Thought I’d post a link to a funny web page since I haven’t finished my story. I thought posting 3/4 of it would motivate me to end it but it didn’t. This sentence didn’t get auto-capitalized by word and it annoyed the hell out of me. Mainly be....whew, that one popped up a capital M....mainly because I have been spending a hell of a lot of time trying to build a content management system that uses Word as its editor, yes, I’m still working on it. Day and night. Obsessing. So, in the spirit of obsessing over trivial matters and producing a laughable result, I give you a hyperlink to Toilet Paper. A supercharged bathroom-automation project done with Python, the language that I’m learning. Toilet paper is pretty funny. They even made a poster of it.

Last night I steeled my reserve and applied the last drops of gumption and made a little application that opens Word up and allows me to type into it and then closes word and reads the HTML from Word back into my app. One of the reasons I’m doing this is that Word knew better than I how to spell the word gumption. (of course the grammar checker its utterly baffled at my parenthetical quasi-verbal remarks.)

I’ve made a whole lot of progress on understanding what happens to the ‘ and “ characters in my writing and why terms like Unicode and ASCII are actually quite important to a writer. I’m going to try to switch over to Unicode, (now that the industry is providing some support -- XML and programming tools are helping) and hopefully I can arrange it so that my composition and storage use the full character set and then it's dumbed-down when translated to other formats (like the Netscape browser.)

John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno play Cafe du Nord tonight. Their new album is really sweet. Better than the new Mountain Goats I think.