I started to type a ten thousand word essay on why every machine I've seen in the last month running Windows makes me cry, curse, and curl up into a ball, but then I realized the redundancy of that effort. If you've ever used Microsoft Windows (any version), then just imagine your worst day with it, and then mentally transfer that image to your screen for a similar effect.
I spent the last week in San Francisco, but neglected to tell anyone except for my friend Andy (since I was crashing in his house). If there was a tourist attraction we missed, I must have been asleep. Andy gave us a tour of the (mostly empty) Intershop offices downtown, and we led ourselves around to various spots of interest. I was happy to pick up some decent music at Amoeba, including albums from IQU, Cornelius, and Science Park, all for $6 or less. And if you haven't seen Ghost World, travel to a theater showing it immediately. It's a nice reminder that movies don't have to suck so badly (ahem, Mr. Burton) during the summer.
A completely new version of Pecos has been a few days away from release for the last month, but I've been too busy actually using it to package it up. Amongst the "exciting" new features are: objects are stored in two tables rather than one (now one for the object itself and the other for the properties); faster sorting on object lists (thanks to letting SQL sort on the appropriate values), object caching via PEAR's Cache classes (although in informal benchmarks this seems to actually produce worse results), plus the usual array of bugfixes, etc. Of course, I still haven't seen a single message to any of the mailing lists, which is a little surprising because I would think that the idea of persistent objects in PHP (no matter how rudimentary), coupled to a vaguely useful web-based object (or "content") manager, would be useful to more people than myself. Maybe it's my utter lack of documentation, or maybe the consistently broken demo site (removing the management object makes it hard to manage the other objects). Who knows.
At least there have been a few new releases of TWIG in the past few weeks (with no thanks to me, I don't even know if I count as a developer any more) to keep the dogs at bay.