Aka… A good weekend..

The weekend got off to a slow start, when Amazon claimed it would take a little longer than planned to ship us the “Web Application Hackers Handbook”. Fortunately it picked up after that..

The first ray of light was finding a new strange bug on a huge application that smells a lot like full remote code execution.. Then the office had a power-outage and i felt the rage building.. drove to the office to collect my stuff mumbling statements related to 3rd world and feeling sorry for myself, but.. i needed to complete a report and needed to be in JHB later that night, so decided to stop off in Sandton City where i could work for a bit (exclusive books: coffee + gprs + deels could enjoy herself too)

Of course, to reach exclusive books, you have to pass the CAB – Apple store, which already had queues outside for the Leopard Release..

a quick glance at the global timer they had playing inthe window showed that i was 30 minutes (and a queue of people with funky haircuts) away from grabbing leopard. I tried joining the queue, but discoverd that no matter how hard i tried, passers by somehow still managed to approach me to ask why we were in line.. (i even tried pretending to be on my phone).

After 5 minutes of feeling the intense fanboy feeling, i decided to go back to work.. i returned about 30 minutes later.. happily grabbed a copy (only R999) and walked back to exclusive books..

I find deels, who has a copy of Derren Browns “Tricks of the Mind” waiting for me..

Definitely a book i wanted to buy, and the perfect time since i go on vac in a week and have been banned from any books related to even remotely to work.. (Turns out Maths books are allowed, so i get to catch up on some other reading ive been procrastinating)
Those 2 would have been good enough, but on the way out i browse the physics section and find a new Feynman book that i havnt yet read.. Triple bonus.. The original plan was to also keep it for the vac, but the pull was too strong..

Like a true fanboy i got up extra early on sunday morning so i could upgrade wh00t to leopard before deels got up (i was supposed to be finishing my report). The upgrade process was super simple / hitch free.. and about 40 minutes later the machine rebooted prettier and shinier than before..

Without digging into its guts there are already a few things that are cool.. I used WindowMaker forever before switching to OS X and missed my WMaker style multiple desktops.. Desktop Manager / Friends kinda provided the same functionality but i eventually canned them because of memory footprint and the lack of some integration features.. Spaces handles it simply and with the slightest of config tweaks works exactly like wm used to for me..

I never used tabbed terms much under X, but its pretty welcome now.. maybe im just getting older :>

We almost watched a movie this weekend, but decided against it.. while deels was choosing the movie i spent some time playing with the touch screen, self service ticket kiosk system..

From first touch, to system shell, to seeing the rest of the network in about 10 seconds.. im suprised more kiosks dont use Microsofts Windows SteadyState

I looked at it briefly when doing work on ATM’s running embedded XP (back when it was called Shared Computer Toolkit) and i cant imagine why anyone on a shared computer would not use it.. it helps you to set reasonable policies in seconds point and click style..

Anyway.. the weekend is over.. back to work! :>

/mh
PS..
i have another huuuuuuuuuge rant related to a book i read this weekend called “the Dip” (on how star performers perform) especially since i had this conversation with deels literally 2 hours before finding the book.. but this post is too long anyway, so ill assault you with it later this week..