I wrote an article for the UUG site on how I created the BYU-UUG logo (see the logo on the Gallery. I've also been reading up on Vim. I'm going to write an article on that for the UUG site as well. I'm tempted to play around with Lisp and Perl as well.

Our broadband has been down for a while. Same with the phone line. I guess AT&T's working on it. It came up for about fifteen minutes but just went down again. Very annoying. (Especially the phone.)

Turns out a node went down, which is why our Internet and phone service were down. Everything's okay now.

Found out that Ghostview (gv) can view PDF files. Cool.

I finally got the left-hand sidebar effect I wanted, using CSS. I had to make a background image and set it to repeat-y. A hack, I know, but it works. Somehow I'd gotten it into my head that I wouldn't ever have to use hacks with CSS. I guess I forgot my experience with HTML. :)

Still sick, by the way. I feel well enough to walk around and read and work on stuff like this site, but I still don't have much physical strength (beyond mere walking), and the cough's still here (although it feels like it's fading away). So, life is quite tolerable now, although I still can't wait till I'm fully recovered.

I put together a first draft (so to speak) of the Project Gutenberg programmer's site. It went pretty well, although I'm not completely satisfied. Now the main thing is to find all the projects related to e-texts and get them into listings.

I started reading through the Vim user manuals. Lots of cool stuff I was unaware of. Digraphs are simply awesome. Much easier than copying and pasting foreign characters, which was what I was doing. Ctrl-V and Ctrl-K are my friends. :) (Ctrl-V lets you enter the numeric code for a character; Ctrl-K lets you enter a digraph.) The backspace method of entering digraphs is cool as well, but I think it would mess me up, so I'm sticking with Ctrl-K. Now I need to learn how to split the window so I can edit more than one file in the same window... Vim is exceedingly cool.

Still sick. But it feels like it's going away. I hope. :)

I volunteered today to create a site for Project Gutenberg programmers. I'll maintain it till I leave in August. The vision right now is that it'll have information on all PG-related projects (software, that is) and a wishlist of things to be done. And I'll probably also dig up related links, on OCR theory for example. The site will be hosted elsewhere, since it needs to be maintained while I'm gone, but I'll mirror it here, of course.

I've spent an hour or so this evening working on the layout for the Project Gutenberg Programmer's Page. I wanted to get a simple two-column layout, with the left column a menu flush left and running from the top of the browser window down to the bottom, and the right column the content. Simple enough, right? Well, CSS doesn't seem to want to be that simple. Either it just isn't nice enough to do what I want, or else I don't know how to do it. Probably the latter. I'm having trouble deciding on a layout. I entertained the thought of a 3-column fluid layout, but that doesn't really fit. Simple is better. The cleaner, the better. Having established what is better, the trick is accomplishing that. CSS is being rather bothersome. I know what I want, but I can't get what I want because CSS doesn't want to play along. That's probably because I'm still not sure if I want the layout to be fluid (like Blank Slate's) or more rigid. It's getting late, so I'm going to sleep on it. As far as the other projects are coming, The Ball and the Cross is making slow progress and I certainly won't have it done by Saturday (which was the original plan). I still have 100 pages left to type in (out of an original 254). Typing books in is tedious. I haven't worked on Proofread much at all lately. Now that I'm feeling well enough to work, I'll start on it soon. At the moment the PGPP takes precedence, however.

Same as yesterday. Still not as weak as I was before (and I'm very glad of that), but no improvement otherwise. I've spent the day reading Across China. It's not quite Thailand, but at least it's Asia. Fascinating stuff. I wish there were more books on Thailand. It seems unbelievable that I'll actually be there in just five months. It's like a dream, surreal and misty in the future. I'm looking forward to the layover in Tokyo. Hopefully it's more than just a few minutes; I'd like to look around. Ideally we'd get stuck there for a day or two. What am I saying? I've never hoped for a long layover in my life! :) Besides, I don't know if I'd be able to leave the airport. I probably wouldn't want to, if the layover is just an hour or two. The plane might leave without me. :)

Well, the good news is that I'm not as weak as I used to be. But the cough is still here. I'm hoping today has started a trend that will continue (quickly) until I'm fully healed. Ideally by tomorrow. :) I never seem to get better from illnesses during the day -- it seems that healing can only take place during the night, at least for me. At any rate, it's nice having a little extra energy. Not much -- I still have hardly any strength, as I found out today when I helped my uncle lift some benches out of our van -- but definitely more than before. It's a start. The nights are much better now that I've remembered to rub VapoRub (some cough suppression medicine) on my chest before going to bed. The two nights that I forgot to do it were the awful ones.

Oh, it's looking like my chance at a job at MyFamily might not be completely gone after all. I'm still not quite sure what's happening, but things look good. I've just got to get better so I can go in and talk with them...

