I went to two missionary farewells today. Wow, my own is in just two weeks. That's crazy. :) And only a week and a half after that till I enter the MTC in Provo. Somehow time seems to have sped up this summer. :) It's already been three months since I got my call. Whoa.

In the three and a half weeks I have left, I'm going to start reading the newspaper each morning, including the online edition of the Bangkok Post. I haven't really read the newspaper in several years, so I'm horribly uninformed when it comes to current events. (Reading the Bangkok Post will help me get an idea of what the political situation is like in Thailand now.)

We've decided to switch the Project Gutenberg Software Site from the Faq-O-Matic to a PHP/MySQL solution (which is much nicer). In fact, Project Gutenberg will be completely switching over (hopefully) to a full PHP/MySQL system within a few months. It will be incredibly cool. Too bad I won't be around to see it. :) But most of the kinks will be worked out by the time I come back (two years is enough time for that :)). When I get back, I'm going to set up an RSS feed here on Blank Slate, and I'm going to start using CVS and rsync on my local machine to maintain it. And I'll do it all in PHP/MySQL and integrate it with the Project Gutenberg site (somehow). I'll be doing lots of stuff after my mission -- Project Gutenberg, Unicode work, Linux advocacy, documentation and testing for various projects, etc. But all that is two years down the road. Focus on the present, Ben. :)

Oh, the TeX and PDF versions of the Old Icelandic primer have been posted on Project Gutenberg. Nice. :)

I've decided to use Lucida Sans Unicode for the IPA portion of that Thai alphabet chart I'm working on. It's coming along very well and is almost done, and (IMHO) it looks very nice. :)

Got copyright clearance for The Story of Mormonism and submitted it to Project Gutenberg. We're going to re-do part of the PG Software Site in PHP/MySQL. Should be pretty fun. :)

The Story of Mormonism has been posted on Project Gutenberg as etext #5630. Sweet. :) Oh, my friend Byron will be maintaining Blank Slate while I'm gone on my mission in Thailand. He'll be posting weekly updates and pictures from me.

Got the video and audio streams from the UUG meeting last night converted into usable files. :) I recorded the audio stream in XMMS using the DiskWriter plugin (writes to wave), fixed the wave headers using Wavelength, then touched the files up in Audacity (I had to remove some noise and amplify the sound as the volume was quite low). And finally I converted them to Ogg with oggenc. To capture the video stream I just ran wget on the URL and it kept downloading the stream into a multi-part JPEG file. I then wrote chop.pl which chops the file into individual JPEG files. Finally, I ran ffmpeg on them, producing an MPEG. It all worked out quite nicely. :)

I worked on some flyers for the UUG (for our installfest and club booth and free software giveaway, all next week), using OpenOffice Draw (which is quite cool). My only complaint is that OpenOffice wouldn't import an EPS file I had. (I tried converting it to WMF as well, but that didn't work either.)

Discovered Mutt aliases today. :) Wow, they're cool! Much nicer than having to type long e-mail addresses. I really like how it'll expand more than one e-mail address (e.g. "john, george" will expand both, not just the first). Very, very handy.

I'm really becoming interested in Church history (LDS Church history, that is). I think I'm going to start reading the official Church History (six- or seven-volume set). I may even end up doing this for a career...

I finally started paring down the personal info on here (so far I've cut out most of the romance page and about half of the about page). There isn't as much as I thought there would be, frankly. Good. :)

I discovered rsync today. I'd heard about it, of course, but I never thought I needed it. Well, today I realized that I do and that it's incredibly cool.

I installed OpenOffice 1.0.1 on my work machine. When I tried to Insert Special Character, it killed the X server. And when I was scrolling down a document, once again it killed the X server. So beware 1.0.1. I think 1.0.0 is safe, though. (I haven't run into anything like that with it yet.)

Finished the TeX/PDF version of the primer and submitted it to Project Gutenberg.

Went to the BYU-UUG club meeting tonight (for the first time in three years :)). Cool stuff. I recorded the audio and video stream and will have them uploaded soon.

