So it has been awhile since I put pen to paper, or fin­gers to key­board, on this jour­nal.  A quick list of things of recent note:
– red­mae­nad vis­ited last week­end, and that was a very happy expe­ri­ence.  She got to see the kit­ties and Kate’s school.  They got to go out shop­ping for clothes.  She got to see the fall leaves.  We all got to drink wine and stay up too late.  Then she had to go home.  The [extended] week­end seemed to go by in a flash.  There were so many things Lisa did not get a chance to see: Powel’s, the crazy-big Japan­ese mar­ket, the super-cheap Indian restau­rant, the nifty break­fast bistro down the road, etc.
– I got the 40gig iPod.  “Is that half the music you have ever col­lected in your entire life in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”  Seriously–I thought the older iPod was small, but this thing is wicked-tiny.  The inter­face has been cleaned up a lot.  The embed­ded hardware/OS has been cleaned up a lot (a “reboot” is no longer required when doing hot­sync­ing).  Cur­rently, my only gripe is with the four con­trol but­tons across the front.  While I like the place­ment bet­ter than the older one, I am still try­ing to get used to the feel.  The old one had the touch-sensitive scroll wheel and five push­but­tons.  You knew when you had your fin­ger on the but­ton, and you knew when you applied enough pres­sure to acti­vate it.  The new iPod has recessed touch pads–not touch pads like the lit­tle soft plas­tic clicky blis­ters on mem­brane key­boards like elec­tronic cash registers–but each but­ton is like a lit­tle track­pad.  Even though they are recessed, I some­times find myself fat-fingering the skip but­tons.
– That Matrix game is get­ting pretty wacky-insane.  Recent devel­op­ments include clues left in phys­i­cal loca­tions through­out the coun­try.  For instance, a CD was stashed in a book with a par­tic­u­lar call num­ber in a Port­land library.  Some­body else beat me to it, but I have a copy.  Also, the plot is get­ting so crazy that I had to draw a dia­gram.  It is hard to fol­low the plot of a story that is seem­ingly hap­pen­ing around you in real­time.
– NIN quiz.  I am a lit­tle sur­prised by the result, but then looked at the scarcity of pos­si­ble answers. 
THE PERFECT DRUG

What Nine Inch Nails song do you relate to the most?
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– I found nifty new music, Black Tape for a Blue Girl.  Cur­rently, locat­ing songs, deter­min­ing if I like them enough to buy some albums.  Still need to get some His Name Is Alive albums.  Holy crap!  I just dis­cov­ered His Name Is Alive is on the iTunes store.  That was by blocker–nobody locally seems to ever have their albums, and I never think to order the phys­i­cal discs from Ama­zon.  The ship­ping usu­ally isn’t worth it.  I guess I’m get­ting a few albums.
– I have not writ­ten C++ STL code since the days of Metapa, about two years ago.  Presently, I am re-learning some of the syn­tax.  The ease of Java really messed with my head.  It took me 20 min­utes to fig­ure out how to declare a list<string>::iterator.  Wmap is being rewrit­ten in C for ease and porta­bil­ity. (…and to make installing depen­den­cies eas­ier.  It’s tough when the first step is “install Java.”)
– The Pre­cious has dis­cov­ered she likes sleep­ing under the cov­ers.  This is the same cat that likes to bite things.
⑆END⑈

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Tagged as: apple, cats, ipod, matrix, meme, metacortex, quiz