X etera Just loaded up Panther, aka OS X 10.3 (people at work were chiding me for waiting for several actual days before upgrading). It is very good. Apple touts the Finder as being improved. In fact, it is much better; so far I'd say it is the best file management tool I've used on any OS. In general the OS feels a lot more responsive, and seems to boot faster as well. The only problem I have had so far was with X11; the upgrade apparently does not automatically install the final X11 application if you had the beta. The fix is to delete the beta X11 application from Applications and install again from Disc 3 (or from the Apple site). You can tell because the new application is in the Utilities folder. The change didn't take effect for me until I restarted, to get rid of the old X11 that was still running (there may be a way to really kill it). The old one didn't properly start the quartz window manager, and all windows appeared with their tops overlapping the menu. But it works fine now. A very nice upgrade. There are apparently tons of new tricks to judge from macosxhints.

The white stuff Our boy saw his first snow yesterday. Not only falling, but actually sticking to the car and the ground in some places. He had to go to preschool so he didn't get to see it for very long. But, this being New England, I'm sure he'll get lots of other chances.

Good reading I like this post very much. Many of the regrets I have about my life are things undone; very few are for things done that didn't work out. I don't have much original to add -- just go read Tracy's post!

Tonight I'm in one of those moods where it seems nothing I read (blogs) is quite what I want to read. Our boy is being quite a pain tonight; he won't go to sleep and is very cranky. So I want to read things to relax but ... not a big connection happening. That seems to happen more and more often lately. For a while I felt pretty close to a lot of my blog friends (most of whom I've never spoken with in any other way); now it seems there's more distance. That may be because I've been writing very little recently. Blogging needs to be two-way to keep the connection alive. Part of it is being busy, but I think it is also that some of the things that I really want to say can't be said here. This doesn't mean my life is bad or anything; in fact it is going very well now. But that doesn't erase all the painful things of the past entirely. But you won't read them here. Neither will you read about anything bad that happens at work; I've pretty much decided it is too risky to bring anything up here, because I'm far from anonymous. I thought once our boy was home I'd share lots of fun things about him. Well, there are a ton of those things, but for some reason it is hard to share them in public, too. I guess maybe I don't want to have his life be too public until he has a chance to have a say on that. Maybe I need to find a new focus ... we'll see.

On being young My son is 2 years old. This means, Lord willing, he may live to see the completion of the reconstruction of the Route 2 bridge over the bike trail at Alewife. I know I won't.

The best thing about a poopy diaper change ... ... is that everything else you do that day will probably be more enjoyable. This is of course assuming he doesn't poop again.

Silly news There's no particular point to posting this, other than it is just bizzare:

Backfire Ignites Dog, Dog Sets Grass Fire

BloggerCon musings

I ended up staying only a half-day at BloggerCon. I left mainly for some family time at home, not because it wasn't interesting -- it was very good. In fact, two sessions almost left me in info overload.

The first was led by Susan Mernit, whom I met and worked with in a former life in New Jersey along with another participant, Scott Brodeur.

The session centered on tools for bloggers, and what tools people need that they don't have. While a few people were happy with the tools out there, most of them wanted more -- several teachers in the room noted that students had a lot of trouble with losing posts, for one thing.

I was eager to hear Dan Bricklin (pictured above with Susan), a legend among software developers for creating the first popular spreadsheet (Visicalc). And he lived up to his rep. He spoke about how current blog tools don't make it really easy to add photos, nor do they easily allow collaboration on a single post by author and "editor".

The problem, he said, was the developing really powerful Web interfaces costs a lot of money, and so far the blogging community probably won't pay that much (corporations using blogs might help pay the tab; or open source projects might also fill the gap

For more on this session, see the Betsy Devine's excellent account

The other session I went to covered blogs "inside the firewall" -- in essence, how weblog technology can be used for intra (and inter) business communication. I think I'll leave that session for another post.

At BloggerCon I'm here: BloggerCon. Trying to figure out how to write/take pictures at the same time I am listening to all this interesting stuff. I think I'm going to try to take notes and distill things down a little, not send out transcripts or anything. For that, try Betsy Devine. (There would be a pic of Dan Bricklin here but iPhoto is for some reason refusing to import photos. Maybe later).

Why is it that ... ... roads in New England sometimes don't seem to have a good sense of north, south, east and west. For example, we took a wrong turn today and ended up coming into Biddeford, Maine, from the east side. One would think that we should, therefore, have been driving west. However, we were on Route 9 East. This may have something to do with I-95 South turning into I-93 North south of Boston. Or maybe not.

Blogtown If you are coming to BloggerCon this weekend I hope to see you there. This is the first blogging event I've ever been to -- even though I am busy beyond belief, the lineup of interesting people is too good to pass up. (I'm only coming Sunday; I've got another place to be on Saturday and besides not sure I want to shell out the fee). If Net access is working I'll try to post from there ...