1000 buffalo stampede

Feh. Woke up at 5 am or something, having spent most of the night tossing and turning. Actually contemplated going into the office for 6 am, and then decided no matter how stressed out I might feel at the moment, I’m simply not going in at 6 am. Caught a little more sleep, and some tea. 7:06 am, according to the TiBook. Joy. Mornings…. Feh.

In other news, Microsoft lets go a “full time” temp after said individual posted a report – with pics – to their blog… of the new Apple G5s that Microsoft bought for their print shop. I’m sure this is crushing for the individual concerned, and certainly wish them well. However, a few suggestions should anyone be so inclined: free speech (which applies to the Government) aside, posting news about your employers purchase/use of a competitor’s product is a bad idea. Taking pics of operations at your company and posting them may be breaching confidentiality. I have empathy for the folks concerned, but there’s a reason I don’t post about my employer (and it’s not because they’re draconian about things) – it’s just not wise.

The things that occur to you at 7 am. I’m slowly working myself into my day, with a new effort to wake up just a bit early, have some tea (coffee will come when I arrive at the parking garage), catch up on news and let my brain get going – without thinking of work – for a while. So, as part of that, I happen to be reading some old entries in the blog and saw where my yellow messenger bag (Issaries logo) arrived in Sept ‘02.

Which gets me thinking about my messenger bag collection and related I’ve put together over the years. In order of most recent to oldest, I now have: Brenthaven Powerbook case (black), Timbuk2 custom commuter bag (design no longer available), two neoprene laptop sleeves, yellow Issaries messenger bag, logo’d case similar to a Racer X case, Samsonite laptop backpack/briefcase, 2 company briefcases, 2 LL Bean briefcases, and an old army messenger bag. I’ve no doubt left out a few somehow. I do think I may have a slight case of… messenger bag madness.

Well, while I can’t claim that yesterday was a particularly bad day, I can say it was a thoroughly “blah” day. The best thing that I can say about yesterday is that it’s over. The second best thing I can say about it is that it started about 6 am for me and stopped about 11:00 pm. There were definitely a few nice moments (emails, and then the Monday Night Gang), but – lordy – I ain’t a fan of Mondays. That is all.

Of course, Tuesday – given this is being tapped about in the pre-7 am dawn hours – is shaping up as Monday-ish itself. Joy, joy.

Well, well, tonight wound up as a surprise – actually having the time to go to the Apple Store in Emeryville and get a copy of the new Mac OS X (10.3) – Panther. Picked myself up some Mac dogtags they were handing out as freebies. I resisted the urge to get a new iPod.

The upgrade went very well. Took a bit of time, but went incredibly smoothly. Thus far, I haven’t had any real issues. A few of the small haxies and whatnot don’t work, but largely everything else does. The new X11 is humming fine, and my previous Fink installation is moving nicely. GKrellM is up, along with AbiWord, etc. My iTunes music library is intact. Aaaahhhhh.

So, my good friend John emails me to say, among other things, “email me when you update your blog”. Well, that’s encouragement. A few interesting things. First of all – OS X Panther. Now, not only do I get the supercool new Mac OS in, really, a handful of days, but I’ll get to buy the latest versions of my favorite books all over again. Finally had a chance to try out Rendezvous networking over a wireless network. Very easy and very nifty – I can’t wait to try in at O’Reilly’s OS X Conference the last week in October. Just a few days after Panther releases. Hmmm… maybe I will upgrade early. Additionally, I took the exceptionally fun and useful SubEthaEdit, a collaborative writing tool. Multiple people can work on the same document at once – I mean, literally at once. Fantastic.

I also had a chance to review some of the website reporting for the Jade Lantern. Very interesting referrals. Turns out robots are sucking up a good bit of bandwidth each month. I’ll have to work at blocking those. Other interesting statistics I found out about 75% of the browsers are IE, 78% Windows, Macs had a small clip, and there’s one visitor coming in as showing an IBM AIX system. Wow. Well, I’ll try not to get preachy about the mac too much, but I suppose the blog is going to have more of it. The Lantern, however, isn’t such a forum – macs and such would never really come up at all.