Go forward in time to September 2003.
We went to the doctor yesterday; Oralia has to get a treatment for a kidney infection and I have to get a couple of skin nasties cauterized. The doctor also gave us some vitamin B complex efervescent pills, and they make me pee in a very bright, almost fluorescent yellow.
Oralia is ill. She gets really cold or really hot, and her right kidney hurts. This is the same thing that happened about two years ago. We are going to the doctor tomorrow. I hope it is not anything bad.
My desktop box froze twice yesterday, probably due to overheating. Today it froze once and refused to boot until I left it turned off for a while. The CPU fan seems to be spinning all right, but I don't know if it is enough. The BIOS says the CPU is running at 60°C; Mr. Zucchi says that it is rather warm.
Mr. Meeks has been kicking ass with respect to writing a container-based layout system for OpenOffice. This should make creating new dialogs much easier; I can't believe they are still using a system that uses absolute positions.
Mr. Zucchi arrived to Mexico. He brought us a really pretty didgeridoo and some delicious Tim Tams. I'll have to practice my circular breathing so that I can annoy the neighbors properly.
Airport security guy: What do you have in
there?
Michael Zucchi: A didgeridoo!
Airport security guy: [blank expression] Is
it dangerous?
Last night I ran out of the evil teeth-whitening goo the dentist gave me for my upper teeth. You put it on a mold and wear it on your teeth while you sleep. The mold is made of thin acetate and it is just a bit too tall, so it hurts my gums a bit. Fortunately it only really hurts while brushing my teeth, but I've been using toothpaste for sensitive teeth and that seems to have helped. Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and hopefully she'll start the treatment on my lower jaw.
Michael Zucchi arrives tonight!
Last night we went with Joakim, Maru, and Hans Petter to La Linterna, our favorite place for really cheap tacos al pastor. Joakim, HPJ, and I had one of those good, long, pie-in-the-sky technical discussions that leave you psyched up for everything. Later we went to Coyoacán for coffee.
The seams of the cushion covers of our couch got completely destroyed in the washing machine. Oralia went to Carmen's mother's house today, who is kind enough to sew some new covers for us. Now that we have washed the rest of the couch, we can actually use the nice Hindu covers for it that we got in London.
Mailed my incomplete scrolling patch from GUADEC to Søren; hopefully he will have time to add the missing bits to it.
Joakim pointed me to Wikitravel, a community-built travel guide. We are both working on the Mexico City page. For a while Oralia and I have been procrastinating on writing a list of good restaurants and interesting places in Mexico City; this looks like a good place to do it.
Yesterday Oralia made lentil soup and carne en chile pasilla for lunch, and it was fantastic. All during her teacher's course she was too busy to cook, and we both missed her food greatly.
Saturday was Oralia's last exam day, and now her teacher's course is over. Her school should hand out the diplomas/certificates in 20 days. It's good to see her much more relaxed now.
My grandmother used to live in an apartment, but she has been living in my mother's house for a few years now. My mom finally arranged for most of the furniture to be moved to the house. Having no use for some things, my grandmother was very kind to give us a gorgeous chest for dishes and such, and also a small, heavy wooden sofa with square cushions. I spent most of the morning cleaning up the house and putting things in order so that we could move the new furniture in.
In the afternoon we went to Oralia's parents' house and had a little birthday party for Hugo. Rubén got me a very nice shirt as a belated birthday present, which is very nice of him. Oralia's mom made cochinita pibil for everyone, and it was good if a bit different from the style we are used to.
In the evening we watched 28 Days Later. Creepy. I liked the alternate ending better. It got shown after the ending credits, so most of the audience had already left theater and they didn't get to watch it. Their loss.
Yesterday we finished arranging the living/dining room and it looks great now. We moved our couch from the middle of the room to one of the walls, so everything feels much more spacious now. Moving the TV to one of the bedrooms also made things less crowded.
We visited Dominga, Carolina, and Carlos in the afternoon, and then we went to visit my mom and grandmother. Grandma is very happy as she now has her own bed back from her apartment; she is using what used to be my bedroom as her own now, and she arranged it very prettily.
Oralia's mother had given us two chiles en nogada which were absolutely delicious. We'll have to make some one day.
I found Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's second violin concertos on CD, with Maxim Vengerov. I've been wanting this CD for a while; I hope it is as amazing as the one with the first violin concertos.
We went to bed late last night as we were preparing material for Oralia's class today. It's fun to coordinate flash cards, music, and short texts for beginning English students to take in.
