Apple, NeXT, WhateverWe're heading into fall here. Not only is it getting cooler (highs around 75 at most, not that that's much different from the summer norm), but it's getting windier. Over the summer the air was often dead; breezes were mild if they existed at all. Last spring, on the other hand, we had lots of wind, which often pushed my interior doors closed. It was amazing. Right now we're in between those two extremes; some light breezes blowing through the trees and rustling my venetian blinds. My front door got blown shut once, but mostly it's been pretty calm. I like it.I'm sure that few trees where I live will change color this fall, which I actually will find a little depressing, since I love the color changes in the fall. I'll have to go up to the open space preserves this fall to see if any of the many trees up there change color. I have wonderful memories of going to the UW Arboretum in Madison many fall days and seeing the colored trees. There's such a variety of trees there you see many different colors: yellows, oranges and reds.
 I'm making a concerted effort to slog - and I do mean slog - my way through Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum which I've been 'reading' for over a month now. It's a very slow book, and there's a long stretch in the middle in which very little happens. I'm about 3/4ths done, and so far it's decidedly inferior to The Name of the Rose. At this point I just want to finish it so I can move on to something else. I need science fiction! I'm actually nearly finished with the piles of comic books I've been accumulating over the last year-plus, which is actually quite a feat. I love my hobby, but I both want and need to read other stuff, too. I've almost filled in the holes on a few sets of 'lighter' comics series that I want to read, and once I've finished those, I'll probably put collecting back issues on the back burner for a while.
A bunch of people at work are going on vacation, two of them for a month. Ben's going to drive around the southwest, and another guy is going to Africa for a month! Yow! It makes me think that someday I'd like to return to England, rent a car, and drive around the countryside seeking out some of the hundreds of stone circles that are not as well-known as Stonehenge. (I found Stonehenge to be something of a bust because you can't get close to it.) This is going to make work somewhat quieter for a while. Especially since we're sort of between releases at the moment (at least, my part of the department is). I've been taking my first steps towards delving into the source code of our app, as opposed to just doing black box QA. Familiarizing myself with all of this NeXT code seems like good background if I ever hope to go into development. It's going pretty well, though there are lots of little fiddly details to learn about - which is pretty much the same in any development environment. I am regularly asked by new people I meet at Apple if I've been using NeXT technology for a while. I tell them no, I'd never used it before I came to Apple. I'm more of a lifelong Apple partisan, having been using Apples since my parents got an Apple IIe way back in the early 80s. I used the first Mac model to roll off the production line (my friend Rob's family had one), and got my own first Mac - an SE - when I went to college in 1987. I have this strange indifference to many of the details which seem so important to people who are strict classic Mac partisans or strict NeXT partisans. The issue of the Mac Finder vs. the NeXT Workspace, for instance; people have strong opinions on which they prefer, but I find them equivalent. (The Workspace is not quite as evolved as the Finder, but the basic premise is fine, albeit not necessarily better to me than the Finder.) I think this makes it easier for me to come into the NeXTie environment from a classic Mac background. I also feel fairly confident that there are savvy and smart people at Apple who will make Mac OS X something which will work. I don't think I'm really going anywhere here; just woolgathering.
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