(no subject)

jadelennox voiced concern about the car accident, so I will make an official statement that I am OK. I'll give you the full skinny now.

Last Sunday afternoon I was driving down Waterville's College Avenue, a four-lane, two-direction street, in the inside lane, and a car in the opposite inside lane suddenly veered into mine. It was far enough away that I had time to react, by changing quickly to the outside lane, but it still scraped my left rear corner as it passed, making a nice crunchy job of the metal there. I immediately pulled over while the other car plowed into a snowbank many dozens of yards behind me. All people involved left our vehicles at about the same time, and after verifying the crunchiness on my end, I started to walk over -- not easy, since it was all hopping over snowbanks with no sidewalks.

At some point, the car I was walking toward just vanished, really and truly. You may know that I tend to zone out when I'm walking around, and it apparently holds true even in unusual situations like this. It seems the other gentlemen (I think they were two men) got back in their car -- none of the details of which I had taken note -- and drove off when I simply wasn't paying attention, probably minding my footing more than my destination. Upon discovering this, I stood there for a little while, and then went back to my car, started it up, and continued as I was.

The only injury to me was a little fleeting sadness, a little lasting cynicism, and whatever I'll end up paying for the repairs. Hmm... guess I'll see to that tomorrow.

Book update

C&M@ORA worked all day yesterday putting the QC2 edits to bed. There are no further edits after this, friends. I had all of four changes to make, two of them to my acknowledgments. I hope all the name-spelling corrections take.

I should be able to hold an actual copy in my hands before this month is over. We're just barely missing MacWorld, but attendees are getting a discount flier, and there are... many backorders, already.

I am starting to have nervous dreams about how the book will be received. But I am not nervous in my waking life, as I was when P&X was emerging.

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I've already started to take notes for the second edition. Things sure do move quickly, don't they. I would imagine that updating a book is a hell of a lot easier than creating it from scratch, but I should probably talk to someone who's worked on updating one of their own books. Hmm: I know just the person.

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I have been following my nose with the "wiki-for-one" idea, and have an idea for a Cocoa application that will likely preempt Duck (the DocBook editor) as my first public Mac OS X app. The idea is far simpler, and should teach me a lot about text-hacking with Cocoa, which I can then confidently apply to the more sophisticated tasks that Duck will require.

Vapor, vapor.

Holiday Shopping for Hackers

So long as you hold fast to the assumption that all your intended recipients have the exact same tastes in everything as you do, shopping becomes much, much easier.

(Yes, there are still gift-exchanging holidays in the immediate future. If you know the right people.)