View From the Bushes

Yesterday it finally looked like the sun had come out from behind the clouds and that I might have a few days of sunshine. Then, while walking to the breakroom to get a drink, I overheard some people talking about the Hotline, and I realized that there was another Hotline on Monday. Of course at this point you're wondering "What on Earth is a Hotline?' Well it's that magical time once a quarter (more like every other month recently), when I get to republish two enormous books that sit on the website. This particular Hotline is bad for several reasons, none of which are really good things in disquise, like being forced to hang out with supermodels for a week.

The first bad thing is that there are vastly more changes than normal. The second bad thing is that I'm pretty burned out from the last big crisis and summoning the enthusiasm for more late nights is proving very difficult. The third bad thing, however, dwarfs them all. See, one of the two books is composed as a framemake document and I have a program (Webworks) which converts the framemaker source into HTML. Awhile back I was having problems with the program on my computer, so I decided to try a clean install on another computer. That fixed the problem beautifully, and ever since then I just did the extraction on the other computer. Well that other computer just happened to be the one which I struggled with all last week, the one lost to us forever because we forgot the admin password...

This wouldn't be so bad except I seem to have lost/misplaced/played frisbee with/'traded for a pack of smokes/bought my brother's birthright with the install CD. Which means that I may be doing the conversion entirely by hand. Which is akin to the difference between photocopying 100 pages or transcribing them by hand... I spent most of today desperately searching for the disk, trying to get the restored copy on the new server to work, finding a warez copy (yeah framemaker converters from 1999, that's a hot piece of software) and trying to resuscitate the copy on my desktop. The latter actually looks like it might work. Although at this point, even the most pathetic partial conversion would cause me to break into song.

Carpe Diem Quam minimum Credula Postero
Ross