It feels as if I’ve been blogging less recently; one of my friends/readers in England said that “I can fully understand why your blog is no longer a mainly daily occurrence.” (He also recommended that I go out and get a copy of the new CD by Spock’s Beard, Octane. I did try, Paul, but Tower didn’t have it. Neither does iTunes. sigh…)
In any case, there are three things that have slowed my blogging. First is the Philosopy of Mind course I’m taking at Tufts. I’ve already talked about that; suffice it to say that I’m having a blast, and spending a lot of time reading. I guess I could post book reviews here, but then people would know how much dosh I’ve forked over to Amazon.com.
The second thing is seasonal. Maybe it was the flu that clobbered me at the beginning of January, but this winter has really been a physically draining experience. One big snowstorm after another… and we have another one heading our way on Thursday. Enough – I’m ready for spring, stupid rodents notwithstanding. *
The third thing that is taking up my time is my new laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3400. It’s got an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, so that it can run Sun’s new OS, Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It’s a great way to get hands-on experience with the features of Solaris 10, expecially Dtrace and Zones Containers, but right now I’m spending most of my time on installation and configuration issues. I’d originally planned to set up a triple-boot configuration, with Solaris, JDS/Linux, and Windows XP, but I soon realized that (1) I was going to need plenty of disk space for the stuff I wanted to do, and (2) I didn’t really need any OS other than Solaris. So I’ve been (re) learning more about disk partitioning than I ever wanted to know…
Regular readers will know that I’m a hard-core Mac user, and that’s not changing in the foreseeable future. I believe in using the right tool for the right job, and at this point my little 12″ PowerBook is the right tool for much of what I do. There’s a really smart bunch of people in Sun (including a great team in Beijing) working to prove me wrong, and I’m backing them 110%. And I’ll stay on the bleeding edge with them, and do as much as I can to test, test, test.
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* In case you haven’t seen it, this joke is making the rounds:
“Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog.”