A Good Weekend
A lot of travel, but still good. Thursday afternoon we (jmaynard and I) started off, and hit the Twin Cities during the anything but a rush hour. Rather than wait in the car in traffic, we waited at Lindey's and had some great steak. Then back on the road. XM's old time radio channel again was good to have.
Friday was a bit of shopping (I got - and spent - part of birthday present early). The trip to the shoe store went well. Hard to argue with steel-toed leather Oxfords for $10. And then it was dinner time with the usual excess that holiday meals always seem to be. Visited some with my grandmothers. One of them will be ninety this Wednesday.
Saturday was the trip back, by way of the Minnesota Repeater Council meeting. A couple things threatened to take far longer than they needed to, but finally were taken care of. I doubt the issues have gone away, but the compromise should hopefully mean things won't run quite as hot as they had been before. Got home not too late, but didn't do very much. Just as well.
Sunday was a pleasantly slow day of recovery. I did, eventually, manage to work on the COLT again and finished up Looney Tunes #10 from January 1995. Hopefully I can get through, or at least well into, #72 (Jan. '01) this week. Then there won't be any completely empty years - just gaps.
Last night I did ask kinkyturtle to do for #100 what he did for Animaniacs #25 as the cover has (almost?) every Looney Tunes character on it. Excluding the odd one-shots, of course. I think. I doubt I'll be able get to #100 all that soon, though. Next week would be probably be the earliest. And I'm wondering if I can keep up the one issue per week rate. That would get me caught up on three old issues per month, while not falling behind on new issues. But I'd need to keep that up for 14 months.
And now, a somewhat delayed rant:
Switching to linux has been interesting and at time frustrating. Much was expected. I did not expect all to go perfectly smoothly. Fortunately for most things I need to do it's not bad or even an improvement over how I was doing things before.
One thing that bugged me, though, was setting colors in xchat. It is not intuitive for someone who came to xchat from mIRC. There is, I think, at least one real bug involved and a lack of ready documentations doesn't help. (xchat is nice, but a Help menu would be nice, even if all it did was point to a web based FAQ. An 'about' dialog for quickly checking the version in a familiar manner would also be nice.)
Now, in mIRC, there is this do-everything color dialog that shows you all the possible things to color and lets you select each one and change the color. The color palette is right there, too, in case you want to change something to just just the right shade of pink or something.
In xchat, there is a color palette. It is nothing but a color palette. You can change these colors, but that's not the way to change what is put onto the screen. There is another dialog for that. I'm not even sure how the background color is selected, but for me it came up black and that's how I wanted it so I haven't tried to change it.
This other dialog, 'Edit event text' is where colors are really chosen. First one must open that dialog, which is easy enough. Then one must realize that it is wrong size, despite seeming complete. Not so easy. I hit upon that by accident. By expanding the dialog some, a little window of display area (my black background) appears. This will allow one to see what one is doing, eventually.
Once that's open (and it wouldn't hurt to have the color palette open as well - unlike mIRC, more than one menu item can be open at a time), select something from the top area to be edited.
It'll seem to be gibberish: %C11-%C10--%O$t$l has done something...
Once selected, this line will appear in an editing line below the main list, but above the test area. It is here that the cursor can be placed and the line can be edited. First, put the cursor on that line and hit RETURN. The line will appear (with colors and bold and whatever other effects) in the test area.
%C# - Use palette color #
%C - stop using that color
%O - stop using colors (default to 0?)
%B - first time, start printing bold. Next time, stop printing bold.
So to turn " %C11-%C10--%O$t$l has done something... " to all green (if color three is green) it'd be changed from:
%C11-%C10--%O$t$l has done something...
to
%C3---$t$l has done something...%O
Then test it to see the result is as desired. Click SAVE to store it, and then to be sure, when done with the dialog click OK *and then* also use "Save settings now" to be *sure* things are stored.
Colors can be changed on the palette (I'd recommend changing 'duplicate' colors - are two identical light blues really needed?) but be aware that there might be unexpected results (some things might use both light blues and changing one to orange will change the look of them).
It's not as simple as the mIRC color dialog, but once known is not difficult. And xchat allows far more flexibility in what various event texts are. Not only can color be changed, but bold (and, assume, underline) and the text itself if one so desired. Background color can also be specified (look at the Notify lines for an example).
All this is probably "obvious" to some, but it wasn't clear to me until I blundered into how to do it right. If there is a document detailing all this, I have yet to see it. I also consider "obvious" to be one of the most dangerous words around when it comes to software as obviousness is subjective.