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First line of an email I received at work today (yes, it WAS really actually work related):
“Yes we should re-label the Terminator Video.”

I was poking around on the server to see whether there were any video clips in the testing directory that I didn’t have, for variety, or maybe that test some aspect of the system better than the ones I already had. I found The Terminator. Well, a clip from Terminator 3. How rad of testing material is that? 🙂

The other two main clips I’ve been using for testing are called “drug runners” and “high wire”. The drug runners one is about this girl who flies a helicopter and chases down these guys in a boat who are illegally importing drugs. The high wire one is about this guy who climbs out of a helicopter onto high voltage power lines to fix them. He wears this special metallic suit and uses this metal stick to “make lightening” so he doesn’t get electrocuted (the lack of a ground connection also helps) and then he climbs off the helicopter onto two power lines to go out and repair them while they are live (because nobody wants their power shut off). They’re kind of entertaining compared to say…”the clock” video (which is simply an 8 frame per second video of an analog clock hand ticking) or the tank videos (just tanks driving around splashing through puddles and whatnot) or the guy in the engineering lab waving his hand in front of the camera.

Seriously…today I “had to” to test out the rudimentary paint program features built into the snapshot tool of the video capture program… this is kind of fun 🙂

all of a sudden I start trying to type quotation marks and question marks and instead I keep getting braces and dashes. Okay, this is weird. What hotkey did I accidentally press to get in this mode? It was only when I started accidentally getting “enyays” (tilde-ns) that it hit me itd probably switched me to a spanish-key-layout without my knowing. Poking around in windows language settings I finally found the culprit. Apparently leftalt-shift is a hotkey to switch key layouts. So even though it was saying “english key layout selected” visually in the settings…it wasn’t…but a quick repeating of the hotkey restored nomalacy.

Microsoft Word has lots of powerful features that unless you have taken a class on Microsoft Word (or have obtained equivalent training or experience through other means) you probably have never used. Today I got to play with a fun one called “No-Width Optional Break”.

<lj-cut>(Menu) <EM>Insert -&gt; Symbol</EM> brings up a Symbol Dialog. And it has this big table of fancy special characters–and this isn’t too strange, a lot of people have used this to insert Wingdings symbols into their document. But there’s a second tab in this dialog that is much more under-utilized–the “Special Characters” tab. This is where it has the curly quotes and a bunch of other more obscure symbols.

But I think some of my favorites are the special characters for telling word where to split words–because having words wrap at a random character is kind of lame, but having words wrap at spaces only can sometimes lead to random funky whitespace. I’ve seen a lot of people “fix” the columns to be neat (especially when you do justified alignment where both the right and the left line up neatly) by manually hyphenating words by putting “- ” where it should split. In and of itself that is well and good and does the trick, but there’s something else that often happens–you realize a word near the beginning is misspelled or you forgot some key word and suddenly, all your “fixes” to the hyphenation are off and suddenly you have “over-&nbsp;view” in the middle of one line and it just looks like you didn’t proof-read because you couldn’t find all the places you needed to go back and fix *again*. But if instead of inserting minus and a space you insert a “optional hyphen” (either by using the special characters dialog or using the shortcut key ctrl-minus) word will automatically remove the hyphen if the word no longer spans a line break.

But there’s some cases where the proper way to split text is not with a hyphen. For example, urls, code, or file directory paths. in any of those cases (lets ignore the exceptions for now) you would not use a hyphen to mark the continuation as it would be confusing and ambiguous as to whether the hyphen is a literal character that is part of the url/path/or code or whether the hyphen is an indicator of “this didn’t all fit on one line” so they modified the convention slightly to say you just leave out the word-continuation symbol (hyphen) and continue the URL/path/etc on the next line. So in that case, optional hyphen doesn’t quite cut it and you need an even more fun symbol, the “no width optional break” which will tell word where you want to split a really long word if it doesn’t all fit on one line.

