I stayed up much too late last night finishing Shadow Hearts: Covenant on the PS2. The ending actually felt a bit rushed to me, and didn't have quite as much oomph as I'd have hoped for, but overall I thought the game was great. It's the first console RPG made by anyone other than SquareSoft that's really grabbed me.

(And I think you absolutely have to love a game where one of the characters is a vampire superhero pro-wrestler.)

I'm putting the PS2 aside for a while, but Daniel got me the first Shadow Hearts game as well. So, I have some more RPG goodness in reserve, to tide me over until Final Fantasy XII comes out.

In spite of being sleepy, I managed to get a reasonable amount done at work today. I polished off some revisions to an online Help glossary that clearly hadn't had a good revision in some years, and had gotten out of date. Finding a good but old piece of tech writing is sort of like wandering around in the attic and finding the afghan your mom crocheted when she was in college. It's neat to look at and perfectly functional in a lot of ways, but it stinks of mothballs and you wonder why she chose that shade of brown.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I de-mothballed the glossary, you might say.

I also spent some time teaching a coworker how to convert WinHelp to HTML help. Ngggh. I love teaching people stuff. (It's part of the same impulse to explain things that makes me love tech writing so much.) Trying to balance it with all the other things I need to get done, I don't love so much. I do tell people "no" when I really need to do something else, but I find it hard to put people off, because a)I'm nice, b)helping people out makes me feel smart, and it's very difficult for me to pass up opportunities to feel smart, and c)If I leave them to sink or swim, and they make a hash of things, I'm likely to be asked to troubleshoot.

However, sometimes watching very smart people struggle to grasp things that I consider to be simple makes me want to stab myself with a pencil. This is relatively new for me. I rarely had this problem when I was teaching organic or physical chemistry. Chemistry is hard. Lots of people just don't get it. HTML? Just not that hard.

Eh. I can feel a rant coming on. Better not to go there. I'm just feeling cranky because I was sleepy this afternoon, and really would have preferred to be left alone to do my own thing.

I've actually considered getting a "Do Not Disturb" sign that I could tape to my forehead. I may try it, if things don't improve soon.

Ah, well. I'm off from work Friday and all next week. I have exciting plans involving drinking coffee, working on a couple of short stories, and watching the extended edition Return of the King. Wheee!