Ugh. Grunt.

That’s all I can think of (or emit) at this point — primitive grunts. I’m now rather sleep-deprived (never did get to take that nap), and I now hate SVG images with a passion, through no fault of their own or the technology itself — it seems to be well-nigh impossible to convert standalone SVG or SVGZ images into a more widely-accepted vector graphics format.

I managed to complete the presentation, but without the graphics I wanted to use, and as a result, the slides would have looked significantly shabbier. I say ‘would have’ because I never got to present — some marketroid from Novell took up all the time all the way to the end of the meet, boring the rest of us to death with his sales pitch.

Oh well.

The prayer party devolved into a confused set of cliques constantly shifting from room to room, confusedly (I think, almost drunkenly, though there was no ethanol consumed) shifting from venue to venue and from activity to activity. And of course, I managed to get really bored. Which is, in fact, why I’m at the PC, typing this out while the kids are screaming downstairs, the guys are engaged in really boring shop talk, and the women are engaged in really boring gossip.

Well, at least it wasn’t the worst birthday ever. I managed to get myself a source of income after many months, and managed to evade the most boring part of the day (by getting fairly bored at a marketing presentation . . . uhh, hrm). My previous birthday was far worse — if I recall correctly, it was mostly spent sitting at home chatting on IRC.

And now I need to get cracking on my syslog writeup. Too bad (a) my research isn’t done yet and (b) I won’t be able to concentrate until everyone’s gone home and my folks are asleep.

Ugh. Grunt.

The Plunge is Taken

So I have a temp job.

I’ll be doing some technical documentation work (not computer-related) — writing a manual of procedures, involving mostly word processing and OCR work. I’ll be making about US$820 a month, which is, incidentally, more than what the average programmer is paid in this country. (Man, I really want to get out of here.) I start Sunday (which is the second day of the workweek here, Friday being the weekend).

In other news, my sister has her final practical exams for her MBBS degree (a 4½-year undergraduate course in medicine [not pre-med] with no US equivalent; probably includes most of a U.S. MD) beginning on January 27, which means we’ll be well into February before she arrives. I don’t know if I can wait that long to watch The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. I’m not sure it’ll be in cinemas at that time. (It’s all over the place at present.) Fortunately, though, my sister will be free of study burdens (for the past four years, every time she’s been home, she’s usually spent her entire vacation studying for the inevitable exams to follow), so she’ll probably be able to enjoy herself completely after a long, long time.

Mom’s busy cooking, cleaning, arranging, etc. for the prayer meeting. And I should be working on the presentation and the already-late Linux.Ars.

Incidentally, I found a potential solution to the SVG→EPS issue — FOP will turn an SVG document into a PDF, and I can use Ghostscript to do the PDF→EPS conversion, whereupon OpenOffice.org will be able to use the resultant images.

I’m operating on roughly 1½ hours of sleep right now. If I can manage to get the presentation done, I can probably catch a few winks prior to lunchtime.

Perhaps Jorge would like to fix the encoding used on Planet Linux.Ars? ;p (Hint: utf-8 would be good.)

An inauspicious start

So Planet.Linux.Ars inspired me to start this blog — one more drop in the ocean.

I’m really not looking forward to tomorrow. It’s going to be a crazy day:

• I get to start on a job I really don’t want to, but don’t have much of an alternative choice. I get to OCR a big book, then write a manual of some sort based on it. The “boss” seemed a bit too secretive — “we’ll talk about it when we meet” — and I get the feeling I’m going to be (a) utterly wasted here (b) underpaid for the amount of work I’ll need to put in.
• I get to finish the logging piece for tomorrow’s Linux.Ars. This means doing research — enough of it that’ll make the writeup accurate and worthwhile to read. The Linux.Ars pieces I’ve headed up have flopped so far, so of course, I’m apprehensive about this one. Here’s hoping ctkrohn or Soko will chip in.
• I need to finish my presentation for the LUG meeting tomorrow. Apart from the content (hah), I’m having trouble with the slide design — the graphics I want to use are SVG, and OpenOffice.org 1.1 won’t use it. On top of this, neither Sodipodi nor Inkscape will properly convert to the other ubiquitous vector format, PostScript. I might end up inserting bitmapped graphics, and who knows how that’ll turn out on the screen.
• I get to assist Mom in her preparations for a suttsung involving Sikh devotees singing and talking about God and the like. I’m an atheist, and completely disinclined towards being involved in the proceedings. Fortunately for me, the LUG meeting happened to conveniently coincide with this suttsung, so it’s a welcome escape.
• It’s my birthday, so I get to cut the cake. Well, that part is probably the only part I’m actually looking forward to.

It’s 3:25 a.m., and I’m wide awake. This can only mean trouble for the day to come.

Oh well. Time to fight with this SVG image.