Surprise, surprise -- still sick. I can't tell if I'm getting better or worse. I didn't go to the farewells today. Too weak. I wish I knew when it will end...

I realized today that perhaps I got sick from the immunizations. I took all of the shots on May 2nd, but the typhoid immunization had to be taken as a sequence of pills, and I finished that sequence on the 9th. And I started getting sick on the 11th. Certainly a possibility...

My mom was talking with a friend and found that lots of missionaries (the type who get sick rarely, like me) do indeed get hammered down by illness shortly after taking their immunization shots. I'm thinking this is the cause. It makes sense. And a mere bowl of ice cream (my original idea for the cause) wouldn't do this to me. (Unless perhaps it was the last straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. Almost anything can topple a weak immunse system.) Yes, this sounds right. It all fits together. That still doesn't tell me how long it will last, though.

No change. The nights are awful, but the days aren't terribly bad. Most of my time is spent lying in bed halfway between consciousness and sleep. Still, I can't wait to get better. I'll shout for joy when I'm well. :) Two of my friends have their missionary farewells tomorrow. I really want to see them before they leave, so I may go even if I'm not better yet. I'll just sit in the back and try not to die. :) Luckily I don't have anything (other than farewells) planned for the next few weeks, so I won't have to cancel any more appointments (I hope). I've already missed institute twice, though, and I don't want to miss it again.

A friend told me that I could find my Thailand entrance date on my visa application. Good thing I haven't sent it in yet. :) (My passport arrived today, as did the letter from my mission president. I'll turn in my visa and passport stuff pretty soon.) So, I arrive in Thailand on November 4th. Which means I'll be in the MTC for eleven weeks. Wow. I thought it would be just eight. Two months and two weeks. That's how long my friend will be there, too, however, so perhaps all missionaries headed to Thailand stay for the extra three weeks. Probably because the language is so different. I haven't checked with any others yet. I can't wait to get better so I can start eating Thai food...

Still sick. Blah. Tomorrow it'll be two weeks. I hope it will only be two weeks. I'm amazed at how lethargic it makes me. I think the reason I got sick in the first place was that I don't exercise regularly. Very stupid of me. I've known for years that the human body requires regular physical exercise. And I've been lazy. Too many other things to do was the main excuse. It's hard to fit an hour of exercise in when you're already waking up at 4:50 and going to bed at 9:30. But I can -- must -- give up some things to make that time. I really have been the fool here. I'm not entirely certain that my lack of exercise was the cause of this sickness, but it feels right. I'll probably start running or biking. (I'll be biking a lot in Thailand, although I doubt it's very strenuous.) I seem to make this decision once every few months. :) It's like a New Year's resolution, popping up year after year. Don't get me wrong -- I do want to exercise. But it requires an extraordinary amount of self-discipline, especially when your exercise time is 4:30 in the morning and you're dead tired.

Still haven't gotten a router. I'll wait till I get better. There's no big rush. Oh, we postponed tonight's dinner appointment. That's good. Thai food sounds incredibly delicious right now, but we really should wait till I get better.

It doesn't seem to be going away. It's like a pesky little fly or mosquito that keeps buzzing around, bothering you, and just when you think it's gone for good, it's back. Sorry about all of these entries being on the boring side. There just isn't much to write about when you're sick. (Actually, I'm sure I could come up with things to write, but the illness has sucked away most of my energy and it doesn't leave me with much motivation to do anything at all other than lie in bed.) No news yet from MyFamily. Probably not a good sign.

Still sick. This illness is interminable, it seems. Bother.

I've decided to write only in this journal from now on (meaning I won't write in the writing log or the reading log). One place is better.

I really can't wait till I get better. I keep coming across delicious descriptions of food that I can't eat (because it's better to stay on a fruit-and-vegetables diet, to clean my system out, so that's all I've been eating, although occasionally I've decided to take my punishment and have had some toast or a biscuit or something). Especially Thai food. I'm looking forward very much to getting to eat Thai for the next two years. :) I hope I'm better before Friday...

Lest you think something odd is going on, this fruit-and-vegetables diet is something I'm doing myself, not at my parents' command or the doctor's order or whatnot. It has to do with my ideas about the healing systems of the body and the origin of disease and a few other things that would be too complicated to explain here. It's not as weird as it sounds, I promise. :)

Oh, sometimes a journal entry won't show up here till the next day. That usually means I forgot to upload it or was too busy. I don't know why anyone would care about this, though... :)

Not much new on this front. Still sick. It sounds worse than it is, though. Nothing more than a cough. I guess I'm just used to being healthy. :)

Oh, that Thai Book of Mormon came in the mail yesterday. Pretty cool. :) I can read "Mormon" and "Christ" on the cover, but that's about it. I can't wait till I can actually read it. I'm going to that Thai Ruby restaurant on Friday, by the way. (Some of my parents' friends are very into Thai food and are taking us there.) I hope I'm better by then. Perhaps a Thai chili pepper will scorch the sickness out of me. :) (It would probably scorch a lot more than that, though. ;))

I seem to be caught by this illness. I really hope it goes away soon. I've tried everything I can think of.