I guess I'm in an article-writing mood (I wrote Feeding the Hand That Feeds You this morning). The more I look at the word "feed," the funnier it looks. :) Anyway, last night I went to the screening for Handcart, a movie my sister April is in. (She plays Elizabeth.) I liked it. It's about the Mormon handcart trek out to Utah (the Martin handcart company to be specific). I'd never realized just how hard it would be to leave your dead family members there on the plains, buried under the cold snow. My respect for the pioneers skyrocketed after seeing that movie.

Finally finished typesetting An Icelandic Primer. I used mpage to put two pages onto one sheet (reducing the size to 92 pages) and I'm printing it out right now so I can proof it. It's very, very nice. :)

I added the Thai page. Right now I'm going through all the Thai fonts I can find to see which ones are best (and which ones support Unicode). I also started working on a Thai alphabet chart (in OpenOffice, using the Garuda font). It's coming along pretty well. Tomorrow I'll find an IPA font that works well with Times New Roman...

I read through the Mutt help file this morning. Lots of stuff I didn't know about. (I can't believe I've waited this long to learn how to use message tagging.) I love the vi keybindings. :) ('j' and 'k' for scrolling, 'G' to move to the bottom of the current message, etc.) I wish there was some way to use 'G' in the index to jump to the end of the message list... Mutt is very cool, though. I didn't realize there were functions and macros and all that.

Well, I decided to add vi-style keybindings to Mozilla (I was in that sort of mood :)), so they're now on the Linux page. I want to find out how to modify Lynx's keybindings as well. Oh, a guy on the UUG list gave me an example of how to get Mutt to scroll to the bottom of the message list with 'G': 'bind index G last-entry'. Cool. :)

I'm installing Gentoo right now. Sure takes a while to compile. :) (I have a 500 MHz Pentium II with 256 megs of RAM.)

Gentoo tip: make very sure that you compile your kernel with devfs support included, since there's no way (that I could find) to fix it if you forget (short of reinstalling). I'm putting Red Hat 7.3 on my work machine instead of Gentoo, primarily because it's a clone of another server and that server is running Red Hat. (The other reason is that it's taking too much time to compile everything on Gentoo.) Gentoo is very cool -- make no mistake about that. Portage simply rocks and the boot time is amazingly fast. It's my kind of distribution. :) I'll probably run it on my laptop after my mission.

I wrote the Help! article on how to survive in the Linux world (getting help and finding answers).

I get to install Linux on my machine at work. Mmm. :) I'm going to put Gentoo on it (instead of Red Hat). Should be pretty fun. I'm installing it tomorrow morning. As part of the process, I switched from Outlook on that machine to Mutt/IMAP on my laptop. Very cool. I'd much rather use Mutt than Outlook. :)

I spent a few hours working on the Old Icelandic primer. It's very close to done. Another day or two and I should have it finished, I think. I'm going to put together a page of basic Omega samples, probably with some introductory comments. (Omega isn't easy to figure out since there's virtually no documentation, and the documentation that is available is in PostScript, which isn't searchable.)

I got back from California this afternoon. Time passes by very quickly. :) It was a lot of fun. Yesterday I was with my uncle on some cliffs overlooking the beach (Torrey Pines Gliderport), watching the hang gliders go by. It was even windy -- cool stuff. I didn't realize till I got home that I was thoroughly sunburned, though. :) I'm rather tired (got four hours of sleep last night).

Wow, I enter the MTC in exactly one month. I didn't realize it was that close. Goodness. I'm excited, though. :) I studied some Thai on the flight to California -- it's coming along quite well.

I'm definitely getting the hang of using h/j/k/l in Vim instead of the arrow keys. It's much, much, much nicer. :) On the Vim mailing list there's been a thread recently about vi-style keybindings for bash (the Bourne Again SHell). Sounds quite cool. I really need to start using Caps Lock for the left Control instead of the Control key. I really like scrolling in Galeon with 'j' and 'k'. I feel much more like a power user now. :)

Well, I leave in half an hour for California. (I'm taking the bus up to the airport (a three-hour trip) and should arrive in San Diego by 9:30 tonight.) I hope I haven't forgotten anything. :)

I'm going to try to finish the primer today. That would be very nice. I'm also scanning in the TP&V for The Story of Mormonism in an hour and I'll submit that to Project Gutenberg. As far as real life goes :), my mission farewell is in less than a month. I need to start planning that...

