Journal of a Sabbatical

January 16, 2001

cerulean influences

Quote of the day:
"Nor am I under the influences of the blue devils now. The last blue-visaged imp has departed with my exorcism ringing in his ears - 'Conjuro te, sceleratissime, abire ad tuum locum.'" - John Greenleaf Whittier in a letter to Jonathan Law dated 1832.

Today's Reading: John Greenleaf Whittier: Life and Letters by Samuel T. Pickard

Fireplace of Snowbound. A little hard to photograph and impossible to scan. I misremembered the inscription. It doesn't say "actual". I think that was something antiques dealer said to me when I bought the cup. Anyway, here it is in a not very good but at least legible photograph.

Cerulean influences continue unabated. Blue-visaged imps dance around my head enumerating all 84,000 reasons why I suck. Not the least of which is that I am so far behind in keeping up with Internet related technology that few things I try to do on the web work at all or used to work but don't work anymore. I mentioned a few days ago that stortrooper doesn't work with Netscape on the Mac. Subsequently I discovered that blogger no longer works on Netscape on the Mac (at least among those of us randomly assigned to the new server). I was able to blog a little bit about it in my stercos blog before the Mac froze utterly and would not respond to the usual escape sequences or anything. I resorted to unplugging it, not the best thing to do but it worked.

The stortrooper and blogger experiences made me aware of how much work I have to do to catch up, not to mention how much money I'll have to spend on a new computer when the old one sort of still works except that the T keycap has fallen off the keyboard and all of my software is obsolete. So, why don't I just buy a new keyboard (or glue the damn keycap back on) and install Mac OS 9 and all new applications and then ... and then... bite the bullet and contaminate my hitherto Microsoft-free Mac with Internet Explorer?

Why not indeed? Well, the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone and all that. To run all the new versions of all the applications I need new hardware. Sigh. Oh well, I don't need a stortrooper that badly - actually I don't need it at all - and I'm not convinced that blogger is truly the future of web publishing. Then again the next big thing that comes along will undoubtedly not only fail in Netscape, but will fail on the Mac no matter what browser one uses and then my goose will have been cooked to a crisp if I've bought the latest most powerful Mac.

Wonder if I can get into the old programmer's home before I turn 50?