(no subject)

[da]

For melted_snowball's birthday, I took us out for dinner at one of our favourite restaurants in town, where we were entertained by the hosts (who are great people, in addition to running a good restaurant) as well as by some carolers who stopped by to carol in the restaurant. (Have you ever heard of in-restaurant caroling? I hadn't.) It was a miracle they could seat us, since I stupidly hadn't made a reservation before this afternoon, but conveniently a party of 20 had just cancelled for 7pm. We'll take it!

Just now I gave d. his birthday present, a homemade calendar, to remind him of home while he's in California. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. (That link is the first 2/3, be warned it's 1.5MB.)

It was only a little tricky to make it with both US and Canadian holidays and make it look decent. The hard part was getting the darn thing printed, because Staples.ca's online printing service has some bugs to resolve.

But. But. When I went to pick it up yesterday afternoon, in the middle of the snowstorm (which wasn't really so awful yet), the Staples person apologized and said they were having problems with the printer, they made two copies and they both have faint yellow lines on the black and white portions. I looked, I said it was OK, and she gave it to me at a big discount. And made up the second calendar for free! Cool.

Things I learned:

1) Emacs's calendar-mode has a kick-ass LaTeX-output, which I can customize beyond my wildest calendaring dreams. (Yeah, yeah. I have calendaring dreams- doesn't everyone?)

2) Don't send 25 pdfs to staples.ca to print as one job. It will go wonky, even though they claim it will work.

3) Making a calendar at Staples can be remarkably cheap; doing it the right way, 13 one-sided colour pages cost about $10, 12 one-sided b&w pages are under $1, and they'll thread a spiffy-looking spiral binding on it for $3.

4) I like makin' stuff. Well, OK, I knew that.

Comments

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Awwww! So sweet. Mushy man. :D

[quingawaga.livejournal.com]

I think we ran into the same set of carollers while we finished OUR dinner. It was kinda cool.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was, wasn't it?

...Was it two women and two men, all wearing very British looking cloak-thingies? (I'm sure they have a name- but I don't know it so I'll call them cloak-thingies.)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I'm reasonably convinced that they're the local caroling group that my conductor's caroling group is basically a spinoff of.

They were ok. They didn't have 3 carols I asked for...

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Wow, really pretty -- now I'm curious about the rest of the calendar.

And, it should not surprise me, but emacs has a calendar mode? Jeez. What happened to the Unix ideal of do one thing right? I guess their excuse is that emacs did not come from Unix, it came from TOPS-10 (and, unfortunately, it shows -- in my not so humble opinion, emacs would be better if it followed the conventions of the OS is running under better... it's easier for people to learn that ctrl/c aborts than ctrl/g if their OS uses ctrl/c for aborting, for example).

In any case, while I'm sure it'd be cheaper to print the calendar at Staples, I'd much rather print it at home, the photo paper gives gorgeous prints and I have it way faster.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

OK, OK, twist my arm. Here's the rest. (739KB).

Thanks, glad you liked it. :)

"What happened to the Unix ideal of do one thing right?" What ideal would that be? I thought the Unix ideal was everybody and their grandmother re-inventing the wheel the way they wanted it. (red! No, green! With spinning rims!)

See, emacs can't use ctrl-c because that's overloaded, and it would take away dozens of possible combinations, don'tcha know, and you certainly can't use ctrl-g for that, because, well, it's Just Not Done...

Nah, emacs fulfils the philosophy of doing Everything. In Lisp, so it's hackable, but you should learn Lisp first. But, I'd rather learn Lisp than VB.

Printing it at home certainly has its benefits, but you don't get the spiral binding put in so it looks like a professional calendar. This is a professional joint, you see...

If I had a photo printer, I'm sure I'd do it that way too. :)

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Again, gorgeous pictures!

The Unix "ideal" I was referring to was that each program should do one small thing right, so we could combine it with other small programs and get a bigger thing done our way. Evidently not every one agreed it should be a good idea, starting with the folks that decided that "well, now that all the college people got their hands on Unix for 50 bucks a pop, we can start charging them real money" and the gummint that decided that they couldn't possibly let normal folks have it because the networking code actually worked. :-) So, eventually, it split into many different versions of Un*x, which from my perspective is a pity -- I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that the best version (so everyone should have just that one, y'see) is System V, altho I gladly use MacOS X.

I dunno if I should be proud or not, but I never learned Virtual Basic. I was forced to learn Lisp, but don't remember enough of it to hack emacs anymore. I'll use emacs if I have to, but thank god I don't. I think emacs really suffers from dragging around TOPS-10 control keys. Ctrl/g was abort in TOPS-10 and if DEC did the same thing they did in other OSs, you could not change it. So, when emacs came to other DEC OSs, you had to change abort to ctrl/c and overload something else but now your codes were all screwed up. As opposed to emacs under Unix, which made users come to me crying -- "You told me that ctrl/c would abort programs, and now I'm stuck in that thing and I can't get out! And it's replacing all the wrong things in 10,000 lines!". Oh, well, they had to complain about something all the time anyway... :-)

The spiral thingy! Don't you have the doohickey to put it at home? Me neither. ;-)

And yes, my old printer died after what, a decent 5 years or so of service, and when I went to get a new printer, I got this Canon Pixma 5000 (I think that's the model number) -- very decent at printing speed, the cartridges last long enough and I found it's really nice for photo printing too. But the killer, and why I wanted it (besides being sick of the Epson ink prices) is that it automatically prints both sides of the pages if you're willing to wait a little longer. Yay!