Zathras' Great Machine

Forgot to mention...

Denise wanted me to mention that I've had two more letters printed in the Washington Post. I guess she doesn't want me to get too nonchalant about the fact that it's becoming increasingly routine for me to be printed in the second most prestigious and influential newspaper in the country. :-) OK, now that we've got that out of the way...

My several-days long experimentation with Entourage has disclosed that, while it has a lot of nice features and so on, it also possesses a number of flaws. Many of them I might be willing to live with -- such as keyboard shortcuts that mysteriously stop functioning and start again, or scrollbars that gray out and refuse to activate when you click on them. However, I also discovered, after further investigation, that Entourage sometimes refuses to retrieve certain messages from the server (and yes, I'm sure it's the app, not a server issue). Obviously, that's not acceptable in any way, so Entourage is no longer under consideration. My next review is going to be Apple Mail. The last version of Mail was terrible, but this version is supposed to be a lot better. We'll see, he said skeptically... I've already run into problems with it. I was working on configuring it this afternoon, and I was getting an obscure error message when I tried to create my third account. I had to work around the issue by deleting another account, creating the third account second instead, and then recreating the account that I deleted. Not an auspicious start.

The other day, when I was going thru IMDB checking on various people, I happened to remember something that happened when I saw "Austin Powers: Goldmember" in the theater a while back. I knew I recognized the character "Fook Yu" from somewhere, so I checked during the credits and was pretty sure that I recognized the name, Carrie Ann Inaba, as a classmate from junior high. Turns out I was right... the last time I Googled her, I couldn't find any information, but when I looked again this time, it turns out that she now has her own web site. I dropped her a note, saying hello, mentioning one or two funny stories that I remembered about her from the seventh grade English class that we had together... I told her I wasn't sure she'd even remember me, since we didn't really know each other very well, but that I just thought it would be neat to say hello. I wasn't sure she'd write back, but she did... she didn't remember me at first, but with a bit of prodding (and a photo of myself around that age), her memory was jogged. We exchanged a few emails, gave brief life stories, and talked a bit about life, the universe, and everything. It was a gratifying experience.

I just got back from a very satisfying evening of dinner and hookahs with Rob. We parked in Bethesda and wandered around a bit to see what we could find... Rob first wanted to try Jaleo, but the wait there was too long, so we ended up instead at a smaller Italian place called Centro. The appetizers were excellent, the entrées and dessert were just average. The atmosphere was very good, and the service was outstanding... I think my favorite part was when we had two different people at the same time refilling our water glasses. :^)

My evening smoke went quite well, even though my tobacco is getting too old... Rob, unfortunately, had worse luck. He discovered that his base has a crack that caused a pretty rapid leak, so he had to smoke with a towel under his hookah. (Later, when he was taking the hookah down after we were done, he dropped and broke his clay bowl, too. It really wasn't his night.)

We spent some time trying to install Panther on his iBook, but the installation CDs didn't play well with the external CD drive, so after we tried various methods, we had to throw in the towel.

Rob hasn't done a heck of a lot of work on the house lately, except to clear out a lot of the deadwood and weeds in the backyard -- it's really started to look good back there. Once he yanked all the poison ivy and dead shrubs, he made several odd discoveries, including the rusting hulk of a pushmower. He also found that there were tulips in the soil that hadn't had the opportunity to grow in who knows how long... this Spring, though, they're coming up.

I also finally got to meet Rob's cat, Jinx (unfortunately, I didn't bring the camera with me this evening, so I couldn't get photos). Jinx was a stray that Rob took in. She's a solid black cat with a somewhat oddly-shaped head, almost like a triangle. Rob reports that she's usually a very standoffish cat, but she took to me right away -- cats seem to like me, or at least many cats do. Rob has taken her to the vet and given her a full checkup and gotten her all her shots and so on. She's in excellent health, especially as is evidenced by her very smooth and shiny coat, but she does have four cavities, all in rear molars. The vet wanted to pull the teeth, but Rob refused, saying that cats need their teeth for defense (especially outdoor cats like Jinx). I told him I'd check with Denise to see what she has to say about treating cavities in cats, since she'll no doubt have suggestions on what to do... Denise? :-)

Posted by Zathras at April 10, 2004 12:30 AM