The spring is taunting me. Every time I think winter’s over, the next day there’s multiple centimeters of snow on the ground.
It’s a day of waiting, really. Next week’s my annual trip to the Southeastern Conference, which is (as it usually is) in Florida. This is not what you might call one of the most highly organized conferences in the hemisphere, or at least it hasn’t been recently, and so despite the fact that festivities start in less than a week they have yet to post a schedule of talks. I’m not terrifically worried that I’ll be scheduled to speak at a time when I won’t be there, since they’ve assured everyone that they take this sort of thing into account. I am worried that I might get an 8:00am slot, and I feel I can prepare myself better for this the more warning I have.
I’m also waiting for my most recent toy to arrive: a portable hard drive. It’s supposed to be about the size of an audio cassette tape, and holds twice as much data as my current laptop. I’m buying this with my honorarium for the talk I gave in Dayton last month. (“My God, how the money rolls in!”)
Given that I’m mostly getting this drive as a home for my music collection, it’s legitimate to ask why I didn’t go whole-hog into iPod-land or something. I’m not really looking for a player device, in that it’s rare that I’d particularly want such a thing. I have a laptop, which can play my music just fine when I’m in a hotel room; I don’t fly very often, and I’m on trains and buses even more rarely. And if I want calendar sync’ing I can always revive my old Visor (again).