Tangled Mind

Cataclysmic Boss and I have been wrangling Dragon NaturallySpeaking, inhibited by a RealTek soundcard and ad-hoc colour coding.
Cataclysmic Boss has now bullied it into quiet sulks by reading it Horace. In Latin.
Poor Dragon! (It's doing its best, but the transcription is utterly surreal.)

so, yesterday's half-day of Access databasing was actually quite fun, and I ticked off almost all of their wishes and did a lot of cleaning up (legacy database maintained by people without database skillz).

Access types, can you help?
They want to be able to add records into the (Access 2003) database via an external, intranet page. I poked around at Data Access Pages (which I've not used) but results were inconclusive. Any solutions, pointers, suggestions? It's a 'nice to have' rather than a requirement, so I'm not going to put too much effort into it, but if there's a relatively quick and painless way of doing it that would be great.

offline for rest of afternoon -- they don't want me back til Monday morning -- so am treating myself to swim and Inception, yes, again.

My google-fu is failing me on this, but AKICOLJ ...

The problem:
- I am checking pages which include non-standard characters (e.g. quotations in Greek, names in Turkish, mathematical functions, astronomical symbols etc.)
- These characters are coded as Unicode Hexadecimal NCRs, e.g. Tòν is coded as Tòν
- All Unicode characters must be supported in Verdana

My current modus operandi:
- for each character, do a copy-paste-find on this page of supported characters
- or for slightly longer texts, get the NCRs converted via this copy-paste conversion utility, and look at included/excluded ranges on the page of supported characters

What I really really want:
- a website (nothing downloadable) where I can:
--- copy the non-standard text (or, failing that, the HTML code with the NCRs)
--- paste it into a text box
--- specify 'show me this in Verdana'
--- be alerted to (or at least be able to see) which characters are supported and which are not.

Alternatively
- point out the bleedin' obvious solution which I am missing!

As is traditional, I have brought in snacks and sweets (not even past sell-by) and emailed everyone in the office to say goodbye.

Am keeping score of the 'blimey, didn't know you were going' responses. Four so far.

EDIT: Six.
Edit Seven.
Edit Eight, sort of. (Colleague in same dept as me, who heard yesterday.)

Last night I went to my first Pilates class -- which turned out to be mat-based Pilates rather than the kind that uses medieval torture equipment. It was not what I had expected: more like Iyengar yoga than anything, except gentler, and with New Agey music that kept quoting Saint-Saens. Some of my muscles are complaining, but I found it pretty easy and quite restful.

Last night I also gave into temptation: I had a corned beef sandwich. For some reason (hormonal?) I found myself craving red meat, which I stopped eating ~1996. This morning I feel queasy, headachy and unsettled. Fairly clear cause-and-effect.

Edit to add: I also slept pretty badly and had some weird and unsettling dreams, including one set airside at an American airport where they wouldn't let me leave: high-heeled fishlifter came to my rescue with teleporting superpowers. Or maybe that really happened. Who can tell?

This morning I left home in the dark for the first time this year. I've been getting into werk as late as possible, but today had to drop off car for servicing. This 'dawn' thing I have read about is really rather pretty. If only it happened every day*.

So I am in werk early, all set to print and sort barcodes again because the site claims they only received half of the ones we sent before Christmas.

*Lately, 'dawn' seems to involve a slight lightening of the grey. But today it's sunny! Yay!

I'm trying to come up with a symbol / icon to indicate that information in a paragraph applies only to the current version / differs in previous versions / has changed. Have considered and discarded 'pencil editing', 'multiple folders' and the actual version number. Can anyone think of a symbol that conveys 'look out for different info elsewhere'?

By way of approx 50% of my f-list:
1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top umpty results:

1. Multimedia Developer (slightly, a bit)
2. Website Designer (ditto)
3. Desktop Publisher (what?)
4. Computer Programmer (done that, got the T-shirt)
5. Industrial Designer (cannot draw! but questions only asked what I liked, not what I was good at.)
6. Animator (as 5)
7. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator (as 5)
8. Interior Designer (as 5, though I did read that as Inferior Designer in which case yes)
9. Fashion Designer (as 5)
10. Costume Designer (as 5)

My current main role is #32.

I'm using WINK (freeware screencasting app) to record mini-tutorials for training purposes.* It's pretty easy to use and the results -- Flash format, fairly compact -- are good, but is there anything better?

Requirements:
- recording screen activity and mouse/key clicks
- annotation
- voiceover
- logical paths through multiple possibilities (there is a better way of phrasing this but cannot think of it)
- multichoice
- scoring, e.g. for a quiz: how many times did they pick the right answer?

It is rather unfortunate that the file extension for the intermediate stage is .WNK. Is there something they're trying to tell me?






*actually, I'm spamming LJ and vaguely tidying up. But in principle I'm werking. Honest

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