March 6, 2006
DO NOT RESPOND

monday saw the six year anniversary of helix gnome preview 1. joe mentioned that if it were a child, it would be in kindergarten now.

last week i got one of the new mac minis too hook up to my tv. it is possibly what the mac mini should have originally been, what with its ample usb plugs and daily gigabit ethernet. but the fact of the matter is that this machine is fast, there is no getting around that. i only now realize that i was actually CPU-bound just mousing through menus, that's how obvious the difference is. hopefully some day my laptop might ship.

March 17, 2006
kennebunkport

phik and i have decided to fulfill our musical destiny by road tripping to the merrytimes for the weekend. flights are upwards of thousands of dollars, so we decided to employ the latest advances in automobile-based travel.

the last time i was going to spend anywhere near this long in a car was without such basic necessities as GPS and GPRS-based internets.

March 19, 2006
traipsing around the clock

most of our trips involve the addition of some word or phrase into our lexicon. i don't know why, but it happens. joe will remember previous trip's phrases such as "essence" and "____ of a lifetime." in about twelve hours he will know what new word i've brought back with me from the maritimes.

to say that we felt underprepared friday night would be an understatement for the ages. first of all, i always think st. patrick's day is on march 15. when we finally reached saint john, we were greeted by the following sign:

when we got a little lost and stopped to ask for directions, a nice man started off by saying, "take a left onto st. patrick's street..." nobody told me it was going to be like this.

we eventually found the hotel, and decided it would be a good idea to have some dinner. we tried a couple of places: shucker's (not seafood), and the church st. steakhouse (not on church st.). while waiting for a table at the latter, we traipsed over to a deserted looking place near our hotel that we had passed earlier. phil was pretty sure they weren't even open, but i saw a couple of people upstairs so we ventured in.

i've lived in boston now for over six years, and for some inexplicable reason i've only gotten lobster there once... maybe twice. whatever the reason, this will be corrected, and hopefully soon. i had to put my utensils on the other side of the table to keep from eating too much to enjoy the show, as we have often done.

the show itself was a blast, as usual, despite some technical problems. they played some old favourites that we hadn't heard in almost a year now, and of course a bunch of songs from the upcoming album.

for dinner last night we revisited the five fisherman, and were not disappointed. haddock and halibut were consumed, before a hopefully newly traditional preshow nap.

we're about an hour out of boston now. i didn't realize we were so close until i noticed my gprs internet connection has stayed up for a record 45 minutes! along with the backlight keyboard, this really does feel like the future.

March 26, 2006
a suggestion

if you are dumb enough to waste your weekend trying to install XP on your mac, may i recommend the following:

set up rsh on a handy linux box. you can run rcp from Terminal.app on the OS X boot dvd to install and then bless the xom.efi file, which should speed up unsuccesful tries at booting XP.