7:48 PM PST — I'm stunned that such a small-minded person could be on the public payroll. LA bureaucrat Joe Sandoval should be beaten for displaying such ignorance of technology terms. They're just words. Get over it you petty simpleton. What are you going to do about the thousands of vehicles in the LA County fleet that have master and slave cylinders in their hydraulic systems, just such superfluous things are brakes and clutches? I hate that PC-centric view that as long as you don't speak of evil things they won't exist.

But you probably figured that out already.

9:43 PM PST — Oddball notes that have no real thread except I'm typing them now.

Has anyone else noticed that Panther's Image Capture sports the twisting cube effect when you download pictures from a camera?

Go check out Chris's nifty redesign. Maybe one of these days, he'll take pity on me and my pathetically static page wrapper.

I'm sick. Head cold hit over the weekend. I probably shouldn't have gone into work today even but with half the department out I felt obligated. Now I can feel the congestion migrating into my chest. Think I'll go slather some Vicks on and retire.

Rich is a lucky man tonight, let me tell you.

9.25 PM PST — Another big gap. What's my excuse? None interesting. Thanks for visiting. Come back soon.

9:27 PM PST — An airline named Ted.

No really, they're serious. The jokes seem inevitable.

9:56 PM PST — Pop media consumed in the few days just completed. How Soon Is Never which re-awoke my drowsing passion for The Smiths. A great read even if you didn't come of age musically in the 80s. And if like me you did, just buy the damn thing right now.

And while I watched my dad recuperate, we blew through Band of Brothers. Second pass at the 10-hour series for me. Still, we'd end one episode and I was ready to watch the next right away. At the risk of sounding like a shill for HBO, it's brilliant entertainment. If you haven't seen it yet, come on over. I'll fire up the DVD changer and run all 10 episodes back to back. Seriously. It's that good.

6:53 AM PST — Like Brian, I've been put off by the networking changes in Panther. "What do you mean servers don't show up on the desktop even when you have that option checked?" Found a thread over at apple.com/support ("File Sharing in Panther: Lessons Learned" if you want to go search for it since the board uses relative links that can't be reposted, bah.) that cleared some of the mystery for me. "Eject a server from a Finder window. Hmmm."

12:53 PM PST — How did it get to be 12:53 PM? I haven't even showered yet. Bah.

10:11 PM PST — Home again. Trip went well, etc. No work for me today since I'd booked the entire week off. Played medical catch up instead. Took the cat in for her annual checkup. Swung by the optometrist to pick up new glasses and a fresh supply of lenses. Had the bonus of getting my eyes dilated. Not sure how but in my 25 or so years of bespectacledness, I've never had that done. After being told my eyes were completely unremarkable (a good thing), I hoofed it home and did, well, nothing. When you can't read or look at light (TV), what's there to do? Jerking off and napping. I'll let you decide what I was doing when the phone rang at 5:32 PM.

8:17 PM CST — Another reason why I'll never live in Texas again. The local news morons who gave 2 minutes of airtime to puritanical prigs upset because their precious children can see a beer billboard featuring "Damn." What the fuck?

9:37 PM CST — I know. I'm tardy once again. The lame excuse is lack of high-speed. Meaning dial up. Yes, I'm visiting the folks in the Texas Hill Country. Where the ground is rocky and the water is bad. Really, really bad.

All of us spoiled urbanites shouldn't sneer at our municipal water supplies as we haughtily order bubbles or still at dinner. Out here where you have to maintain your own water system (meaning well), my folks have spent a small fortune on all manners of filters and reverse osmosis rigs to get palatable, clear liquid for drinking. The rest of the taps in the house dispense merely softened stuff. It's good enough for washing, etc. but still has a decidedly sulfurous edge. Then there's the untreated flow at the outside taps. Not for the faint of heart. Its iron content is so high that the ground around faucets rusts.

Why am I telling you this? I have no idea. But it makes a fair imitation of actual content which is cool, no?

Previously