sacha chua living an awesome life

I have about 41 pages for my current chapter on taking notes in Emacs, and I still have to write the introduction and wrap-up sections. This means that I’ll need to do some more editing. It’s clearly time to apply another piece of advice from the wonderful book How to Write Fast (While Writing Well), by David Fryxell: don’t over-write, because the time you waste writing more than necessary and then editing down to the required length could be spent writing about something else!

I also rock because I’m getting the hang of writing macros for OpenOffice.org. Basic is not my favorite language and OpenOffice.org macro programming is sufficiently obscure that it’s hard to find examples of what I want to do. OOoMacros.org helped me learn enough to write a few more functions to make my writing life better. I wrote two new functions today: one to mark up wingdings in my code, and another to mark up the source code examples. Both save me lots of tedious work. The wingding function replaced all instances of (1), ;; (1), (2), ;; (2), until (9) and ;; (9) with the corresponding wingding. The example function marked up everything enclosed in <example>..</example> tags, formatting the first and last lines in a different style and using a single-line code style for short examples. Between that and the two functions I’d previously written to format about 80% of my command and keyboard shortcuts, editing is just so much better.

It seems that most people don’t tinker with their tools. I like doing so. I like getting to know what I can do with a tool and how far I can push it. This can be frustrating sometimes (I spent all afternoon trying to get Emacs to play nicely with other weblogs!), but most of the time, it’s both fun and useful. Not only am I saving myself time, I’m also exercising my brain and opening opportunities for other hacks down the line. This is good.

Oh! And W- is giving Ledger a try. The tool he’d been using to keep track of finances dropped some more of his data recently. Because it’s all magic inside, he couldn’t figure out what happened. I’d been going on about how awesome Ledger is, this command-line double-entry accounting tool that provides no bells or whistles but with which I can do all sorts of crazy things. He described how he wanted to budget, and I showed him how to do it. No screencast, but I do plan to review the audio and create some supporting materials for my upcoming article on Ledger and Gnuplot.

Life is good. =)

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