Happy 25-hour Sunday

Riding with Ricky to South Station in a few minutes. He has been a fine houseguest, all around. Yesterday we went to the MFA to see the brand-new Rembrandt exhibit (fantastic -- I want to go again, and bring a magnifying glass with me (they rented these out for $5 at the door, but didn't explain why you might want one; some of the etchings are no larger than an LJ userpic)) and I finally got myself a museum membership. (Actually I got a dual membership for the both of us, since it was only $3 more than a one-person membership plus a one-time admission.) As the museum is a short walk away from the HMS campus, I look forward to visiting it by myself after work sometime, when I'm feeling properly whimsical. To just explore at my own pace, for hours: here is something I have not yet done with the place.

It has been so long since I've had anyone visit for an extended period of time that I forgot how important it is to have food. I may (sadly) think nothing of grabbing a bite whenever I get hungry, but this is awkward to do when there's another person around who also gets hungry and expects a means to fulfill it. I'll amend this for next weekend's spate of houseguests. (It is houseguest season, for me. Tra la.)

Ricky has tasked me with finding him a particular variety of oscilloscope on eBay. I don't know what he is going to use it for, but that seems an unimportant detail. I will try to oblige.

The Book is dead, long live the Book

Well, with Panther out, MOSXiaN's first edition is officially old news. A quick check of oreilly.com reveals this, and I wish them the best of luck. (Though I'm bemused at the decision to change the book's title, rather than just increment the edition number. Especially as this calls attention to the apparent animal-type mismatch...)

My total financial take on the book so far is... such that my advice to anyone interested in tech-book writing is:

write quickly and publish a lot (in other words, be David Pogue), or

live somewhere less expensive than the Boston area, or

keep your day job (and write the rest of the time).

In the 2001-2002 season of the jmac show, y'all saw me attempt and then fail at the first option, and then barely squeak by with the last one. I don't intend to do this again.

Well, except for the fact I'm doing it again, yes. Actually started hacking on Book -- the new holder of the title, the Volity book -- today, enough to start teaching my fingertips the nXML-mode bindings (didn't I say I'd do a writeup of that? Well, at some point, sure) and refresh myself with DocBook. Ahh, DocBook, 's lovely. Very much caters to info-organizational freaks like myself; each paragraph stamped, sorted and labeled as much as you please. Book currently has a preface, a part with a chapter, an appendix with a few refsections, and a bibliography -- all containing Actual Content, mind you, no lorem ipsum for me -- the result of a quick tour through DocBook features I haven't really applied before. I thought that MacOSXiaN would be "my" book when I signed that contract 20 months ago, and quickly learned how wrong I was. This time though, oh-ho-ho-ho, yes, things are different.

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I haven't even installed Panther myself, yet; waiting for an official ICG copy to start floating around the office. Fink is all ready to work with it, according to that project's homepage, and that's great news. I don't expect that my Oracle public beta will continue working, though, which means that I won't be able to run DBD::Oracle locally, which means flying poo for ICG development, unless I grumblingly make the cranky machine of JDBC work again. And would that pain be worth it to enjoy Panther? From all that I hear about it: yes, yes it would. (And it's not like it's really possible to make Oracle use more painful, anyway.)