I’ve been experimenting with other blog engines, namely, Blogger and Typo. I really dig Typo, but unfortunately, I can’t get it to run on my Dreamhost account. There are instructions on how to get it to work but the code gods are not with me, I guess. And since today is my last day of vacation, it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll get it running any time soon.

I also toyed with the idea of going back to blosxom, or trying another blog engine that uses flat-files like blosxonomy or blogtari, which then led to the idea of working on my own blog engine once again.

This also obviously led nowhere.

In any case, today is the last day of my vacation and nothing I planned to do today really panned out: I misremembered when my appointment with my psychiatrist was (it was actually yesterday) and I didn’t get the apartment I wanted. Instead I threw down $300 at Fry’s for no good reason. (Well, OK, there is a rationale, but even I am the first to admit that it’s basically bald sophistry.)

My psychiatrist is based in La Jolla, and upon figuring out she isn’t in today, I decided to go to the Fry’s in San Marcos instead of in San Diego. The reason is that I apparently fried my Linux box last night just by turning it on. I pressed a button and I saw a few sparks, and then poof, a curious burning smell. This is unfortunate, because I had been planning to install Darwin x86 on it and turn it into a dedicated file server. I have four external Firewire enclosures, and they all run ridiculously hot, and they are also likely sucking down serious power from my dangerously overloaded wall socket, so I figured I’d try to consolidate. And since nothing supports HFS+ decently except for MacOS X and Darwin, I kind of don’t have any choice. (I’m not brave enough to deal with Linux’s HFS module, particularly since it would involve screwing around with kernel source code—writing to journaled volumes is currently not supported and only possibly with some kludgery.)

In any case, since the I-5 crawled to a complete stop near the Del Mar racetrack, I decided to go off the beaten path and ended up in the backwoods of North County, wending my way through two-laned roads until I unexpectedly ended up in Escondido. That burned a good hour or so. At Fry’s, I picked up the equipment I figure I would need to build a file server, and then proceeded to go RSS/Atom feed crazy.

Let me explain. So I recently discovered the power of using an RSS/Atom newsreader. You can flip through blogs and figure out when the people you stalk

read have posted a lot easier than using a web browser. The two free newsreaders I found for MacOS X are Vienna and Shrook. Both of them have their highlights and their flaws. I like Vienna because it automatically puts whatever you have in the clipboard in the URL field when you create a new feed, cutting the number of keystrokes. But if I browse in the “new items” section, it lumps all the new posts together without a good indication of which blog posts are actually from. I like Shrook because I know exactly what I’m looking at. However, it requires me to do the whole Option-N Option-A Option-V finger dance in order to create a new feed. (OK, so I haven’t clicked on the RSS icon in Safari to see what happens in Shrook yet. In Vienna, it works as you would expect it, though.)

The problem with RSS, however, is that it’s like drinking from a firehose of information. Much like e-mail (although less so now that spam-monkeys have taken over my main e-mail account), I feel compelled to read every post to nullify the little counter on the Dock. (I know I should just turn it off.) I’ve gotten stuck just idly browsing for hours which is totally ridiculous.

I finally wrested myself away from my computer at 4 pm, because I was faint from hunger. I managed to get to Einstein’s Bagels before they closed, got a salad and a cookie, and then drove to Mission Bay.

Three long months ago, when I was doing a really cake rotation, with 2 hour lunch breaks and weekends off, I would spend a lot of time here, just sitting in my car, watching the people walk/jog/bike/blade by. And I would just read until I had to get back to clinic.

May seems like an awfully long time ago.

Then again, it’s almost September.

So much for summer.

It seems odd, that despite the raging insanity roiling through my brain which is likely unchanged from the years gone by, I feel different today. I am aware that I have changed, that time has moved on, and that things are inevitably different. Maybe it’s simply the way the sun glints off of things this late in the summer, compared to when it was still spring/eary summer. There is an oldness to August, particularly as the month runs out. It always makes me think of things waning.

I suppose this is unavoidable since I’ve lived on an academic (August to June) year schedule for the past 20 years.

In any case, I can definitely tell that the sun sets a lot earlier than it did.

So it’s back to work tomorrow. We’ll see where any of this leads, if anywhere. I dread the feeling that I’m going to end up in the same old dead ends, but I hope to God that I’m wrong.