Where things are

After working with Chuck for most of Monday, I can announce that my contributions to the first edition of Mac OS X in a Nutshell are complete. Hoo-hah. (Well... almost. We discovered that a chapter was inadvertently left out of the QC draft, and the QC of the command reference chapter/sub-book arrived only today. I have until next Monday to examine these. But, I don't think this will take long for me.)

Didn't do much else today. Sank four hours or so into installing DAMP onto the TiBook while watchin' Star Trek and then Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Drudgery... just a lot of mindless robo-work that I seem to have to do several times per year across all my machines. (If Apple trusted a Perl newer than 5.6.0 half of this wouldn't be necessary. Grunt.) My goal before fleeing to Maine involves putting all my ICCB stuff on this thing, but I didn't quite make it there this evening -- got stuck on a stupid problem where the mod_perl interpreter won't follow symlinks in order to load Perl modules. This behavior seems indepedent of the Apache FollowSymLinks directives. Blaaah. I gave up to eat some Annie's Mac and read the remainder of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I rather enjoyed, though now it's 02:15 and I'm feeling kind of messed up and not sleepy and wanting coffee.

We hates tricksy Baggins, he gives us alopeciases!

Wacky dermatologist Vail Reese, MD, goes to the movies. His look at TTT gets a little creepy with all the zoom-ins on actors' made-over pimples and moles, but I found his analysis of Gollum's skin actually kind of interesting.

Merry merry

Off I go to W-ville once more, full of anticipation for several days of the heightened joy, boredom, contentment, frustration, and love that can only result from time with the fam. I'm not sure what schedule I'll follow... I suppose that I'll just follow my mood. I'll definitely be replanted back in Somerville soil by the 30th at the latest, whatever happens. Planning on a NYE party with Circle-D people and then a NYD party with Circle-J(s) people. Yay

---

Going to save all my written sentimentality for New Year musings. The short version is: 2002 was good to me, maybe the best of all my years so far, and I have solid evidence that 2003 will be even better.

---

Unexpected piece of holiday cheer arrived in my mailbox today: a royalty check from Perl & XML, which indicated that part of its total came from sales of the latest Perl CD Bookshelf, which our book is apparently part of. I didn't know that!! Cool.