In a transition that took far more work than it should have (yet far less than I expected it to), I have moved this site from the old location at personal.aparadine.com to simply aparadine.com. I had been using the top level domain to host a website for business dealings I set up using the Aparadine name (it made my bids look more competitive on programming contracts). As I have been making the transition to focusing on writing more and programming less, it now makes sense to list my personal site on the more convenient URL. The old site still forwards to here so it shouldn’t be a big issue unless you’ve linked to some of my content directly (in which case you’ll have to update the link or it will just forward to the main website). Which reminds me, I still have to update a few of my own pages which do exactly that. Silly me.
Author Archive for Tarential
While I haven’t tested it yet, the Buzz settings indicate that this blog is now set to be re-posted automatically. I assume that means when I publish this message it will be similarly published in Buzz. I spent almost an hour looking around for solutions online and found, if anything, far too many solutions — for enabling a “Buzz This” style button on your WordPress blog, which is not what I wanted to do. Finally I asked a friend who suggested the answer: Set up your website on Google Webmaster Tools and the option to display it in Buzz just appears magically!
Now I’m going to post this and see if it works. Wish me luck 
It’s been quite the weekend here in sleepy little Agassiz: We were proud to play host to the British Columbia event of the international old timers motocross championships. Riders up to 84 years of age took part in this family-oriented racing endeavor. Classes are separated into under 30 (support), 30+ (over the hill gang), 40+, 50+, 60+, 70+ and 80+ as well as a ladies class. My own family played no small part in this massive undertaking with the majority of the credit going to my grandfather Laurence St. Pierre, a very well respected and long time member of both the BC Old Timers and Canadian Motorcycle Association. He was there the majority of each day for almost two weeks before the event took place overseeing the cat work and preparing the track. My cousin, Justin, and I also helped him in preparing the track. My mother, aunt, and grandmother did the lap scoring for the races as well as sign-up.
The event was unfortunately not the financial success we might have hoped, but the low turnout of riders was no reflection on track conditions. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect with a couple hours of rain after the races were over Saturday night keeping down the dust for an overcast Sunday. To my knowledge, we didn’t receive one single complaint about the track over the entire weekend. On the contrary, we received many compliments and sent home a lot of very happy riders. My cousin and I had a great time riding the support class with our family claiming three of the four holeshots (first rider out of the first corner off the start) for the weekend (myself with two, him with one). Though my grandfather isn’t much of a photographer he did get a couple of good action shots on our cheap digital camera, which I will try to post as soon as I get a chance. Update: Myrna Hansen has her excellent photos up on her website. Photos including me are available here.
All in all, it was quite a weekend. Everyone involved feels stiff and sore and more than a little worn out today, I’m sure.
I’m in the process of updating my website, albeit slowly. I’ve decided to add some more content for users to (let’s be optimistic here) enjoy. Whether or not they enjoy it is entirely up to them of course. Up until recently I’ve largely used this website as a placeholder for people who wish to Google me. Now I think I shall use it as a place to post various pieces of information as I think of them. Let’s face it, writers like to write. Sometimes to excess. Speaking of that… this post is about over. I just wanted to say: Beware of construction!
I am attempting to teach myself Spanish. Simple enough, one might assume. Of course, in writing Spanish words on the computer one must learn how to use those fancy little accents and weird upside-down characters. Actually, the information supplied at my university was to the effect of “Here, take this file full of special characters and copy/paste them whenever you need it. Or you can memorize these painfully abstract alt codes to have the same effect.” It worked. I memorized the alt codes for use, painfully, while I was at school.
Recently, I have taken a renewed interest in learning Spanish. This time it is at home, on my own computer. This means I am no longer on Windows and can no longer use those not-so-friendly alt codes. So should I copy and paste each character each time? Ridiculous, I say! Of course, it is ridiculous, and alternate keyboard layouts were designed to solve that very problem. Here is where the simple things get complex. I don’t use the regular QWERTY (aka “US style”) keyboard layout. I use the Dvorak layout, which is much more efficient. I would expect, given that Dvorak is at least somewhat popular, that there would be more than one person in my situation and as such I would be able to select “Spanish Dvorak” or “International Dvorak” and be done with it. Not so. There are both such layouts included on my system, and I have tried them both. They are both ridiculously complicated for what I need, and the Spanish Dvorak keyboard layout switches some keys around on me. All I want is a few simple acute accents and an upside-down question mark / exclamation mark.
After searching around online for a very simple Dvorak keyboard layout that included the keys I required, I concluded that there was no such keyboard. There are many overcomplicated attempts which seem to feel that after including the needed keys for Spanish, they might as well turn it into a full international keyboard. At the current time, I don’t need any such thing. Whatever is a poor, tired programmer to do? Oh, I know. I got fed up and modified my current Dvorak layout to suit my needs. All the tutorials I found on how to create custom keyboard layouts were too out of date to really help me, but they pointed me in the right direction and I eventually managed to find the proper file to edit in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us (since Dvorak is a variant of the “US Layout” aka layouts for the English language). Simple as pie! Now using the AltGr (right alt) key in combination with normal letters brings the proper diacritical mark (acute accent for vowels, tilde for n) and reverses the exclamation/question marks. No extraneous marks have been added. This is a pure Dvorak layout for those needing to type Spanish text.
¿Lo quieres? Download it here.