August 26, 2002
Very little about this weekend turned out the way I expected it to. I did go to the Apple store for the Jaguar release, which was a blast. They had expected maybe 500 people to show up; there were over 2000! It was like that in Apple stores all over the country. We were in line for about two hours before we made it into the store, by which time they started to run out of stuff to sell. My friend Jim, who had tagged along on a whim to buy a computer, found that the 17-inch iMac he'd settled on was out of stock. I managed to score a copy of Jaguar, though, which was my goal. We left around 1am and the place was still hopping. I have no idea what they did on Saturday, considering that their stock had been depleted so dramatically.
Then I had to get up early to wait for the guy from AT&T to come set up cable modem. He did arrive when AT&T said he would, but I still don't have Internet access. After trying for hours to get the dang thing working, I called AT&T and was told the work order hadn't been closed so the account couldn't be activated. Hmph. Hopefully that'll be squared away by the time I get home today.
I want to wait until we have broadband working before I set up the home network, just cuz conceptually it seems cleaner, so I didn't get around to that. Not to worry, though, I had plenty to do: Kiara had decided to paint the nursery. Then Sunday night I got to babysit little Robert. He is such an adorable kid, the highlight of the weekend.
Once he was asleep, I attempted to work my way through the Perl Exegesis 5. Myabe it was the fatigue, or maybe it's honestly just impenetrable, but I was lost about a third of the way through. I'll give it another shot, but I might just wait until Perl 6 is released and there's a new Camel book before I try to follow what's happening in regular expressions.
What I had really hoped to be reading was JMS's Rising Stars, but I can't seem to find my copy of the first volume. I guess I'll wait to reread it until the third volume is released (I'm not collecting individual comics on this one).
Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), by the way, is excellent. If you've been waiting to make the switch, now's the time. Even on my old iMac, it seems faster and generally more pleasant to work with. Others have discussed it in greater detail than I will. Suffice it to say that I am more than pleased, except that I'll have to build Perl 5.8 since Jaguar ships with 5.6.1. Once we have broadband and I can download OpenOffice, I might even be able to convince Kiara to make it our full-time OS. For most of what I do, it already is.