I'm thinking about using GTK+ 2 for Proofread instead of GTK+ 1.2. Not sure yet, though.

Worked on Proofread for a couple of hours. Nothing major, though. I need to go through it and fix the segfaults. I wonder if there's some script for vim that will make editing changelogs easier...

Oh, I finished Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time a few days ago, but forgot to mention it on here. Fascinating book. I don't agree with the "There wouldn't be much for a creator to do, so therefore there probably isn't one..." attitude, but that's easy enough to ignore. I wonder what the current theory is (probably not superstrings, although they're a mind-bogglingly cool concept).

Still sick. Argh.

I decided to collect all of this information I've been gathering about Thailand and put it up on a page. And thus Thailand Tips was formed. It's pretty spartan now, but when I get better I'll go through all the e-mails I've gotten and make sure every bit of advice is worked in.

The coughing attacks almost feel like they're getting worse. They don't come all that frequently, but when they do, they're more violent and involved than they used to be. I look skeletal and I realized today that I've been quite weakened. But I'm really quite a baby -- many people go through much, much worse than this on a daily basis. Last night I was reading Jesus the Christ and came to a discussion of the parable of Lazarus the beggar and the rich man. As I read about the dogs licking Lazarus's sores, I quickly realized that I can't really complain.

Well, AT&T will be coming by sometime this morning to install broadband. Should be pretty nice. :) I'm most likely going to buy a router (probably a LinkSys BEFSR41 Etherfast 4-Port Cable/DSL Router) and set that up as well. But I probably won't do that today.

Broadband is pretty darn nice. :) Download, that is. Upload is only 128kbps, which is still better than a modem but not up to par with DSL. So don't go with it if you want to run a server. The AT&T salesman actually told me the upload rate was 256kbps. I'll pester them about it later when I'm not sick. It's incredibly nice being able to be on the Internet without worrying about tying up the phone. :) And of course the speed is nice. And no dial-in wait. I need to get that router soon...

Spent three and a half hours hacking away at Proofread (the Distributed Proofreaders Gtk+ client). It's coming along pretty well, although of course the bug list is growing too fast for psychological comfort. :) Speaking of proofreading, I've now passed the halfway mark on typing in The Ball and the Cross. I should have passed it a long time ago, but I've fallen behind.

I thought I would start getting better, but I'm getting worse. This is certainly not fun. I won't be volunteering at the MTC today.

The job interview went pretty well (at least from my point of view :)). I'm going in again on Tuesday or Wednesday to talk with one or two more people. The company (MyFamily.com) is even cooler than I imagined. It would be an incredibly awesome place to work.

Because of school I haven't really done any real programming in quite a while, so I decided to write a linked list implementation in C. Nothing major, but it's been a while since I coded in C. Amazingly it worked perfectly the first time. I also wrote most of a binary tree implementation (which works almost perfectly). This sickness is bothering me a great deal.

I read up on XML (the XML FAQ, for instance) and related technologies (XSL, XLink, RDF, etc.). Cool stuff. I really like XML. It's a very clean technology, aesthetically speaking.

Still sick. Last night I didn't wake up in a cold sweat, though, so I think (hope) I'm getting better. I'm hoping tomorrow will be a return to health. I didn't go to Star Wars. Yesterday I spent most of the day in bed, but that made me feel sicker, so today I think I'll avoid that. I have a job interview tomorrow. And I'm volunteering at the Provo MTC.

Last night I started reading Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many biological terms I recognized. Ah, I've neglected science too much in the past year. Since none of my classes were science-related (except for Physical Science fall semester), I've tended to focus almost entirely on languages and literature and history and computers. Which are all worthy causes, of course, but I do miss science. I think I'm finally going to start reading Euclid's Elements.

Yesterday afternoon I started E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers and finished it by evening. I liked it. I liked Five Children and It more, but Treasure Seekers still has that 19th-century British feel to it. Reminds me of Agatha Christie for some reason. Sherlock Holmes, too. And of course Lewis and Tolkien and Chesterton. I really haven't been doing much reading lately. But that's because I need to focus on Thailand. I haven't studied Thai at all the past few days (mostly because of my illness).

Wow, the 18th (the day we're getting broadband Internet) is almost here. That went by rather fast. I need to get a router. I originally planned on putting together a Linux box for the purpose, and the idea still holds great appeal for me, but I'll be leaving this summer and it would be easier for my family to have a hardware-based router. At least theoretically. I don't want to spend more money, but I've heard routers are pretty cheap nowadays, and it would be a good long-term investment.

