Waiting for the New Machine
A quick check reveals that as I write this my Journal counter stands at 1998. If you read this and you're #2000 (or very close to it), I wouldn't mind you dropping a line to me about it, out of curiosity. (I promise I won't do this again until it hits 5000!)
I also read some information on MacInTouch about the next MacOS release (which a friend in the know tells me is called "System X", not "System 10") and some cool stuff it will have in it. Actually, it sounds like it might be the end of MacOS as we know it, once Rhapsody is released. Could be cool. It might motivate me to learn Mac programming again (Mac programming is, in my experience, about eight times more complicated and convoluted than any other system I've programmed under. However, the last time I really tried was about four years ago and newer development environments might hide the dross under the surface by now. That's what development environments are for, after all).
Anyway, you can infer from my first paragraph that I had to fix my hard drive again tonight. Not a full restore, thank goodness, but ~25 minutes lost to Norton Utilities and sundry tinkering. Well, look on the bright side: I'm backing up my data every Tuesday now, like clockwork. (Why Tuesday? Because that's the day I download the stats for my fantasy baseball league.)
Last night a few of us got together to play some railroad games - specifically, we played Eurorails, part of the Empire Builder system). Playing at work after work works very well (how often can I work the word "work" into this sentence?). Two people hadn't played this system before, and liked it very much. It is a very cool gaming system. I had to play it a lot several years ago to get tired of it. Eurorails is a good variant.
However, it lasted longer than expected, so I got home late, and overslept my alarm, and thus did not bike to work today. Tomorrow, I really hope to push myself to do it. I'm in as good shape as I'm going to get without biking into work, so there's no reason to put it off other than, well, fear I guess. The daunting hills on the way, and knowing that the first few days I do it I'll be extremely tired at work.
Tonight I finished reading Steven Gould's novel Helm. He's very good at writing entertaining adventure yarns. This one is not as tense as his earlier novels, but it still resonated for me. A lot of it involves quasi-feudal military structures and maneuvering (a la H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen), but the SFtional stuff does kick in, makes sense in the context of everything else, and raises the stakes of the whole story. Although I must admit I don't think Helm is as creative as his earlier works, I think I found it more purely enjoyable than what he'd done before.
Now I'm reading Suzette Haden Elgin's novel Native Tongue, which I suspect is going to remind me a lot of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (okay, I admit it, I haven't read THT, but I've seen the movie and an ex-girlfriend of mine loved the book and told me a lot about it). But I'm interested in the linguistic stuff, and I'm hoping to read it and Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After before WisCon - which starts a week from Friday. Both Elgin and Murphy seem to be regulars at WisCon, so since I want to read these books anyway, this seems an opportune time to put them on top of the "to read" stack.
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