So this morning, on the first day of the Christmas buying season, Apple let me know that my Christmas present to myself was shipped out from Taiwan this morning (err, evening, their time).

My Gigahertz Powerbook G4 with Superdrive is on its way and should be here around Tuesday. Too cool... Now I just have to console my three-year-old powerbook that it won't be left behind.

It's snowing again, harder than last week. The forecast threatens 2-4 inches by morning. I'm still enthralled by it. :-)

Just glad I'm not driving anywhere for Thanksgiving...

Hey y'all! Continuing in the three-year-old thread of writing bots for AOL Instant Messenger, I've written an applescript interface between AIM and iTunes.

While offices can use it to let anyone at any desk control the office iTunes jukebox, and stores can use it to control their music from computers in the front of the store, I wrote it so I could control my stereo from my couch, using my hiptop's AIM client.

Anyhow, it's getting pretty polished and I'd like to know if any folks out there use AIM and use iTunes, and would be interested in doing a little usability testing and QA on it before I release the first full version next week.

Interested, or know someone who is? Drop me a line!

Wow, okay, so I don't consider myself a cinema expert, but reading through this Nerve interview with Parker Posey on her latest film and her career in general, I was really surprised by the vividness of her real-world personality. I get the impression that she's a person first, and an actress second, but no less assertive for that.

On an orthogonal side of that die, fans of Apple's Switch campaign might be amused by the interview that Ellen Feiss finally granted to Brown University's student paper (after turning down Letterman and Leno). It turns out that she was on drugs (Benedryll), and sounds like she still is.

Like an Easterner caught in their first California earthquake, I'm just fascinated (though probably quite a bit less frightened) by our first true snow of the season.

I knew it was coming. The weather forecast and ominously ring-like radar picture made it clear. Nevertheless, I was still eager with anticipation as I walked to the bus stop at around two in the afternoon.

Waiting for the bus, I felt small pinpricks of water. So tangible was my impatience that I held out my gloved hand, trying to tell if the tiny droplets were crystalline, or just really cold. They weren't really floating, still mostly pelting in their occasional pinpricks of cold.

After a few minutes it started picking up a bit, to where I could look into the distance and see the array of lines, each one a tiny droplet of freezing rain. I lamented (in my own tiny way) the fact that a digital camera couldn't capture the beauty of the falling water, and I thought for a moment whether I had my videocamera in my backpack, but as irony would have it, Adam was returning it to me at the very meeting I was progressively becoming later for, as the bus obstinantly refused to arrive.

Though I've been in snow several times (skiing, mostly), I've never lived in the stuff, and so didn't have a concept of the many faces of snow. My eskimo vocabulary would probably have about four words: fresh powder, packed powder, slush, and that stuff that turns a three hour drive from Tahoe to Berkeley into a 12-hour tour past accident after accident.

The interface between this cold, cold rain and true snow was something of a mystery to me, and I idly wished that I did have my video camera on me, so that I could point it into the distance and focus it a little closer, so that I might capture this transition that was clearly imminent.

Then, silently and without fanfare, between one heartbeat and the next, the entire array of falling droplets stopped. I don't mean that the rain ceased; I mean that the droplets stopped, instantly turned white, and progressed at a far more leisurely, and less linear rate. The world became hushed, as I never really noticed the white noise that the small rain was making until it was replaced with visual white noise.

It was just magic. I'm sure in my happy wonder I looked like a goof to the people driving by me, no doubt accustomed to the wonder, or perhaps having seen it earlier, just down the road.

Me, I enjoyed the snow, for the five minutes that it lasted, almost as much as I enjoyed again on the bus ride back home, when it made Forbes Avenue look like Manhattan in the movies, for just a few minutes.

But I have to say that right now, at two in the morning, when it's been snowing for several hours, nearly an inch of the white stuff has blanketed my car, and the world went from Fall to Winter overnight, that I enjoy it most of all.

Crazy day today... Coding all kinds of different class projects. Hopefully I'll be able to post a few online tomorrow, including a loony shockwave app I wrote that combined tetris and dance dance revolution into the same game, with one hand controlling each.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled chatting about my diet, drool, and other assorted effluvia.

Played raquetball for the first time in over a year tonight. It felt good to be tired (and thirsty!). Now I'm sooo tired. I worked through the night, and caught three hours on a couch after my morning class. Time to make friends with the bed that hasn't borne me for two days...

Oh, and it's supposed to snow an inch or two tomorrow night. :-)

Because nothing fosters determination like the yin and yang of ridicule and support...

Ammy and I have decided to simultaneously diet, and keep a running blog-tally of our progress. She and I are aiming to lose 21 lbs and 18 lbs, respectively, though her's will probably be a greater challenge since it constitutes losing 13.9% of her body mass, while mine only equates to 9.6%.

Here's the deal: You'll notice a new module on the left-hand navbar, titled "Blogger Diet." That's where we'll keep everyone apprised of our respective progress. Later I might add something nifty like a dynamically-generated graph or something, but I need to get better at gnuplot before that can work.

We're aiming to lose the weight by March 1st or so. 1-2 lbs a week is a supposed 'safe rate', and that means sometime between the end of January and the beginning of April.

Good thing we both had big dinners last night!

From the comments of this post:

phreakydude: I think we shld have a messageboard on here where we can comment on whatever we want not just the entry. Put it in yr thinking cap.

A very good point, and one that's already under my cap. A lot of the features I want to add to Fury are more in the 'sub-post' range, and probably wouldn't have comments of their own, but I'd like a place for people to talk about the site in general, or whatever else is relevant.

For example, if I loosened up meme-o-matic from one meme a week to maybe 3-5 interesting links I come across each day, and post them without any commentary, I'd still like people to be able to talk about things they find interesting, without having seperate threads for each one. Similarly, I'll be starting a photo-nav on the right, where I can post media bits, be they realtime hiptop pictures shot and uploaded within seconds, desktops like the Fall one I posted yesterday, quicktime clips, or whatever. These might have a caption, or might not, but they would have little or no text, and also wouldn't be able to be commented on directly.

So I'll probably make something like a 'furytalk' which will probably *not* be a threaded BBS or anything too fancy, but just a running log that people can write on, keeping a vague conversational thread going.

Oh yes, and I'm going to be creating logins. Don't worry, it's probably the most simple, least-invasive registration process you've ever seen, but will allow me to allow you to customize the site in a lot of cool ways, not the least of which is supporting 'new to you' continuity across all the computers you might use to read Fury from.

Snow keeps threatening to fall, or rather the Weather Channel keeps promising, with nature underdelivering. I'd complain except I expect she's saving it all up for a blizzard, and I'll wish I'd kept my mouth shut.

In the meantime, I've hardly got my camera locked up. The Fall colors here were (and, lingeringly, still are) stunning, and I took plenty of pictures.

For most of you, Fall is still in full swing and Thanksgiving, that cornucopia of Autumnal bliss, is just around the corner. With that in mind, I'm turning some of my better pictures into desktop pictures for those who want a little of the Fall spirit in your computer, without the worry of soggy leaves actually shorting out your screen.

Here's the first. I'll put the rest up one every couple days. for those using Mac OS X 10.2, you might want to try out the nifty new auto-change feature that can fade in a new desktop picture every day, hour, or 5 seconds, as you like. If you're on a PC, Wall Random does pretty much the same thing.

Choose your screen size:
800x600 | 1024x768
1280x854 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200

Lemmie know if I missed any important screen sizes. The 1280x854 is for G4 powerbooks, and I figured (hoped) nobody was still running 640x480.