Worked on the primer some more. It's getting there... (All the major stuff is in place. Right now I'm just cleaning things up, making it look pretty.) I decided to put the paradigms in minipage environments instead of table environments, but now the spacing on some of the pages is horrendous. Perhaps I'll have to go with floats after all... TeX is very, very cool. When I get back from my mission I'm going to dive into it and LaTeX and Omega.

Jonas Öster sent me some Omega code today (an OTP and an example that uses it, to be precise) to make an o-with-ogonek with a diaresis on top, an italic o-with-ogonek, a y-with-macron, etc. That way I don't have to edit the Omega font directly. It's very cool. :) (It uses the emaccents package.)

I forgot to mention yesterday that I'm still fairly new to TeX and LaTeX. I've learned a lot in these last few days, and TeX is amazingly cool. Just wait till you see this primer. :) I really, really, really like TeX. Now I need to find (or produce) a good font (Garamondesque) for typesetting English stuff...

I realized today that I really am spending my time on the wrong things. Sure, they're nice and fun and good, but I really need to be focusing on my mission and on Thai. Only a month to go. I'd better put together that Thai page to keep me focused. :)

My little brothers are playing Jedi Knight II on the computer next to me. Wow, 3D graphics sure have come a long way. :) I remember Nethack on the old DOS machines (it was for Netware if I recall correctly) and the primitive effects one could get on a 386. In fact, the whole 3D gaming thing started (I think) with Wolfenstein 3D. Too bad so many of those kinds of games are violent and graphic. I virtually never play computer games any more. Too many other things to do (like typesetting Old Icelandic primers :)).

Oh, one of my birthday presents was a $10 gift certificate at Borders, so today I stopped by there and bought Teach Yourself Sanskrit. I'll teach myself Sanskrit after my mission. :)

Worked some more on the primer. I'm flying to California on Thursday to say goodbye to my grandparents (I won't see them again until after my mission). I'll be back Sunday afternoon.

I've been staying up till midnight each night working on the primer (the TeX version, that is). It's almost done. I'm hoping to have it done by Thursday so I can print it out and proof it on the flight.

I decided to make that Unicode Coptic font so I could use it in OpenOffice and TeX (with Omega), so I opened up PfaEdit, copied the Coptonew characters into a new font, added them in the appropriate Unicode spots, and ended up with Unicopt. I'm quite pleased with it. It still needs some fixes (the supralinear stroke only covers half of the preceding letter right now), but those shouldn't be too hard. (I need to learn how to use PfaEdit first.) I saved the font as a TrueType file and added it to OpenOffice and it works great. Even prints out fine. :) (Those with experience with Linux printing will understand.) It works with Yudit as well. I probably should add a Coptic keymap to Yudit...

I started reading the PfaEdit tutorial. It's even cooler than I realized. I really like it. :)

I've been working on the TeX version of the Icelandic primer. It's coming along splendidly. I modified my PHP source (from which I generated the HTML) so that it would output LaTeX instead. That way I don't have to reformat all the tables by hand (thankfully! :)). It won't take long at all at this rate. And the result is very nice. I'll have to edit the Omega font to get some of the ogonek characters to show up, though. Shouldn't be too hard. I originally wanted to stick with the text as much as I could (i.e. try to reproduce the typesetting of the original book), but I've ditched that, since it's better to let LaTeX have its way. (This mainly comes from the tables that want to float all over the page.) People who really want the original text can look at the page images. The purpose of this TeX/PDF version is to be useable.

I got a notification e-mail today letting me know that the Icelandic primer has been posted to Project Gutenberg (it's #5424). Cool. :) I should have the TeX/PDF version done within a week or so, depending on how much time I'm able to put into it. Shouldn't take too long, though. I scanned in the TP&V for The Story of Mormonism last Saturday, but the files got corrupted en route, so I'll have to rescan them.

I caught up on replying to e-mails today, other than two or three that came in the last few days. Yesterday I got a book at the BYU library about a guy's experience in Thailand as an LDS missionary (Two Years in God's Mormon Army, by Ross H. Palfreyman), which looks pretty good. I haven't started reading it yet, though.