Talked for a long time to Owen and Ettore about how to implement symbolic color names for gtkrc and XSETTINGS. This should not be terribly hard, and it would be a pretty useful feature. Many programs would benefit from a standard way of picking colors to colorize items based on categories or other criteria. Evolution's calendar entries are the subject of discussion right now.
Speaking about SuSE woes:
<joakim> It's a little awkward, but you generally don't want to fight the Germans.
Spent a large part of the day trying to install SuSE 8.2 on a spare partition in one of our test boxes. Somehow, during the first-stage install, it manages to install a kernel and modules for a completely different one, so nothing works afterwards. The second-stage installer, which gets run after rebooting, needs to mount a CD-ROM but it can't.
We had lunch at La Salamandra Otra Vez, a beef/pasta restaurant in Coyoacán. This is the first time we've been there, and it is quite good. The beef is excellent and rather cheap, which is a nice surprise from the frequently-overpriced Argentinian restaurants that we know.
We went to my father's house in Cuernavaca over the weekend and we had a lovely time. The toll-free highway is just beautiful during the rainy season, as it passes through a sort-of-forest that gets really green and misty.
We went to the Jardín Borda, a lovely botanical garden, where we got to see to a really good photography exhibition by Rodrigo Moya, photographer, not to be confused with Rodrigo Moya, hacker. This was quite nice surprise as neither of us had any idea that the Jardín Borda holds exhibitions periodically.
To avoid the Sunday evening traffic, we decided to sleep in Cuernavaca and return today in the early morning; we woke up at 5:00 AM and the first thing we saw through the bedroom's window was an absolutely beautiful, huge full moon.
Dentist appointment in the morning, and she finally put the porcelain crowns on my lower right molars. She also gave me the first part of the whitening treatment. It consists of a mold for your upper teeth and some paste that you put on it; you are supposed to wear the whole thing over your teeth while you sleep.
Code gem of the day, from OpenOffice:
void
get_icon (int icon_id, Pixmap **pixmap, Pixmap **mask)
{
void *handle;
char buffer[50];
void (* func) (char **xpm);
char *xpm;
sprintf (buffer, "get_xpm_fn_%d", icon_id);
handle = dlopen (NULL, RTLD_LAZY);
func = dlsym (handle, buffer);
(*func) (&xpm);
dlclose (handle);
parse_xpm (xpm, pixmap, mask);
}
(Paraphrased from studlyCaps, Hungarian notation, and all other sorts of evil.) It builds a function name based on an icon's ID, finds that function in the process' symbols, and calls it. Of all things, to generate an Ex Pee Em.
Everybody has already linked to this, but primate programming is what we have been doing all along.
Spent the entire day yesterday battling SuSE's broken non-use of pam_console, and what that implies for gnome-session and gdm. Pain by the truckload, that's what they call it.
Got a new microwave oven; fixing the one that got fried in the voltage drops would have been more expensive. Sigh. After watching Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, I do hope that some industrious fellow repairs it and takes it home.
Last night, while rummaging in our photo cabinet, I discovered that we still have two one-liter packets of XTOL. I should mix them today and get some rolls developed; I've been quite a slacker in that respect.
Last night we stayed up a bit late making flash-card drawings for Oralia's class. We needed a little bunch of verb-type drawings for English novices ("run", "eat", etc.). My initial thought was that we should just grab some clipart from the net, turn it into B&W line art in OpenOffice Draw, print it out, and then color it with pencils. However, finding good clipart is a total pain in the ass; clipart sites seem to be worse than porn sites with respect to registration and general uselessness. Just like porn sites, there are clipart pages full of nothing but links to other clipart pages, which are in turn full of nothing but links... We could find no sites with free vector art; most of them just had really small and badly-drawn bitmaps. Eventually we phoned up Hugo, Oralia's brother, who sent us some usable clipart from MS Word. It is well-drawn, in vector format, and quite nice to modify. I hope a free clipart project for OpenOffice appears soon.
Note to self: Iris artist's glue dissolves the toner in laser-printed pages. This was quite surprising; wasn't printed stuff supposed to be immutable?
Yesterday we went to Ruben and Adriana's house. They threw a little surprise birthday party for me; it was completely unexpected, so it made me very happy.
Oralia's mother made some absolutely delicious tostadas de pata for us. We'll have to make them on our own one of these days.
And today in the afternoon we went to my dad's to eat apple strudel and some good tea.
It was great to relax over the weekend, as both Oralia and myself had been very busy last week. She gave her first class to novice English students on Friday; preparing a class takes a lot of work. Fortunatey it turned out very well.
Go backward in time to July 2003.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2003/Aug/04 12:19:23 CDT