Yeah, even geeks have to pay lip service to this day. Go ahead: don't be shy. Kiss your MacMini today.

I don't know if my first attempt to "spread Firefox" last night was successful. I managed to at least convince a co-worker to try out Firefox. My first experience as a Firefox evangelist tells me that the browser's features are pretty much non-obvious to people whose browsing experience has largely been limited to Redmond's finest. The target platform was Mac OSX, which comes with the Safari browser, which my co-worker described as slow. I tried to highlight what I felt were Firefox's killer features, but my potential convert was a bit less than enthusiastic over the tabs, the find-as-you-type toolbar, and the pop-up ad blocking. Now I know what ease-of-use means. "User-friendly" is what most people use, even if the interface is as klutzy as the one that comes with most cellphones. A user is forced to adapt to the interface, because that's the only way they can make the cellphone do the things they want it to do. They really have no choice of downloading a better WM or Desktop environment. Things may change. But that's user-friendliness as it now stands. You use what you're used to -- unless you're forced (by your boss or your budget) to use something else.

I'm suffering from what I sometimes think are just the psychomatic symptoms of hypochondria. But the thing is, I'm not sure, and that feeds the hypochondria. Maybe I just need a visit to the doctor. But who wants to go to the doctor for some vague complaint? What I need is the more comprehensive equivalent of, say, the off-the-shelf pregnancy test kit, something that could diagnose whatever ailment or non-ailment I'm feeling with a 90% or better success rate. Color blue: you're OK. Color red: dude, you're probably not malingering. To confirm, consult a doctor

A friend has decided to exchange her old cellphone for a newer one with a camera. Years ago I would have thought it the stuff of science fiction for a device not much larger than a pager to allow you to receive short messages (the pager's forte), call your friends, calculate your groceries, schedule your appointments, play games and shoot your own porn clips. I'm now convinced that the most stunning -- if not the greatest -- advances in technology will be in the field of small consumer electronics. I don't see flying cars or space elevators in the near future. But I see very much a supercomputer in the hands of every citizen of any First World or newly industrialized economy.

I'm terribly unimpressed by iTunes. My chief complaint is the way iTunes seem to treat music files from different sources like they were all in one place. I must confess I haven't used the program that much. But from the praises I've read from satisfied users, it seems that my "beef" against the program is the desired behavior, a "feature." I want to know that the music I'm hearing is stored in /media/music/foo or in /media/cdrom1 and not say at http://foo.com. To me the perfect player is a no-frills command-line program that I can invoke with something like " mplayer `find /path -name "*.ogg"`" If I want to remember a particular series of Tunes, I could always create an .m3u playlist and have mplayer play that.

Why is it that the greatest advances in technology are in the fields of entertainment? I'll be visiting the dentist RSN and yet I still have that same childhood fear of the drill. I've long tossed out the casette tape players and Ataris of my youth. But for something as essential as good teeth, you still have to endure the wonders of 19th century medicine. A casual Google search reveals that the dental drill was invented anywhere from -- gasp! -- 1790 to 1872.

I don't know how true the rumors are, but I'm now kind of ambivalent over the Hubble retirement plan. It seemed like a good thing to free up cash for the space fan's holy grail, a crewed mission to Mars. But if they can't risk what seems like a routine mission in low earth orbit, how likely is it that in the end -- after the press announcements and the Discovery documentaries -- the NASA people are going to be up to a challenge that may well be a million times riskier in terms of space mileage?

I finally had the chance to use Amazon. I downloaded a couple of free mp3s. I needed to register and supply an email address. But that's just what my two dozen email addresses are for. I guess I now have to throw one away.

06:21:48 up 35 days, 8:19, 7 users, load average: 0.33, 0.84, 0.58

Yes, I know it's really pointless citing uptime statistics for a home computer that isn't doubling as a server. One of the vain reasons I've kept the computer on 24/7 is the fussy feeling I get of having kicked off some bad habit. It's been 35 days since I last smoked. It's been 35 days since I last downloaded pr0n. It's been 35 days since I last rebooted. Somehow the computer has become an extension of my personality and its achievements have become mine.

I can already see my future.

I see myself living, as I do now, onthe nth floor of a tall building. I see myself staring out of the window at other tall buildings. The horizon is filled with tall buildings. Tall buildings are the horizon. Unimpressed by the sight, I turn from the window and walk the few meters to one of the room's few pieces of furniture, my work table. On the table is a sheet of what looks like frosted glass, rising from its base at a 45-degree angle.