I've been thinking about making a Unicode font for Coptic, based off Coptonew. It would be pretty easy to copy and paste the characters into the appropriate places. (The reason I would do this is that there aren't any Coptic fonts that have Unicode support -- at least not that I'm aware of -- and Unicode doesn't actually have Coptic-only characters, just the Greek ones and the few additional Coptic ones. So if you wanted to print out a Coptic text, it would use the Greek font most of the time, which isn't what one wants, especially because some of the characters look slightly different.) I keep finding all these projects I want to start on, but I won't be able to do even half of them since I enter the MTC in just over a month. Oh well. :) I'll be back in two years and can do all of them then. I wonder where Unicode will be in two years... Hopefully much more prevalent than it is now. It'll be interesting to see where everything is in two years, for that matter. The world could be at war by then. Times change.

I'm home now. Just submitted An Icelandic Primer to Project Gutenberg.

I've been playing around with Omega (Unicode TeX) and PfaEdit. Very, very cool. In fact, I've decided to do the Icelandic primer in Omega, so that I'll have a nice printable version in PDF. So far I've gotten most of the characters to show up (though there are still a few that'll need work -- since Omega uses Type 1 fonts, I think I can just edit the font files with PfaEdit and shouldn't need to mess around with anything else, although a cleaner solution would of course be nicer). I'm captivated by PfaEdit.

I went to a local Thai restaurant for dinner with my parents (it's my 19th birthday). I love Thai food! :)

I've been with my family in Oregon for the past week. The drive there is pretty long (ten hours to our cousins' house and then five more hours to the beach), so I worked on the Old Icelandic primer and finally finished it! When I get home (tomorrow, probably) I'll submit it to Project Gutenberg. I'm rather tempted to try doing a Sanskrit grammar in Unicode, but I'd better wait till after my mission. :)

The Oregon forests are beautiful. But even better was the beach. We stayed at the Inn at Otter Crest, near Newport. Exceedingly beautiful. The sunsets were unbelievable, and it was windy most of the time, which made it even more like heaven for me. :)

Luckily that sickness wasn't really a sickness, at least not anything major. I haven't been studying Thai very much at all lately. (I somehow seem to keep getting myself involved in all these other projects.) I think I'm going to add a page on the Thai language to Blank Slate so that I'll simply have to study Thai to be able to put more stuff on the page. (It's weird how that works, psychologically. :))

Wow, only a month and a half until I leave. That's soon. Quite soon. Wow. My farewell is in just over a month. I can't believe the time is slipping away so quickly. Too fast, too fast, too fast. But that's life, I guess. I think it's too easy to freak out if you focus on how fast time goes by. Far better to accept the fact that it's gone before we know it and embrace it, going with the flow. (You can't really fight against time, no matter how hard you try. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.) It boggles my mind to think that these next two years will be over before I know it.

I've finished cleaning up the Old Icelandic primer and uploaded the text file. It's in Unicode, by the way, so you'll need a Unicode-capable viewer/editor. The next step is to convert it to HTML.

Wow, I spent pretty much the whole day working on the primer. At least it's almost done. I'm about a quarter of the way through converting it to HTML, I think. It's going quite well. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get it done early next week and submit it to Project Gutenberg.

I started reading Anne of the Island again. I love it!

I bought the Fellowship of the Ring and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones soundtracks today. Concerning Hobbits (track 2) on the LOTR CD is beautiful. Very nostalgic. And I love Across the Stars (the Attack of the Clones love theme). Actually, I love all of the music. :) But those are my favorites from each CD. I wonder what other music Howard Shore has written...

Worked on the Old Icelandic primer for a couple of hours.

I really like the new journal look. :) I think I'm starting to get sick again, confound it all. It started a few days ago, but I wasn't sure if it was allergies or a real sickness. Today it wasn't as bad as yesterday, so hopefully I'm getting better. I don't want to go through another three-week sickness.

