(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.

[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.