how?

How am I going to get out of bed, when in bed I have a purring cat and access to my email and the BBC World Service? Plus there's six or seven inches of snow out there. Days like this I wish I had a coffeemaker...

The reason for getting out of bed, though, is Zebediah. Getting out of bed means I can do my job, which means I can do my job well, which means I can leave this job with great accomplishments behind me, which means I can get a new job somewhere closer to Zebediah.

Getting out of bed is much easier when Zebbie appears next to me, in person, and says, "Wake up, Sascha! Time to put on daytime clothes!"

fantastic, super, great

I've come across several fantastic things in the last few days:
O2 Optix: I'd been seeing advertisements for these new contact lenses, and simultaneously having increasing trouble with my contacts. I'd been using 1-Day Acuvue off and on for a few years now. I started using daily disposables when I was more affluent than I am now, and I got used to the convenience: I put them in if I want to wear them on a particular day, and at the end of the day, I just pop them out -- a maneuver I often perform in bed. Since coming to New England, though, the comfort of my contacts has declined to the point where I would only where them when I was going to be working in the Cave, where cumbersome LCD shutter glasses are required. Even then, I'd have to bring eyedrops and my glasses everywhere, because the lenses would dry out and quickly become intolerable after as few as six hours. I visited my eye doctor yestereday, and he gave me samples of these fantastic new lenses, O2 Optix. He explained that they don't contain as much water, and so they're less susceptible to drying out. When he first put them in, I blinked and exclaimed, "Wow! Those feel great!" The doctor laughed -- "That's probably because of the anesthetic I put in your eyes five minutes ago." Even after the anesthetic wore off, I'm still loving these contacts. No dryness! I do blink a bit more then when I'm wearing glasses, but the blinking isn't accompanied by discomfort, so I'm super happy.

Pages: Brown bought iWork '05 for me; I requested it because I was facing some technical writing and I just couldn't face writing another document in goddamn Microsoft Word. The simple documentation I need to write doesn't need all the power of Dreamweaver, but I'm not good enough with html to make things look just the way I want with just BBEdit. So, I've started using Pages -- so far for one of the few writing tasks less pleasant than documentation: a letter appealing a denial of health insurance benefits. I found the program simple, small, and pleasant. The table editor was just... easy to use. Painless.

I suppose the other fantastic thing is that I just cleaned my bathroom, tip to toe, fore and aft, everywhere. Tomorrow is supposed to be the kitchen... or maybe today. Now I get to choose between tech writing, cleaning the kitchen, and watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. Tech writing and dvd's simultaneously? Hmm.

I'm also trying to decide on a to-do list system. I started reading Getting Things Done, and even started doing it, over winter break... but the in box is an overwhelming pile. I probably do need a physical solution; I switch computers and OS's too frequently (minutes or hours) to use a single application, and a pure-web solution is subject to someone else's control. Any suggestions? There's got to be a perfect mac product out there... Oh yes, and the Palm etc -- nope, no new hardware purchases for me, especially since I've owned two or three palms and always stop using them after a few weeks or a month.

dealing with odd newsletter mailings without pissing off the entire world

I got this delightful message in my email today, along with several related "wtf?" messages:

-----Original Message-----
From: **REDACTED**
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:50 PM
To: **REDACTED**; newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com
Subject: Re: did you send this?

I did not send this.

----- Original Message -----
From: **REDACTED**
To:
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 5:44 PM
Subject: FW: did you send this?

I"m trying to track down this problem.
aw
----------
From: "Automatic Email Delivery Software"
MAILER-DAEMON@belldandy.booksite.com
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:39:15 -0500
To: newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com
Subject: hello

The message was undeliverable due to the following reason(s):

Your message could not be delivered because the destination computer was
not reachable within the allowed queue period. The amount of time
a message is queued before it is returned depends on local configura-
tion parameters.

Most likely there is a network problem that prevented delivery, but
it is also possible that the computer is turned off, or does not
have a mail system running right now.

Your message could not be delivered within 2 days:
Host 125.187.47.159 is not responding.

The following recipients did not receive this message:
newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com

Please reply to postmaster@belldandy.booksite.com
if you feel this message to be in error.

As a public service, and because I am a bit of a... I don't even know what... I replied to the "wtf?" messages (the individuals who sent them, not the list) with this:

When each of you replied to the message, the "to:" field was
"newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com"
That means that your reply went not to the *sender* of the email, but to the entire list. Which is why I got it, and Kate, and Warren Licht, and probably dozens/hundreds/thousands of other people. So, you're an inadvertent spammer. Happens all the time, so I'm writing you as anti-spam community service.

At the end of the messsage that you got, it tells you what to do:

Please reply to postmaster@belldandy.booksite.com
if you feel this message to be in error.

Another good thing to do would be to try to find the source of the message via the web, without generating more email traffic.
The first step is to visit http://belldandy.booksite.com, which in this case isn't informative. So the next step is google: a google search for "belldandy booksite"
http://www.google.com/search?q=belldandy+booksite&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

That takes you to
http://belldandy.booksite.com/nonesuchbooks/book_link.html

Reading that page gives clues that the originating site is a bookstore in Portland, Maine.
The yellow pages on a9.com gives this:
http://a9.com/nonesuch%20books?ypLoc=Portland,%20ME

...which in turn gives you an address and phone number for a bookstore:

Nonesuch Books & Cards Mill Creek Store
50 Market St, South Portland, ME 04106
(207) 799-2659

On A9.com's yellow pages, you can actually call that business for free -- it's pretty neat. So you call them, and you ask them if they have an email list, and if they meant to send this mailing. Probably they didn't.

What probably happened is that a spammer is just pretending to be belldandy / nonesuch books, in which case, there's nothing you can do about it.

mac status report

My mac is hanging in there! Hooray! It's been a week since I got it back from service, and it's still basically working. A few minor problems:

• When I unplug it, even if the battery is fully charged, it sometimes immediately shuts down, and won't restart until I plug it in again.
• It seems to have trouble reading from cd's, but not dvd's.
• I can't complete the 10.3 install from the install disks. I had to install X11 explicitly, and I don't have iPhoto at all.

In other news, ChemPad has hit 1.0, and we're now adding features for version 1.1. I'm working on a tutorial, but ye gods writing documentation is stultifying. Also finding bugs in code generated by a mechanical language port is stultifying.

quicksilver

If you use a mac, you need Quicksilver. Follow this tutorial and your jaw will be hanging open with amazement. You knew the mac was cool, but quicksilver makes you so powerful. Superpowers. You know those unix masters who write scripts for everything and get their keyboard commands to do everything... this will make you like that, but more powerful, and with a nice aqua interface. This just about makes me want to get a development environment set up here... but that would be approximately decades of work. It's so amazing.
Now I need a milky way dark.