Remapped my Caps Lock key to Control by putting the following lines in my ~/.xmodmap:

	clear Lock
	keycode 66 = Control_R
	add Control = Control_R

I like it. The Caps Lock key is much easier to hit than the Control key. Now to figure out what I want to remap the Windows and Start keys to... (I'm thinking Multi_key, using XFree86's Compose functionality, which sounds pretty cool.) If your .xmodmap isn't loaded automatically by X, by the way, you can put "xmodmap ~/.xmodmap" in your ~/.bash_profile. See this page and this one for more info.

Vim digraphs just got even cooler. :) I found out that if you're editing a UTF-8 file, the list of digraphs is exceedingly long. I've been working on the Icelandic primer and this'll make it a lot easier (before, I had to type in the four-digit Unicode code for each foreign character).

As I was working on the Old Icelandic primer I decided to convert the page images to PDF and to DjVu. It took a while to get them up in PDF (the details will be on the page before long), mainly because psmerge isn't as nice as I thought it was. PStill is quite nice, though. tiff2ps and epstopdf are as well. Converting the PDF to DjVu was quite easy with Any2DjVu, and the result is very nice (and only a meg in size). As for the etext of the primer, it's coming along fairly well (I've done 62 pages out of 111). I've finished the grammar section and now am working through the texts, which take much longer because there's so much Old Icelandic. The glossary will probably take a while as well.

Wow, the PostScript saved by DjVu (if you print to a file) looks better than the original. :) I think it's because it antialiases everything. I'll have to try printing both and see which turns out better.

I decided to add a page for The Story of Mormonism as well.

Wow, tomorrow is Blank Slate's two-year anniversary. :) It's come a long way from the first version (see the About Blank Slate page for some truly horrific screenshots :)). I decided that the current journal entry style didn't fit at all with the rest of the site, so I changed it. (It used to be a blue monstrosity.) This new one fits in perfectly, I think. I really like it. It's very nice to be able to change a stylesheet and watch the changes propagate throughout the rest of the site. :)

Changed the look of the music listings and the gallery to fit in with the journal entries. Very nice now. I like it a lot.

I installed Vim and Cygwin on my Windows box at work today. I love having Vim on Windows. :) Cygwin's pretty cool, too. Much nicer than the clunky command prompt (the lag is unbelievable). It's a Win2k box, by the way. I can't stand Windows. Linux is much, much better, at least for me. I'd never go back.

I watched the Two Towers trailer today. Wow. Too bad I'll be gone in Thailand. But it'll be available on DVD when I get back. I need to go see Fellowship again before I leave...

The CodeWeavers Crossover plugin is pretty cool, by the way. That's how I watched the Two Towers trailer without rebooting into Windows. :) (The trailer's encoded in the Sorenson Quicktime codec.)

I added the Cool Stuff page today. Now the things I think are cool won't get lost in this journal. So far it's almost entirely computer-related, and I suspect it will stay that way.

I finally found out how to switch between tabs on Galeon and Mozilla using the keyboard: Ctrl-PgUp/PgDown.

The four Montgomery texts are now on Project Gutenberg (Further Chronicles of Avonlea (#5340), Kilmeny of the Orchard (#5341), The Story Girl (#5342), Rainbow Valley (#5343)). Cool. :)

I found out today that the Church puts out a CD (for $5 or so) with most if not all of the translations of the Book of Mormon. So the task now becomes to see if I can get permission from Intellectual Reserve, Inc. (the copyright holder) to submit the etexts to Project Gutenberg.

Never mind -- the CD only has the French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish translations.

Mozilla's Orbit theme is simply beautiful. I'm quite taken with it. I'm becoming more and more entranced with Mozilla. The XUL stuff is very cool. If only Galeon could import Mozilla themes... The DOM inspector and Javascript debugger are really cool as well.

I've started reformatting the Spanish and Portuguese editions of the Book of Mormon. It'll be pretty easy. I also sent in the TP&V for Talmage's The Story of Mormonism. The four Montgomery books will appear on Project Gutenberg today or tomorrow.

I reformatted all of 1st and 2nd Nephi (in Spanish) today. I'm 30% through the first translation. It's going along quite well.

Ended up getting all the way to the end of Mosiah. Halfway done. This is going even faster than I expected.