"Hal, turn on," I command.

And the sheet of glass comes to life, filling with the colors of a green field beneath blue skies and a lonely cloud that seems to move. The cloud is moving, and so is the faint shadow it casts on the green -- the animated wallpaper of my desktop.

There are no icons as yet. But I draw out a finger and before it touches the screen, a cartoon of a gorilla beating his chest appears. Had I disturbed his sleep? The gorilla soon quiets down, and from his back, he pulls out a sign. On it are a few options:

Read mail?

Order pizza?

Pay bills?

Call X?

I press the fourth option. Not two seconds has passed, a familiar face appears. But it's not X. Only her avatar. Please leave a message.

I've started to encode my collection of classical music CDs into Flac format. I will archive the flac files onto cheap DVD+R media with the goal of duplicating the DVDs after, say, a year, i.e. making a backup of the backups to avoid the consequences of optical disk rot. I don't have any short-term plans of giving away the Flac files (the physical equivalent, I guess, of filesharing). I plan to pass the files on to my descendants (or maybe some close relative or friend who will promise to act as their custodian) as a sort of digital inheritance. Hopefully, the copyrights on the performances will some day run out. Maybe I'll call this my Digital Patrimony Project.

I find myself wondering what is lost in writing without hard copies. In our digital age, it's quite possible for a manuscript never to see the paper stage. When I print, say, a story and blue-pencil it, I see the revisions as something like the brush strokes on a painting -- not that I'm necessarily a good painter. Sure there are word processing programs that let you see concurrent versions of your manuscript. But none of them can yet capture the desperation of a scribbled note on the margin of the hard copy.

I'm writing this while waiting for the Sun registration 'bot to finish my registration. I need to fill in some forms in order to get to the download page for the Solaris 10 installer CD's. The registration page is taking some time to load because I'm on dialup and I have a background wget process targeted at a site that hosts free Classical music mp3s. I clicked thru the Sun click-thru license without reading. What you don't know can't possibly hurt you.

It now appears I can't use wget to download the ISO's. Having reached the download page, I'm quite simply amazed at the effort Sun has put to force users to stand up and be counted. Does Sun really want bragging rights to having N thousands of Solaris installations based on the number of people who visited their download page? Count me out. I can't download the ISO because Sun's site apparently can't cope with the number of downloaders. I think allowing other sites to mirror the ISO's would lighten the embarassing load on Sun's servers. I think Sun would be better off just crippling the ISO, say, by requiring the use of a key to unlock the download. That way, Sun can be sure the download is going to be installed. Whether the registrant will actually use the installation for productive purposes is a different matter, especially for OS junkies.

Let me describe the computer I'm using to type this entry. My "work"-station is a Power Macintosh 7600/120. At the back I see a label which says "MANUFACTURED JUNE 1996." The beast is nearly a decade old!

The OS is Mac0S 8.6. The 7600 was a replacement for, if I remember correctly, a PowerMac G3. It originally had OS 8.5 installed. I upgraded the OS -- without the support of tech support or their knowledge -- to 8.6 using the update files I downloaded from Apple's site. The files are actually parts of a split-up disk image.

In terms of I/O devices, the 7600 is pretty much a barebones machine. It has a flaky CDROM drive that has trouble reading CDR's and cannot read CDRW's. It has no USB ports.

For the browser I need to log in to /. and do my research, I use iCab, Mozilla Navigator, and WannaBe, a text-mode browser. On occasion I use Internet Explorer. For the word processing I need for my edits, I'm condemned to a choice of either Word 5.1 or Word 2001. Not much of a choice really. But there's no version of OpenOffice or AbiWord for OS 8.X or 9.X.

As someone who doesn't smoke or drink beer or coffee, I find /. to be better than crack -- not that I've tried or inhaled it -- in perking up those odd moments when I feel I've been hypnotized by the tedium of my job. Reading the rants and submarine humor is just the jolt I need to get my mind back on track. My misreading of the story "Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3.0" was an occasion for some accidental humor. Thinking that Apple had come up with a long overdue update to the NeXTSTEP OS was like a mental slip on a banana peel for me. Apparently, I wasn't alone in my misimpression. Luckily for me, I resisted the desire to post-and-run in the hope I'd get modded up by being one of the first geeks on the block.