No progress...
A lesson learned: don't work on three or four things at the same time. It means that if one of those things turns out to be a little too hard, you cannot commit the rest. Which, in this case, meant that Sven has had to do a lot of work to get previews working in Krita again, after the autolayers merge. (The infamous merge which makes Krita behave the same as Photoshop when moving layers, at the cost of some performance and a lot of breakage.).
Another lesson: don't use apt-get to keep your main development system up to date when there's a KDE release around the corner. First I couldn't use the keyboard at all. That appears a known bug, something to do with kdm. Now I just cannot use alt and del in KDE anymore; the other keys work fine... No solution, yet, so I'm downgrading to the SuSE release version while I'm typing this on my old powerbook.
Not that I would have had much time for hacking anyway. Friday we did a little city trip to The Hague with the kids and a friend. We paid a visit to the Convent of Saint John the Baptist, where a good friend of ours lives.
Then we had lunch at one of the best Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands -- not haute cuisine best, but good Chinese food of the kind Chinese ex-pats prefer to eat themselves best. Indeed, there were three Chinese couples lunching, one Cypriot couple and a Dutch old gentleman when we were there. We had Peking duck in thousand-year sauce, squid with seasonal vegetables, beef with sour vegetables and bean-curd puffs with pork mince. Delicious... The friend who had joined us had never eaten in a proper restaurant before, but she enjoyed every bite. The restaurant is Sing Kee, (Wagenstraat 63).
Afterwards we went to the Mauritshuis, a rather small museum that houses some very famous paintings. Currently the most famous one is without any doubt Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, because of the book (nice) and the moving picture (boring). But that painting was a bit disappointing. There's a much better painting by an unknown artist of a servant girl on the same floor a few rooms further along the route... But there are also some rather good Rembrandt paintings (among them Suzanna in bath which is simply astonishing, and also surprisingly small) and a Holbein the Younger and some Rogier van der Weijden paintings that I had never thought I'd ever see for real. We spent a long time discussing the taking-down-from-the-cross by van der Weijden -- and then we noticed a small group of people had stopped listening to us with some interest. Not many kids can determine a bunch of saints with any pretense to accuracy.
Again, this was the first time that friend of our daughters had ever visited a museum, had ever seen a real painting that hadn't been produced in our house or at school -- it was even the first time she had visited a town the size of the Hague. She rather liked it, comparing it favourably to Deventer. Her reaction to the notion of going inside a building as grand as the Mauritshuis was a little comical, being "Cool! Vet-gaaf! Gaan we daar echt in!
Anyway, the next day everyone was inspired to paint, and I started on a portrait of our three daughters, so didn't spend any time on Krita, and in the evening we watched My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn. What a disappointment! Or rather, what a culture shock! Much must have changed in the fast forty-two years... I remember the movie as one where the male love interest, i.e., professor Higgins, turns around completely and acquires some manners. But in the end, when he demands his slippers from Eliza with his hat over his face it's clear that he's bought the girl who has declared her throughout the movie to be a good girl, not a whore, and that she has let herself be bought because the prospect of marriage with impecunious Freddie (query to self: is there any movie or book in which a Freddie, Reggie or Algy ever marries the first female love interest?) is too daunting. I guess we don't see the female sex quite so much as a chattel to be acquired or disposed of as the makers of this move. I've had the same experience with books, for instance those by Havank. Apparently, forty years ago women were very much seen as an object, which is incomprehensible nowadays. (Although Wodehouse (in , e.g., Uneasy Money, already had a very real and independent woman who is very much not an object.)
And today I spend most of the afternoon trying to rebuild a working SuSE 9.2 + KDE system. I guess I'm going to slap this powerbook shut and take a peek at progress right now...
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