It seems like the only remaining evidence of my illness is the cough (which seems to be getting better). Wait, no, for the past few nights I've had woken up several times in a cold sweat (which isn't fun, I've found).

I don't think I'll be going to Star Wars tonight. Staying up that late (the showing is at 1:00 tomorrow morning) would almost certainly make me sicker. I thought the chills had gone away, but they've come back within the past hour. I probably won't recover till Friday. Darn. Being sick is not fun at all. Some of the missionaries I've talked to (who have recently returned from Thailand) have said I should count on getting sick a few time while out there. Oh joy. :) Hopefully none will be too bad. ("Guess what, Mom, I've got malaria!" :)) I'm not really worried. My cough isn't better after all. My, these entries are incredibly uplifting and bouncy, aren't they. :) I still have a few things I have to go to this week that I'd prefer to miss (because I'm sick), but I can't, so I'll just have to grin and bear it.

Still sick. Yesterday afternoon my cough moved from the innocent stage to the gritty, raspy, painful stage. I take it that isn't good. :) It seems that every time I get sick, it takes four or five days to recover. Good thing I only get sick twice a year (or so). :)

I need to start updating other parts of the site. I'm tempted to really dive into XML. And Perl. But I really ought to be focusing on preparing for my mission. I'm getting close to having the Thai script learned. I need to memorize which consonants are in which class (low, middle, high), since the tone rules are based on that (e.g. if the initial consonant of a dead syllable is a middle-class consonant (I doubt economics are involved :)), the syllable's tone is low). Dead syllables end in a stop (k, p, t) or a short vowel. Basically anything that you can't prolong. Live syllables end in a nasal (m, n, ng) or a long vowel. (You can say 'm' for as long as you have breath, but you physically can't prolong a 'p'.) Syllables can't end in any other consonant sounds, by the way. For instance, the letter 'j' becomes a 't' when placed at the end of a syllable. Likewise, 'l' goes to 'n', so King Bhumibol's name is actually pronounced Phumiphon. (B's and p's are rather interchangeable as far as romanization goes.) It sounds more difficult than it really is. I think studying Welsh and other languages where consonants change sounds has made it easier. I haven't really started on the tapes yet. I want to learn the script first, so that I can follow along with the tapes and see exactly how each letter is pronounced. But before long I'll spend a lot of time with the tapes, since I need to get a feel for the language and the way it rolls off my tongue. That'll help with getting rid of the accent. (I have a feeling that it will take many, many months before I'm even able to come close to losing my accent, though. :)) At any rate, the language is coming along quite well, even though I haven't spent as much time on it as I should. I hesitate to memorize vocabulary until I have the pronunciation mastered, since I don't want to reinforce bad habits.

Earlier today I was looking at a Georgia-Pacific box (a Xerox box, or whatever that size is called -- the kind that paper comes in) and liked the colors (white, pastel blue, and dark grey). So I started fiddling around with the color scheme on here. I quickly realized that the layout wouldn't really allow me much artistic freedom as it was. So, since I'm not the type to give up easily, I redid the layout. I quite like this one (#7 -- there's a history of the different layouts on my About Blank Slate page). I'm still not sure if I like the colors for these journals, but I can change that later.

The last time I did any creative writing was at the beginning of April, I think. Today that changed. I'm on the lds_writers mailing list and decided to write a story based on one of the prompts. The result was Encircled.

Apparently the Thai dialects (there are four main ones -- central, north, northeast, and south) are as different from each other as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are. Wow. :)

Still sick. Sicker than before, actually. Not fun. The amazing thing is that this time it isn't messing up my brain, so I can still study Thai and do other mental activity without feeling incredibly yucky. It's rather nice (compared to what it could have been). Still, I can't wait till I'm better again. Especially because this week will be busy. I'm going to see Star Wars on Thursday at 1:00 a.m. (Why do I have a feeling I'll fall asleep halfway through? :))

I ordered a Thai Book of Mormon today (it's only $2), so that should arrive before long. I wonder if I can get the missionary discussions in Thai...

Proofread (the name of the Distributed Proofreaders client I'm working on) is further along than I thought. That's good. I want to add a manual zoom slider. I'll also be completing the image caching support, making the username/password authorization more secure, and fixing miscellaneous bugs. I think I'll need to learn about POSIX threads. And Gtk+, of course. (That's what it uses.) I'm also thinking I'll add a history feature, stored in XML, so that the user can see which pages of which books he or she has worked on. I found a bunch of tutorials on threads and will start reading through them when I get to that point. The first order of business, though, is to read through the existing code and make sure I understand it thoroughly. I wonder if I should put the project on Sourceforge...