOME 2

So, I finished my rewrite of the GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation and I forgot a section. Probably the most important addition for GNOME 2 from the docs people is Scrollkeeper and there's nothing about it in the Handbook. Well, there needs to be a second draft. Hope I didn't forget anything else. Anyways, it's a real pleasure to work on this piece of writing from docs icons Dave Mason, Dan Mueth, and Alexander Kirillov.

I've been really busy writing these docs lately. Beginning of this week I did bug buddy and now a 6 hour marathon to finish the Handbook. Something must be wrong. Or maybe just most of my leads to a job have dried up and I wanted to forget about it. Yes, escapism fits much better. Much better.

26 Oct 2001

Fri, 26 Oct 2001 07:25:26 GMT

Hope this is bold.

What's the difference?

Not a lot says I.

That's enough. Enough fooling around I say!

Okay. Down to the business of writing a diary entry.

My Adventures into XSL

I had written a customization layer for Norm's stylesheets and today I broke it up into pieces. Trying to find the best way to break it up is not too easy. Depends how much stuff is going to be customized is the determination for now. I found out how to turn off the formalized procedure using the formal.procedure, but am stumped as to how to customize it into the role attribute.

<xsl:template match="procedure">
  <xsl:if test="@role='informal'">
    <xsl:param name="formal.procedure">0</xsl:param>
  </xsl:if>
<insert rest of procedure template>
</xsl:template>

The above doesn't work well. Need to ask DV or LotR about it tomorrow. Just looked at bugzilla and will prolly try to fix jfleck's bugs wrt the procedure tag. I haven't heard back from the gnome-doc-list about the stylesheet modularization proposal.

Need to write something for Gnumeric's documentation since I do have a deadline of Dec. 1

Life

This week is homecoming at OSU and boy am I excited. Pep rally Friday night to play at, 2 mile parade to march in, marching band practice right afterwards with hundreds of HS kiddies around, and don't forget the football game we're going to lose. No, win...we have the same conference record as KState (0-4) so there might be hope. Oh, Nebraska will trounces OU too. Cannot think of anything else to ramble about. Bye all you who actually read this.