Is it already Friday? Goodness, that week went by fast. Only two more months until I leave. Wow. I decided that instead of cleaning up the source for Proofread, I’m just going to post it and let the new maintainer take care of that. So I did. I announced it on two local mailing lists I belong to and I’m going to put a note on the Project Gutenberg Software Site when it comes up.

This journal must be largely incomprehensible to most people, now that I think about it. Most of it is Linux- or computer-related. It must seem like I have no life outside of computers. I do…I think. Once I finish all these various projects I’m working on (the etexts, PGSS, etc.), I’ll be spending most of my free time studying Thai and Thailand. I’ve fallen quite far behind on replying to e-mails in my rush to get these projects done. I don’t imagine that it’ll take more than a few more days to finish the four Montgomery etexts (two and a half are done), and PGSS should be coming up pretty soon and it’ll be out of my hands (Daniel Webb is going to maintain it).

I wrote my first real schema (in XML Schema) today. Quite exciting. I downloaded Sun’s Multi Schema Validator (MSV) and I can’t even describe the emotions that poured through me when it validated successfully. Xerces looks pretty cool as well, although it doesn’t seem to be a full-fledged validator (but maybe it is).

I was talking with my mom today after work. She hinted that I was a wee bit too open on this site. At first I disagreed heartily, but then she said it didn’t leave me very mysterious. Now, being a hopeless romantic, my ears perked up at the word “mysterious” and realized she was exactly right. Here I am, an unabashed romantic, being dully unromantic by eliminating all the mystery. So, over the course of the next week or two I’m going to scale it back a bit, closing up like a clam and becoming Mr. Mystery. ;) No, really, I am going to work on the site, but I’ll still keep this journal on here and my writing and artwork and music and stuff like that (and of course all the stuff that isn’t about me personally, like the VAIO page).

I’ve decided to finish this Vim article first (before the etexts, that is). I’m reading through all sorts of stuff on Vim. For over a year now (if not longer) I’ve been using :wq to save and exit, but today I rediscovered the ZZ command, which is one less keystroke and therefore much cooler. I’ll have to re-train my fingers but it shouldn’t be too hard. And ZZ only saves if there are changes. The reason to use Vim/vi (among many others) is speed. The less your hands have to move, the better. Right now I still use the arrow keys when editing text in Vim, but I want to train myself to use h/j/k/l so that I won’t have to move my hand over. (Yes, we’re talking milliseconds here.)

Vim rocks. In my research for this article I’ve learned dozens and dozens of new things I never knew before. (And most of those are things I’ll actually use, commands that’ll speed me up or reduce typos or whatnot.) What’s really cool is that Galeon lets you use ‘j’ and ‘k’ for scrolling. I discovered it quite by accident.