Bounded in a Nutshell

A selection of the typical phone messages on my machine:

1. "This is an important message for [name garbled]. If you are [name garbled], please press 1 now; if you need to bring [name garbled] to the phone, press 2 now..."
2. "...hello? Hello?!" [click]
3. Hold music for about fifteen seconds, followed by (2).

This accounts for about 99% of the messages I ever get that aren't just hang-ups. This is possibly a sign that I need more of a life, or maybe less of a phone service.

Upgraded to the new Mac OS version this weekend. Doubting the wisdom of that.

Part of the problem is that they've apparently revamped Spotlight (the super find-everything-on-your-computer utility) in a way that requires it to re-index the entire hard drive. As well, there's Time Machine (an automated backup system); this is a fine idea, but again takes a certain amount of setting up. And if one isn't careful, then the very first thing that happens is that both of these HD-intensive applications start working through their initial setting-ups at the same time.

This takes a while.

And it takes longer if the computer decides to put the hard drives to sleep (since apparently nothing's going on).

Besides that, I'm not wild about the interface tweaks – the darker grey reduces the range of angles at which black text on it is visible – and they've managed to make Mail even uglier than they'd made it in Tiger. Spaces is a nice touch, but most of the other new applications and/or features seem to apply to people who aren't me (i.e. people with the built-in web cameras, or people using their Macs in an enterprise-type environment, or people with kids, or…) and so I'm not entirely convinced that this was a needful update. (Except in that it probably won't be too long before we start seeing nifty little Leopard-only applications hanging around for download; I still use 10.3 on my office machine, and there's any number of nifty Tiger-based things I'm missing out on.)

You know how comment threads at political blogs (e.g.) are often populated by rambling illogical statements fraught with random spelling errors? I say that there's nothing random about them.

What's you're actually seeing is communication between secret agents and their higher-ups. Dead drops in plain sight. The patterns of errors and strange word choices actually encode the secret reports: steganographic messages hidden amidst what appear to be nonsense.

A selection of bullet points, in which the discerning reader may infer the circumstances of my absence from this site:

• I've spent rather two much of the last several weeks sick: not actually sick enough to do something about, in this benighted land, but sick enough in a couple of cases to inconvenience me greatly.
• My talents of procrastination are such that, even in a semester with less than twenty students all told, I'm mournfully behind on my grading duties.
• Also behind on: reviewing papers for journals, reviewing papers for Mathematical Reviews, revising accepted papers for publication, revising rejected papers for resubmission, writing new papers for submission, reviewing the literature for a major ongoing project, preparing my next semester's courses, making travel plans for the upcoming winter break. Note that this is almost certainly a partial list.

I'm still more or less alive, though, and the major circumstances of my life remain unchanged. So there you go.

I intend to start posting more often, since writing in my various blog spaces gives me the illusion that I'm talking to people. We'll see how this particular resolution goes.