There's not enough bitching

[Brian]

Evidently they'll have an installer out on Sunday, which ... works for me, actually.

[Yuthirin]

Comcast has always sucked for Customer Service.

[Muphrid]

So I was going through a set of story files, trying to make the syntax of commands consistent so my hacked perl script would process them into HTML properly.  The big problems were a lack of closing braces on the ends of simple macros or just overall weird spacing with ellipses.

So I had the clever idea to open all 48 files in vim and manipulate every buffer all at once with a regular expression.

I also realized it was annoying that the command to manipulate every buffer would stop whenever a file was changed, so I set an option to automatically save every time it moved to the next file.

One of the problems I had was use of an ellipsis command near a regular period.  So in the regular expression, I put in to find \\ldots{}. and so on.

Except . in regex is a wildcard that means any character.

And I was auto-saving every file as soon as the regex completed.

And for whatever reason, I wasn't clever enough to mass-undo that before closing vim out of horror and, hence, losing the undo history.

So now a lot of ellipses have munched the character next to them or put dots in weird places that they shouldn't be.  And that's not awesome.

[Iron Dragoon]

So I was going through a set of story files, trying to make the syntax of commands consistent so my hacked perl script would process them into HTML properly.  The big problems were a lack of closing braces on the ends of simple macros or just overall weird spacing with ellipses.

So I had the clever idea to open all 48 files in vim and manipulate every buffer all at once with a regular expression.

I also realized it was annoying that the command to manipulate every buffer would stop whenever a file was changed, so I set an option to automatically save every time it moved to the next file.

One of the problems I had was use of an ellipsis command near a regular period.  So in the regular expression, I put in to find \\ldots{}. and so on.

Except . in regex is a wildcard that means any character.

And I was auto-saving every file as soon as the regex completed.

And for whatever reason, I wasn't clever enough to mass-undo that before closing vim out of horror and, hence, losing the undo history.

So now a lot of ellipses have munched the character next to them or put dots in weird places that they shouldn't be.  And that's not awesome.

I have no idea what any of that means. =D

[Muphrid]

Bad, bad things happen when you set things to autosave and you make a mistake.  That's more or less the gist of it.

[Brian]

This is why I have so much version control over everything I write.  Eve dropbox is better than nothing, though that's more intended as portability than version control....

[Jon]

I highly recommend setting up 'git' for version control. It doesn't require a server, so you can save versions ('commit') without a network connection, but you can then later push the entire history up to a server for safe-keeping. (Or to another machine on your network, etc etc)

http://boingboing.net/2009/02/13/flashbake-free-versi.html is a neat wrapper around git that at least one novelist uses to automatically commit changes every 15 minutes.

You can find me on irc and I'd be happy to talk your ear off and help you set up git for your particular situation.

[Muphrid]

That's a smart way of doing things.  I'm slightly more familiar with darcs (but still pretty new to either of them), so I put that on my machine and  set up repositories for all the stories I'm actively working on.  Thanks for the tip, Jon!

[Brian]

I realize my last comment here may have sounded somewhat condescending....  FWIW, I only learned that lesson after managing to format the HDD with my fics on it, some years ago. >_>;;

Today: James's Personal Hate Machine e-mailed me to say, "Dude, you're being unreasonable. D:"

Wow.

[Yuthirin]

I'm still awake. Fuck.

[thepanda]

I hate the cold. Why couldn't it stay warm at night?

So wet.

So cold.

;_;

[VySaika]

Therepist is ticking us off. Keeps changing the day of the appts so it's never stable, today is the second time she's just neglected to show up for the appointment...gah.

We have to take what the insurance covers since the child does need the therapy, but this is getting to a point where we really wish we had the money to take him somewhere else.

[Yuthirin]

Next time she doesn't show up, bill her for time and travel.

Your time is just as valuable as hers. If you didn't show up for your appointment, would she still charge you?

[Yuthirin]

Her: Come to my wedding! We've been friends forever!
Me: Are you still with that guy that constantly told you that you were fat two years ago, even though you're the single hottest woman I've ever known?
Her: Well yeah! He's great now!
Me: No.

[Anastasia]

Her: Come to my wedding! We've been friends forever!
Me: Are you still with that guy that constantly told you that you were fat two years ago, even though you're the single hottest woman I've ever known?
Her: Well yeah! He's great now!
Me: No.

Ah, the joy of friends in those sort of relationships. He sounds a bit abusive.