Damn it. Apple was supposed to release iLife on Saturday, but they simply changed the web site from "coming Jan 25" to "coming soon" and haven't released it yet.

Yay. A Microsoft SQL Server exploit is responsible for breaking large parts of the Internet. Nothing is more fun than dealing with Windows administrators at 4 in the morning who take an hour to install the patch because the files take so long to download and Windows remote administration isn't really that good.

me (slicing beets): "Wow, I cut myself with my new knife. So that's what my finger looks like under the nail."

Bob: "They're beets. Nobody will notice."

Hmm. I seem to have a lot of cash in my wallet.

...

Oh yeah, I put Saturday's bar tab on my debit card and everyone else gave me cash.

I wonder how much I paid.

I noticed my car's odometer says I've driven about 3600 km since I bought it. That's about 88 km/day on average. Not bad for a guy who walks to work and lives next to a Safeway.

On the subject of car ownership, I still need to get one of those scraper/brush things. For those in warmer climates who aren't familiar with vehicle ownership in the frozen north, these are essential tools. They have a hard plastic blade on one end for scraping ice off your windshield and a brush on the other end for brushing off snow when it covers your car. It's the sort of thing that I never think about until I need to use it, like when we stopped for ice cream in Red Deer on the way back from Canmore last week in the middle of a snow storm.

On the plus side, I forgot to pay the apartment building people for my parking spot this month and I haven't heard anything about it. I'm curious to see if they track those at all or if they just rely on the honour system.

Wendy and Bob both have birthdays around this time of year, so a bunch of us went to Canmore for the weekend. It was a lot like the old high school ski trips, except that the room was much nicer and the food was outstanding, mostly because we had two world-class chefs among us. With three digital cameras and one SLR, there was photographic evidence.

So Jobs announced some interesting stuff at MacWorld San Francisco. One of the things he didn't announce is the new X11 server. Like I explained to a Windows fan boy a while back, I didn't become an Apple lover - Apple became a Unix vendor. One thing I didn't see mentioned on the Apple site is where to find the Aqua window manager. The X11 server seems to work fine, but the big news is the fancy window manager that makes X apps look just like Aqua apps. I was using the Fink XFree86 packages with blackbox (mostly because it's a fairly unobtrusive window manager), but it's just not the same. Anyway, the Quartz window manager is in /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm so make sure you load it up. Otherwise, your X11 windows won't have any decorations.

I also like the looks of Safari, the new Apple web browser. When they said it was based on an open source rendering engine, I assumed Gecko (Mozilla). But it turns out it's based on KHTML (Konqueror). I just wish it had tabs.

Evan and I spent Saturday night in my office working on okcomputer's epic drive upgrade. At first, we thought the two new SCSI drives were working fine, but then we ran into weird SCSI ID errors. After many hours of going through documentation, upgrading firmware, and fiddling with jumpers, we broke down and just pulled off every jumper we could find. Then it worked.

As requested by several users, I have posted some pictures of okcomputer's fancy new case. We decided to leave it in my office for a couple of days so that I could get at it quickly in case there were any problems. With all those hard drives and fans, it's pretty damned noisy.

Wendy and I cooked crabs for dinner on Boxing Day. And when I say that, I mean Wendy cooked crabs and I got the butter out of my refrigerator. Well, I pulled the guts out of one of them, too. We tossed around the idea of a new form of vegetarianism: not eating meat unless you kill it yourself. That way, you appreciate what's involved.

The crabs shortly before they meet the "court bouillon".