so, how to compare today's fresh redhat install with the jaguar install from the other day?

well, os x might bill itself as "wildly innnovative" - and in many ways it might be. but there's something about redhat [ and other distros ] that remind me of a crazy uncle that will fart when he leaves the room while never letting you forget that after years of abuse he'll still come through in a pinch.

me suspects that'll make far less sense in the morning.

interesting. the best IA tool you never heard of is tinderbox?

"Tinderbox does an incredible job as a note-taking, brainstorming, information-gathering tool, working much like your brain does to allow you to capture, link, and organize ideas in a flash. It really shines as an IA tool. It allows you to quickly prototype maps of information, establishing links between ideas (or pages or nodes), sites, or other files. Tinderbox is the perfect replacement for those "sticky note" sessions so many information architects are used to. Just start brainstorming, get all the elements that need to be on your site in one place, view them in one of five different views, arrange, link --and you're ready to go. Tinderbox even exports as HTML, so it's possible to create entire prototype sites from your Tinderbox sessions."

"XP distilled": Customer and management practices:

"Roy Miller completes his review of XP practices by exploring the customer practices and management practices. The customer practices address the issues of determining which features should be in each release. The management practices help management give business direction to the entire team and keep them focused on the problem at hand. With the programmer practices and joint practices discussed in previous articles, you'll now have the complete picture of XP practices."

don't mind me, i'm just installing jaguar after doing my best to pretend i'm a laggard.

i just did the standard upgrade and things went o.k. for some reason i feel like i should do a clean install though.

[later that same night: hey. that wasn't so bad afterall. took me longer to back everything up. you know, just in case. everything seems smoov.]

hey, arts & letters daily closed up shop.

Old-boy network's power exposed:

"By considering various possible networks in a board of ten members (a typical size for a corporation), the researchers show that each network can be assigned a 'force' which measures the likelihood that the board will approve the CEO's proposal. If the board has, say, three links between members (a link indicates that they sit on an outside board), then 40% of the possible networks have at least a 75% chance of approving the proposal. For a non-interlocked board - one with no old-boy network - this chance is close to 50:50, as it should be. In other words, even a small amount of cliquiness can make a big difference."

following cam's lead, i decided to see if the vast wasteland was being filtered in china. indeed, it was for most of the day today, but has recently become accessible. my china filtering sources tell me that this is completely normal day in the life of a web access to us sites in china.

congratulations and a hearty happy birthday movable type! it's amazing that it's only a year old.

today harper went to the vet and didn't come back. after almost a year after we discovered that harper had epilepsy, we decided to have him euthanized.

even though i could rattle off the rationale for why it was best for everyone involved, it was impossible to stay composed as i opened the car door and let let him jump in - seeing how utterly and completely overjoyed he was at going somewhere, anywhere, in the car. turning left onto a main street, just a few miles from the vet, from the back seat harper sticks his head out the driver side window - his big, floppy ears flopping in the wind right behind my head; i catch a driver stopped at the cross street light crack a giant grin at the sight. harper pulls his head in and vigorously licks the back of my head and ear just like he always does when he's really, really happy.

i tend to think of myself as a bit of a modern man. i do dishes. i get a little misty eyed during certain movies. i don't think i have a problem crying in public. and yet, i was hoping that i could muster a modicum of composure while talking to the vet and her assistants. i had grand plans of maintaining a cold, clinical distance from the actual specifics of the situation. of course that's not the way it turned out, and before i knew it i had the assistant and the vet crying.

i don't remember much of the conversations. mostly everyone just reassuring me that i was making the right decision. that there really wasn't anything left to do. that i somehow hadn't put much thought into what i was going to do with his remains. that cremation really isn't that expensive. that i had to decide if i wanted to see the procedure. that even though i'd probably regret it later, i couldn't. that if i wanted i could stay with him as long as i wanted.

then his lease comes off and is neatly folded and handed to me, replaced with a green, cloth leash. the door opens and an assistant calls for harper in an oddly cheery tone, presumably to not get him anxious. the vet hands me his leash and says she'd like to walk me outside. we walk down the hall, as i make clumsy attempts to gather my wits. the door opens into the lobby and everyone looks up. i see the other customers slowly put the pieces together. teery man with neatly folded leash. and no dog. immediate sadness on faces and quick looks to their own dogs.

i come home and mauja is very upset at having been left out of the car ride fun. and then he looks puzzled when he sees harper's leash in my hand. i see him quickly deduce that he's been tricked and harper is either upstairs or outside. he runs everywhere and then gives up and decides that he's going outside to guard his rawhide that he likes to tease harper with.

it's natural to try to draw some lesson from all this. this wasn't the first pet that i've seen killed or put down, so why was it so difficult? i think it might have been because he was so young - not even three years old - and so, so completely devoted to you when he wasn't having seizures. his sole desire in life was to be as close to you as possible. and because of that near infinity of love that almost could vibrated from harper, you wanted to do everything you could to make him happy. but in the end, we learned that disconcerting lesson that everone learns the hard way.

sometimes everything you can do isn't good enough. and that's o.k.

somehow i missed the news that mozilla's usage share is rising. suuure, microsoft may still dominate the browser scene, but it's nice to know that a few people are exercising their right to choose.