For example: C:\mydocuments\jessica\work\foo is a nice (semi-)long path without spaces. However, if it doesn’t all fit on one line, the default way of wrapping is ugly and will probably look something like

C:\mydocuments\jess
ica\work\foo

But by inserting a no-width optional break it will display as:

C:\mydocuments\jessica\work\foo

if it appears on one line and as:

C:\mydocuments\
jessica\work\foo

if it must be split across multiple lines.

By using optional breaks it makes word automatically remember to take those out if you change the width of your table cells or change the page from portrait to landscape or change the number of columns or something else that severely changes where your line-breaks are.

This concludes a lesson in microsoft word. was this of any interest? useful? did you already know how to use this feature?

Yesterday we (the tech team) stayed at the hotel and tested all the remainder of the computers. Of course, this required moving all of them from D. & M.’s room to the Bruncas room (what kind of name is that for a room anyway?) which was a lot of heavy lifting even with the baggage carts to move them. In the end we got them all tested and the room cleaned back up, but not until an hour after “lights out” time.

But in all that testing, we were having fun. All the really broken equipment got named with funny names in sharpies so we wouldn’t accidentally mix up one of the items from the “irrecoverable damage pile” with the “good pile”. And then we were dragging around all the broken monitors by their “tail”–“walking the dog”–we explained to Ceasar, the staff-person from the hotel setting up for breakfast, in Spanglish that the monitor was a dog and then he was laughing with us.

The tech team is a little “different” than the other groups. We don’t tend to follow along with the other groups as closely–we have a little more freedom, being a small group–like we went out for lunch yesterday again (the other groups had only PB&J for lunch), and to the market a couple times during ministry time and me and Leslie went for a swim till we got kicked out of the pool because it was raining too hard–but when we’re there finishing and then cleaning up till 11:30 after having been up at 6:30 in the morning, you don’t feel an unfairness about it–we just get our free time distributed differently and are doing work a lot of people don’t want to be doing.

Yesterday we had our first real rainstorm that was more than a drizzle. We also had power-outtages in the Market when we were there, and the rest of the day in that building when we went back for dinner. Not that I was entierly sorry when that meant we got switched from eating at the downstairs restaurant to the upstairs one that has more menu choices (ie. fish or vegetarian instead of just chicken or beef) and required eating in shifts so we ate later and it was pretty much just the tech team hanging out because naturally, D. the trip coordinator made us the last group–she knows computer people are by nature night owls and woudln’t mind having the last dinner compared to say, the construction team that is famished.

So, even at the meals we were having time to get to know the other geeks better–and not only are they computer geeks–but computer geeks who are Christians and computer geeks who go on missions trips. Way cool. And I still think its weird (but cool) that half of the tech team is from San Diego so their comparisons of San Jose Costa Rica to TJ and Fudruckers and other such local San Diegian things are understood.

Even though we are doing a lot of work, I really feel like I’m on vacation on this trip, and feel thankful for that.

Yesterday we went out to Project Abraham on the other side of town and installed a lab of 8 computers, plus one computer for the secretary of the church. It was a pretty impressive church because they have been very resourceful–almost everything they’ve built is with donated materials–like they found someone who was throwing away wood from shipping crates, and they got laborers (labor is much cheaper than materials in costa rica) to pull the nails and carpet and whatnot off the wood to build the framing for the building, and the glass is all donated. And they aren’t out there building on credit, they only build when the money and materials come in and they have a long term plan to build in phases.

We had a few broken machines, so for the 9 computers to install, we brought along 15 so we’d have some extra to raid for parts if needed. We had to break out a hard drive and network card from one of them, and a couple of the monitors were damaged in shipping (though if you saw the way things were shipped, you’d actually be surprised how few were damaged!

Out of reflexive typing habit you make a typo like this:

So I did a little scouring with some success (I think()

…and don’t think anything strange of it until after you’ve sent the email…