Waiting

This is one of those days where I'm just waiting to get out of here. No major problems to deal with, nothing enormous broke over the weekend, nothing new coming up to strike at us. I just want to go home and do all the stuff I need to do there. I was up too late last night, doing everything from playing with the new beta software from IBM (yes, in some ways I take my job home with me, but only the fun elements of it) to lecturing cats about pooping in little unauthorized hidden locations. One of those nights where I feel like I should just stay up all night in case something happens in the world I might miss.

Of course, it was Sunday night. Nothing happens on Sunday night.

The new iPod is flawless and happy. The PSP has some new software to even-more-easily put video on it, so I was watching High Fidelity earlier on the small screen. It's amazing that you can stuff an entire DVD into a very watchable 486 megabytes and then put it on a system smaller than a box of Cracker Jack. I also found some software that would let me watch the same material on the even-smaller screen of the Sony Clie UX50 I still carry.

This is a pretty good time to be alive if you like new gadgets.

Fawn is home today, and in addition to her recuperation managed to get her DSL adapter working with her existing phone properly. Apparently Earthlink sent her some sort of magic splitter which she hadn't plugged in, and plugging her phone in on a conventional 2-way splitter caused enough of a voltage drop that DSL refused to talk after that.

This means, when I get home, I can get her in IM and (in addition to saying all sorts of provocative things) talk her through installing a real browser, real email, and all sorts of other fun stuff to take advantage of her G5 iMac.

I love bringing other people over to the light side.

Did I tell you that I heard from Belinda, the doctor up in Philadelphia?
She's studying to take her boards, and among other things, has come over to the light side and bought an Apple. She hasn't apparently had time to fool with it, but I'm glad I had something of an influence while we were together. She's moving out of Society Hill to somewhere further north in the city, and said she'd say hi when she had time. I was most amused by her cashing in her Dell for an Apple.

I know of no one who has gone the other way recently. I wish I'd been able to convince Melody to come over to the Mac side of the world, but she was dead set on getting a Windows laptop, and did. Oh, well. It'll be ready to upgrade or replace when Longhorn (gag -- I'm sorry, Vista) comes out next year, so maybe she'll be open to an Intel-based iBook or something.

Martha had an iMac as well, but she was so disinterested in it that I had a hard time believing she actually had one. Mac users by and large seem to be more curious about the nature of their machine than Windows people. It used to be the other way around, but that was because with DOS and early Windows, you HAD to know about the guts of the machine to make it do anything useful. Now, people are curious about Mac because it's easy and non-destructive. You can play with things without blowing the damn thing to smithereens.

Hell, I can now run Linux on my 20Gb iPod. It doesn't seem to like some of the encoding rates of the mostly-podcast MP3s on there, but it does run. Amazing what you can do with only one interface element.

Somewhere, I have the x86 build of Mac OS, but haven't lit up a machine at home to try it on.

Both of my Macs can speak Linux if they want (or if I want). Or Windows, via VirtualPC.

All the walls are coming down. I can't wait for it to finish.