Sunday, September 11, 2005

Too much|little to post

I don't know that I've come up with good decision criteria as to what should go into a blog. The obsessive-compulsive part of me thinks that a crafted, well-honed, fine piece of editorialship is required. The rest of me balks at both the effort that would be required and the necessary reduction of the thoughts that that kind of piece would require. Ah, well, I suppose, after some consideration, that I'd prefer to show my foibles.

But first, I can show you the foibles, er, postings of my wife in her journal. She's abroad for an educational stint at the American University in Cairo. She's away for a while, which can be kind of hard, but between Skype and iChat A (we don't use the "V" yet, since her connection doesn't have enough throughput), we get to talk to each other pretty regularly.

Now back to the nitty gritty. This week, I ran into yet another "can't install/use except as admin" program. These irk the crap out of me, largely because I want to be able to make it so that guests of my house can't (accidentally) destroy my stuff on my computer, but that they should be able to install things when I'm not home. I have heard arguments that IT departments want to be able to restrict people from installing anything, but that seems like an orthogonal problem. It is just a bug (sorry, I meant design flaw) that a regular application cannot be installed merely because the setup program seems to believe it needs administrative credentials. Many things should Just Work™ in a non-admin setting. Apparently, it's problematic enough that (1) developers cannot program correctly for non-admin users and (2) users who should not be admin users are, and invite attack upon themselves, that there are whole other blogs on it.

On the personal side, I ended up hanging out with quite a few friends this weekend that I have not hung out with regularly in quite some time. I spent some amount of time continuing my recovery period from Burning Man, mostly in the form of laundry (of which some is now been pink-ified!), though partially putting various things back into their storage, where they will not be touched for another 51 weeks. I did get a chance to meet some new folks, friends of friends, and head out for a sailing day trip on Puget Sound with them. It reminded me of my two previous longer-term experiences with sailing, and how I certainly enjoyed all the ropework involved. The capstone of the weekend, blog not included, was a fierce gumbo made by my next door neighbor who invited me to dine this evening; by the way, he makes a mean Sazerac-oidal concoction that won even my licorice-hating self over. All in all, a good weekend.

In the vein of the useless: Currently listening to "myself typing this blog entry".

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