Recovery

Fortunately, I felt just about fine when I woke up yesterday. I felt a little weak - not a big surprise I guess, having been sick and not having had any dinner - but the headache, nausea and (presumed) fever were all gone. Thank goodness!

I wonder if I had a touch of food poisoning from the hash browns at Hobees, or if it was something in the cookie I ate at the Exploratorium, or if it was just some random bug. I dunno. Well, hopefully it will be a while before I feel this way again; twice in six months is more than enough random illness for me, thanks!

I did precious little Sunday, all told. Wrote up the Exploratorium entry, read a bunch of comic books, watched some TV, did some laundry... and it sounds more exciting than it was. But a quiet day of downtime was probably what I needed. The most excitement I had during the afternoon was trying to upload the journal entry to Spies; the graphics for some reason refused to transfer, though the HTML uploaded fine. I ended up sending the graphics to an old account, and ftped them from there. I dunno what's up; I dropped Ceej a line to let her know of my problems, though possibly the problem was at my end. Shrug.

(Though, as I type this, it seems Spies is down altogether, shell account, Web server, and all. So maybe there was something wrong!)

In the evening I went up for the Keplers speculative fiction book discussion group, which was for The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. Longtime readers may recall that this is one of my favorite books, so I took an hour or so to skim through its pages again, and then headed to the discussion. There were a number of folks who hadn't been there at the first discussion I went to back in February. There was quite a range of opinions on the book, with people who didn't swallow some of the coincidences, and people who felt let down by some of the resolutions in the story. I could see their points, but I felt Russell built up her background mostly more successfully than they did. Diff'rent strokes, and all that.

(By the way, if you're a fan of the book, Mary has some news about a possible movie on her Web site.)

After the discussion I went to the Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto for dinner, has their typically okay hamburger with a typically scrumptious mocha chip malt. Yum! I nice end to the day.

Today it was back to work, which was a little difficult due to the bad feelings I had following Friday's events. Things shaped up okay as the day went on, though. I went to a meeting (half an hour late because the meeting program didn't beep to remind me, for some reason) and made some real contributions. Made some good progress at installing fresh systems on my machines so I can do testing for the latest Alpha candidate build of our software. Also started teaching myself OpenStep (a.k.a. Cocoa) development, which went pretty well. (I bet the existing tools were really cool back in 1990, although they feel like they lack polish in 2000. But the essentials are there, and I guess many of the tools are getting polished up as the move to Mac OS X proceeds.)

Tonight I've spent the evening watching early Homicide episodes, which Court TV is showing, having recently finished the loop through the whole series. I'm taping these episodes to keep, and I'm editing out the commercials and putting them in film order, rather than the irregular broadcast order. Boy, this is good stuff! I'll be happy to have the first three seasons on tape, when they get through them (the first two seasons totalled only 13 episodes, so this is less impressive than it seems).