I am now back at school. My classes start this afternoon.

I finished Gödel, Escher, Bach last night on the plane. If you havn't read it, do.

Another good book is A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider. In a way it's a helthfood book, but that doesn't do it justice. It is all about making food that tastes good. It's full of ways to improvise and isn't afraid to use bacon fat when that's the best way to flavor things.

I had a great vacation, including getting to visit some monkes from Ximian in Cambridge with whom I played GTA:Vice City for the first time. I have never been a gamer, but I have always loved ritch computer worlds and good graphics. This has both.

I got my mom off of AOL. She now uses Outlook Express which she already likes much more. (If only there were Evolution for Windows.) To those of you with friends on AOL, my own experience was that it was easier than I expected to move over.

I am strongly considering switching distros from Debian to RedHat. While I love what Debian is doing in general, I've found it hard to keep a reasonably-stable bleeding edge GNOME build using Debian's packages. I think I'll be able to be more productive doing my part to help the GNOME project if the only thing I have to worry about is breaking GNOME.

Fun fact: According to NPR [real audio], the word “acronym” is often misused. According to that segment, things like radar, laser, and GNOME are all proper acronyms — words formed from the letters of a longer phrase. However, when the resultant “word” is said letter-by-letter, as in GTK, KDE, or TCP/IP it is technically an “initialism.” The definition is fuzzy, and some things like SQL often go both ways.