As seen in a letter:
I live a ten minuets walk from [the metro station].
I can just picture the guy doing ten dances on his way to the train. :-)
September 2006 Archives
“My undead math teacher is rolling in his grave.”
meaning
“My math teacher, who isn’t dead, would be rolling in his grave if he were.”
but the first line is so much better. :-)
My wife had dinner with another guy behind my back yesterday.
(Ok, so there were too many of us to fit around one table, and Christine and said guy ended up at the table directly behind where I was sitting, but it’s still a good line. Especially since this is the guy who introduced his foot to his mouth a while back by saying something to the effect of “So, I hear Steve’s out of town. We should do dinner sometime,” leaving out the oh-so-critical-to-avoid-mortification “when he gets back.”)
I just needed to install a bunch of Thai fonts, which were included but not installed with Windows 2000. So, I had to expand them all, which at 52 files was going to take a while (the expand utility apparently doesn’t take wildcards).
Waaaaaaaay back in the MS-DOS days, there was this phenomenon called batch-file programming. It’s a cheap knockoff of what Unix is able to do, but it does work for the most part. And it’s actually still built into Windows! So, I was able to expand the files with the following command-line:
for %f in (*.tt_) do expand %~nf.tt_ %~nf.ttf
(Posted for the sake of nostalgic MS-DOS geeks… Anyone remember 4DOS?)
I converted my database from ISO-8859-1 to Unicode over the weekend, which was supposed to make all of my accent problems go away. Which it did, sort of. All of the accents in the database now show up correctly. However, it’s croaking any time someone tries submitting new text with accents, at least for some users. It looks like conversion from ISO-8859-1 to Unicode isn’t happening in the nice automatic way I thought it should…
Update: There were two problems…
On the way in, Internet Explorer wasn’t parsing the content-type header properly, and therefore ignored the fact that I wanted Unicode form submissions. Simplifying it fixed that problem.
On the way out, Mason wasn’t escaping HTML strings using Unicode like it says it does, escaping them as ISO-8859-1 instead, resulting in a bunch of â and similar strings being sent to the browser, rather than actual Unicode. Telling it to escape only the minimum number of codes necessary to prevent parsing and XSS-related problems fixed that problem.
Since I moved into my new office in May, I’ve made three attempts to do my morning Bible reading at work, usually because I’m expecting a delivery or a service technician to come at some point during the morning.
It’s worth noting that this area is normally extremely quiet. I feel bad sometimes for having the loudest equipment of all the tenants (folding machines), but nobody’s complained or given me nasty looks.
However, each of these three times, some loud and distracting noise has prevented me, at least for a time:
One of the tenants parked their dog next to a tree outside my window. Said dog wasn’t terribly happy about this, and proceeded to bark straight for about two hours. Just when I started to acclimate to the dog, the upstairs tenant started vacuuming immediately above my head.
The lawncare folks had an all-day weeding and mowing session.
Tribal drumming. I kid you not. I’m listening to it right now. From the chiropractor’s office upstairs. This is Vermont, not exactly the home of great numbers of Native Americans!
