Balancing out yesterday, I managed to have a deep hack. Hours and hours of focused coding; lots of code written and the direction for the next few days formulated. I’m mentally fatigued, but pleased with the satisfaction of an exceptional day of work.

Speaking of devils, the first beta for Launchbar 4 was released today. Integrated Google and IMDB searches, passing arguments to CLI scripts, and sub-searching further solidifies my love for this program. I am in awe.

We all know what tomorrow is. The internet has taken to April 1 like a duck in a wetsuit and scuba gear takes to water. I guarantee that there will be at least one page on the net tomorrow free from half-hearted jokes about quitting one’s job and becoming an eXtreme llama farmer in Ecuador.

This is the result of today’s baking festivities. A loaf of whole wheat bread and 18 whole wheat bagels, over 10 cups of flour. The bagels are not beautiful, but it was my first attempt; hopefully the next batch will gain in the beauty department.

I’m all over the map this morning, doing this and that, and that other thing. Everything I look at reminds me of something that needs doing, and hey! now is a perfect time to do it, right? The net result is that I’ve gotten an insane amount of stuff done in the past two hours, virtually all of it two or three minute activities.

If I were in a different mood I’d likely get on my case for being in the mood I was expecting myself to be in, ready to sit down for a few hours of really deep thinking and planning. However, that doesn’t seem to be the way things are panning out this morning, and I’ll have to content myself with doing what I’m suited to do this morning, and hope that my mind settles down a bit by the afternoon.

I got up six times to do things during the typing of this post. That is all.

I spent the morning writing software tests, and the afternoon fixing bugs that the tests uncovered, as well a few new features (and tests for those as well). Perhaps not the most thrilling work one can do, but satisfying in its way. I’m starting to get the hang of the debugger Affrus, and was able to use it to quickly pinpoint a couple of bizarre exceptions. Testing for this phase of the project is almost finished; then it’s on to the next phase of the project, which is much more user-interface oriented.

Before dinner I pulled out the French Suites and did a bit of sight-reading. It’s a bit demoralizing at how my piano skills have atrophied over the years, but I can still muddle through. Bach’s music continually restores my faith in art and humanity. The fact that I can play it, albeit a bit less musically and accurately than I could ten years ago, is a pleasure indeed.

I failed to notice the lifting of the ban on Sunday liquor sales in this, our state of Massachusetts. Glory be.

While I’m multitasking on the Apple, about 80% of my usage comes from 5 programs. I’ve assigned these applications hotkeys, so, for example, when I need to use the Terminal, I hit command-F10 and all is well. Since I bought my first modern Mac I’ve been using Keyboard Maestro. While Keyboard Maestro works well, it hasn’t been updated in over a year, which equates to at least 5 revisions of OS X, a cyber-coon’s age.

This worries me; a program that close to the core OS that goes that long without updating tends to be unstable, but I couldn’t find a program that elegantly did what I was looking for without a lot of overhead. Imagine my joy when I found Spark, which does exactly what I want (minus one thing that I can live without).

At dinner tonight, we overheard a fellow explaining in great and tedious detail the ideas behind what might be the world’s first action/romance/drama set in the exciting world of beer brewing, starring a feisty yet sensitive beauty who “brews with her feelings.” She’s the kind of woman, who, if one of patrons of her brewery gets drunk, will come out to bar and personally take their beer away, explaining “that she does not brew beer so people can get drunk.”

I can’t make this stuff up if I tried.

If one likes, one can make a witty statement about “beer nuts” here.

I discovered that the incomparable Dr. John is playing the role of the sun in the children’s show Whoopi’s Littleberg (yes, Whoopi Goldberg). I never equated the Dr. with children’s television, but there you go. Everybody’s got to eat.

Also, the CD in my powerbook ejected this morning as if nothing were wrong at all. I must have wronged Johnny Appleseed in a previous life.

The PowerBook, she is behaving badly. I loaded a CD into the drive, as I often do, and installed what needed to be installed. Excellent. A press of the eject key produced a series of sounds as follows: “bzzzzz-shhhhhwwwTHUNK zzzzzzssshhwippp Whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” The thunk was the CD, instead of ejecting through the CD sized slot in the case, slamming at mach 4 against the inside of the case.

Beyond that, the laptop works like a charm. It is still under warrantly, so I’ll take it in next week. I’m perversely delighted that I have a provable problem to present to the repair staff.

A long expected noren, a Japanese door curtain, arrived in the mail today from Kyoto, complete with Hello Kitty packing material. I’ve been looking for a reasonably priced one to provide some small amount of separation between the studio and the miscellany room. It works as anticipated, and looks nice enough. Undoubtedly it will look better tomorrow. Yes, it’s curtains for me. Ha. Ha.

The only really startling thing that happened to me occurred at the start of my daily run. 3 times a week I do a 3-mile run on one of two routes; I know the way very well by now and can generally space out and enjoy my inner monologue. I’ve gotten good at dodging dogs, geese, cyclists and rollerbladers (the worst of the lot, erratic buggers) without working too hard. Today, however, I was shaken from my reverie by a bird coming that was no goose; it was a bird of prey, some sort of hawk as far as I could tell without my spectacles, and a large one at that. Just sitting there on the side of the sidewalk. Puzzled, I looked at it; puzzled, it looked at me.

Finally, I should pass on this link, an amusing adventure into the entertainment possibilities of web server configuration!

When I was a kid we had a sign in our backyard that said something on the order of “On this spot in March 12th 1848, nothing happened.” Living in New England has been an exercise in coming to terms with the fact that things did happen in 1848, and that people are more than happy to throw up signs, monuments and placards letting me know.

Generally there are “______________ wrote _______________ book in this place” or “__________ slept here,” but now and then one runs across something quite different. During a walk yesterday, we ran across this memorial:

Today we baked. Wheat bread, banana apple oatmeal muffins, pizza, and Tunisian blood orange and olive oil cake. So many baked goods do we have.

Harvard Square, March 20, 2004.

I finally got Caller ID put on the home phone today. For all the high-techness in so many other parts of our lives, we are practically telephone Luddites. Probably because we don’t get many phone calls, and because neither of us particularly enjoy using the phone.

This is the last step in the Great Telephony Upgrade, which was spurred by me work at home during the day. Our previous answering machine had a lot of character, and like any real flesh and blood secretary with attitude left about 20% of any given message about 15% of the time. Charming.

So now we have a dread phone with Caller ID, and an extra handset I can keep in the studio during the day. I am so up with the times. Now excuse me while I put on a flannel and listen to this new “grunge” thing that I heard is really big in Seattle.

The transition from salary man to whatever it is I’m turning into is well underway. My work with the chocolate company is by far the largest chunk of time and energy I’m using up, but there are a few hours in the week free for various and assorted projects. Amazingly enough, I’ve got a few unsolicited nibbles regarding projects, which is always good.

Last June I posted a few thoughts on the workflow I’d fallen into using the Mac. My usage requirements have changed a lot since then, and the workflow has changed to suit the work. I’ve added some new software to provide solutions where I had none, and a few to simplify other things. I’m having to work smarter, not harder, letting my process shoulder as much of the load as it can.

I found Affrus which is a remarkably cool Perl debugging application. I haven’t probed too deeply into its functionality, but it’s already caught things for me, and as the application grows in size and complexity, it will become more and more useful.

I also discovered CSSEdit, probably the most awesome CSS editor ever written in the history of man. It has real-time preview window and a graphical editing environment (as well as a standard editing pane), significantly streamlining the CSS layout process. I am rather enamored of this application.