Mac lovin’

In his recent-ish article, The Changing Mac Communityfor O’reilly’s Mac Dev Center, Derrick Story pretty much sums up how I feel about the state of Apple and Mac OS X:

Whether you’re a big fan of Mac OS X or its most ardent critic, think about this: Do you remember how life in our community was before the return of Steve Jobs, the iMac, and Mac OS X?

What I remember was: the sneering PC establishment, bad newspaper headlines, huge quarterly losses, and doggone-it, beige boxes just as ugly as the Windoz garden variety. In the case of Power Computing, even uglier.

Now we’re on the cover of Time magazine, have three of the coolest computers of all time, we’re maintaining profits in a terrible economy, and arguably, have created the most exciting, controversial operating system ever implemented on a broad scale.

The article is interesting, but it’s mostly quotes from Mac users (both new and old) about the changes Apple has undergone due to Mac OS X. Still, it’s worth the read.

Indoor/Outdoor

From a discussion at the Backpacker message forum about The North Face gear. I own a few items (daypack, windstopper hat, hiking shirt), but it’s become pretty trendy to wear their mountaineering stuff. I see it around here all over campus and town. The last paragraph in the discussion (about TNF trendiness) exactly sums it up for me: “[It bugs] me seeing people walking around all clad in TNF gear like they’re getting ready for an expedition and I happen to know that their total exposure to the outdoors is snowboarding on their PS2.”

Not good, but could have been MUCH worse

So, Friday morning, I start having chest pains. BAD chest pain. I’m only 32, but the concept of a heart attack at this age isn’t totally foreign, as I lost one of my best friends (we’d known each other since the sixth grade) to a heart attack three years ago — he was only 29.

So, my friend Jack at work takes me to the emergency room. They run an EKG, do chest X-rays, listen to my heart, ask a load of questions. Turns out I have acid reflux disease (or GERD, as the technical term goes for gastroesophageal Reflux Disease). I’ve been having BAD heartburn for the last few weeks, but I chalked it up to the unplanned vacation and new job stress (though the new job is going really swimmingly). Apparently, it’s had more of an effect on me than I thought.

I finally came up with a fitting description of the pain, though: Say you’re grilling out, and you’re doing it old school, using a charcoal grill. Imagine that it’s about time to put the meat on the grill, and you’ve got the coals so hot that they’re ashy-white and glowing red, like little suns. Now imagine swallowing one of those and having it get stuck behind your breastbone. Voila! That is what acid reflux feels like. Sucks, huh?
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Fixed.

A record for the fine folks at my hosting company! They fixed my perl problem in less than thirty minutes. Now, I can post, which I haven’t been able to do for the last couple of days, and I just this morning found out what the problem was so I could ask for help.

Snow day.

Adding insult to injury in the weather category, it snowed today. It rarely snows here in March, but we got a solid 3-4 inches over a bit of ice. Looks like it’s here to stay, too, because it’s not supposed to get up above freezing until Monday. I guess it’s a three-day weekend for school kids and teachers on Monday. But, with the way the weather runs in Arkansas, it’s liable to be 80F in 10 days (or less). And it’s about damned time.