Various Hobgoblins
Here now in Jersey. What can I say about the trip except that I'm less impressed than I've been on other recent trips. The taxi driver from Newark was a royal ass, and the flight attendants acted like they were in high school for the entire flight. Grandma said they looked 'messy,' like they 'spent the night somewhere.' Meow. And of course I was pulled for terrorist screening (I guess the crossed American flags pin on my lapel didn't carry the weight I thought it would), and of course, so was Granny.
It's not raining now, although it spent an hour yesterday in a good downpour. We got Grams a Doctor's appointment on two days notice, and I have to say that this guy is a throwback to the day(s), [as in-good old]. I wish I could find a Doctor like this for myself. He even promised to come and see her at the new old folk's home, which I actually believe.
I started digging into my new Mac OS X Unix book today, and I have to say that I'm pretty excited. The new OS is actually the Unix OS, only you don't have to know that if you don't want to. I got to work in Unix (on an SGI workstation) for a while a few years back, and for some reason it actually made sense to me. I felt powerful as I logged in as 'Root.' I made the plunge this time because I couldn't get rid of this icon on my desktop no matter how hard I tried. I had inadvertently stopped a download of a movie or song midstream, and there it sat. Part of the copyright protection in some of these files is that it won't let you write to them, or move them to your disc, and they usually disappear when you're done running them. This particular shade however was stuck in Purgatory and the only way to exorcise it was through ROOT Power! Be gone! And it was. But mostly what working in the Unix shell does for me is let me ftp to this, my new web site, without a stand-alone ftp client. I AM the ftp client. (Yes, it does seem that even small amounts of power go right to my head).
Okay, what it really does is make me look cool (in my mind) to all my friends that are frightened of Unix. I've been jealous for years of people tap-tap-tapping away on their keyboards with nary a click in sight, on exotic blue and black and red machines. When I used Unix it was for esoteric programs for 3D scanning and rapid prototyping and 3D modeling. When most of these were ported to NT, I just knew that Bill Gates must have stood at the Crossroads, again, and I wondered what it was that he had left to sell. Stock options? And now in this topsy-turvy world we wiv in, the Ben and Jerry crowd from Apple have restored my sense of dignity. Think different, indeed.
One last thought on Jersey for today. I was just an hour ago picking up a prescription for Granny at the local drug emporium, when a woman stopped in to buy a pack of smokes. I knew from my last couple of trips to the Garden State that prices had skyrocketed, and I prepared by hauling four cartons up from Florida. "Hey, what does a pack go for nowadays?" I asked. "Six-fifteen." All I've got to say is don't start whining when you see a crime spike in the next year or so. You make your bed, you lay in it.
