Yet again I got into the situation to fill in for a colleague who had to undergo a surgery. Yet again it means that I've to handle double the workload and yet again I feel I'm totally out of time. Although I try not to spend too much time at the office and to get out of there as close to the stroke as I can, the situation is so demanding that I'm pretty tired after work and I hardly can motivate myself to do something else than to goof off. I don't know for how long I'll have to fill in this time, but I guess it will be a couple of weeks (depending on how fast my colleague recovers).

After looking on my recording of time worked since the beginning of 2010, I have the feeling that all these substitutions become rampant. But wailing won't help, I guess. So let's get through and hope that it won't last too long. At least my upcoming vacation in July is a ray of hope :-)

The official news has already been spread in February, but I it was today that I learned, that my favorite lan party organizers have finally given up to organize their great series of lan party events. Sad news, but it was the inevitable consequence of the ever decreasing number of attendees of the events. The heydays of lan parties are over, sad but true. Luckily they still meet for some loosely organized private lan parties and I'm pretty sure it wasn't the last time I've met them.

I just came across Vimpress, a plugin for Vim that allows to create and edit blogposts directly from Vim. Looks like the right Thing for me :-)

Although it is originally intended to be used with WordPress, it utilizes the MetaWeblog interface, thus it can be used with other blogs too - in my case Habari.

So, as a first test, this post is written in Vim and directly posted by the plugin. Let's see if it works...

Edit:

Works quite well. There seems to be a minor bug when posting new entries (entry id is not returned correctly, respectively an error occurs when this should happen - I'll have a look at this later), but the overall functionality works. Oh, and of course this plugin is only suitable to handle text-only posts. There's no upload functionality for media files - obviously, since we are utilizing a text editor ;-)

Today is Corpus Christi, a religious feast, so we didn’t work here in South Germany. But since the weather was pretty bad (cold and rainy), I spent my day at the computer, upgrading my Cygwin environment and reworking content of my personal wiki knowledge base (which is badly in need to be uncluttered).

I’ve also upgraded my site to the latest version of Habari today. As last time, everything went very smoothly. As far as I have seen, there were mostly bugs fixed and not so much new features implemented. But I might be wrong here, since I haven’t followed the development during the past three months. I’ll have deeper look at it later.

I’ve been very busy during the last few months, as you might have noticed from the lack of posts here. Earlier this year a colleague left our company and I was the only one who was qualified to take over his responsibilities. So I ended up doing his job in addition to mine, doubling my workload. Additionally I was attending an advanced training course, reducing my spare time even further.

Finally, in May, a new colleague took over and I was able to return to my normal job schedule. Shortly after that I also successfully finished my training. Phew! That was a hard time!

As in previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s an option in Office 2007 that turns on additional feedback sounds. The additional sounds needed for this feature to be activated, can be downloaded from this page at Microsoft's website.

Unfortunately the installer insists on having an older version of Microsoft Office installed and refuses to work if you have Office 2007. But there’s a rather simple solution to get it installed anyway. Here’s how:

1. Download the file sounds.exe from the web page above
2. Open an execute dialog by pressing the keys WIN + R or by selecting “Execute” from the Windows Start Menu.
3. Enter this command (note that c:\download in this example has to be replaced with the path where you stored the downloaded file):
   c:\download\sounds.exe /t:c:\officesounds /c
   This will unpack the installation files and store them in C:\officesounds
4. Go to the newly created folder C:\officesounds, execute sounds.msi and follow the instructions of the installer.

All what’s left to do is to turn on the sound feedback in one of your office programs. For example, in Microsoft Word you would click the Office-Button, then "Options" and "Extended", scroll down almost to the end of the dialog and turn on the option "Provide sound feedback".

Enjoy :-)