Tao of Mac

Sep 12th 2009 · 1 min read · #personal

The Fun's Nearly Over

By the time you read this, my three-week vacation will be drawing to a close, and many weird and wondrous things will have happened:

  • We went to the beach with my 1.5-year-old son for the very first time and attempted to persuade him that sand is good, thoroughly enjoying his reticence to step out of the towel at all and the contradictory way he kept pointing at the sea in wonder and wanting to go there.
  • I read through five or six books of various descriptions during the quiet spells in the afternoon, with a cool salty breeze wafting through the house.
  • I decided to sell my “PS3”:Wikipedia:PS3, seeing as if it doesn’t seem like it’s getting used more than a few days a year.
  • I fooled around for hours with “LEGO”:Wikipedia:LEGO Duplo blocks building colorful playhouses and cars and occasionally fetching the most fascinating pieces from under the sofa, where they were hidden as if they were priceless treasures.
  • I whittled down a couple of my pet programming projects to where they cannot be done any simpler, just for the aesthetics of it.
  • I played the voices of the Big Bad Wolf and Mr. Crocodile every night, and actually called the Three Little Piggies P1, P2 and P3.
  • I packed a 500MB database into a 90MB binary file with a hand-crafted index, just because it was a good challenge.
  • I found a hole in my sock thanks to the delighted squeals of my kid, who kept pointing at my toe and giggling.
  • I counted 5329 attempts to hack my site from idiots who think I’m running Wordpress.
  • I watched a whole season of “Eureka”:IMDB:tt0796264, and loved its whimsical mood.
  • I read three maths papers that I’ve been carrying around on my for ages and understood nearly every single formula.
  • I visited old classmates and found enlightenment (or at least a great dose of perspective).
  • We bought two packs of those IKEA finger puppets and the kid loved the moose.
  • I upgraded my single Intel to (now that , it seems safe enough), and “it didn’t take 20 hours”:“http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-upgrade-to-windows-7-can-take-up-to-a-day.ars (more like 45 minutes). Oh, and I’m creating “system services”“:dev/AppleScript/Mail_Archive like there’s no tomorrow.

And, last but not least, I managed to blot work out of my mind even with people calling and texting me every now and then.

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