Keeping Busy
There's a lot going on these days and it's hard to make time to write in the Journal, but I'm taking a little time out now to fill in a few details.
Apple is making some seriously foolish moves with charging $129 for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2, and removing the free iTools email accounts that Steve has promised will be free for life. Since Apple exists due to the loyalty of it's customers, and only those same customers are going to be hurt by these moves, it just doesn't make any sense that they'd charge so little to offset the horrible public relations that this will cost them. But then again, smarter people have made dumber mistakes... I guess Steve's just due for a couple of big ones.
I've taken the time to reformat my iBook to use the HFS+ filesystem from the UFS filesystem. I'd heard that the performance is better, and there are certainly a lot of programs that can't be installed on UFS, so I decided to take the time and reformat the box. At the same time, I used the iBook image disks to make it out-of-the-box compatible. Not bad at all. The CD-RW made it pretty easy to back up what I had and re-install it on the new build. Not bad at all.
The performance improvements are significant. Installing new software used to take a long time. Now it's exceptionally fast. The change is very minor to me - mostly in case-handling of filenames, but I can live with that for the speed. Very nice upgrade.
Work is going well - at least as well as can be expected when I have to deal with the kinds of people that I have to deal with. For the most part, the people at the company are OK, it's the vendor's people that are almost too hard to believe. This vendor has an 'in' with a powerful person in the company and because of that they feel that they can pretty much have free run of the place. They can't, and they're learning the hard way, but I'll make sure that Karma is conserved... they'll have to change how they deal with us sooner than later.
Home additions/remodeling is going slowly. Liza has decided to add a pool to the backyard this year, so she's trying to get everything coordinated and get it in before the first snowfall :). I'm sure we'll love it and the kids will be in it every single day they can. It's a big bonus for all the parties that the kids will have. I'm really looking forward to it.
I was approached by a headhunter for a company here in Chicago. It's doing something I really like - cluster computing. Golly... I do love having machines solve really big problems - even if it's for the financial industry. It's certainly a possible move, I'll have to see what they look like in the phone interview and see how much of the job is in the face of clients and what their expectations of the job are. Could be really nasty if the face-time is most of the job, and it's a suit-world. That would make me quit no matter what the job was. But I'm trying to keep an open mind when people come calling with jobs.