In 48 hours of furious reading on the plane and in the park, I read The Confusion, which I enjoyed a lot more than Quicksilver. I'm seriously considering re-reading War and Peace now- I don't think I was really equipped to do it when I first read it, and I gave it up about 100 pages from the end. And just breezing through the (admittedly much lighter) Confusion has given me the hubris to think maybe I could tackle something that long and complex again.

Also saw the original Manchurian Candidate with Krissa last night; that was fun to see again. The new one is getting good reviews, but I have to agree with Angela Lansbury- it was so good the first time, why do it again?

Davyd: you might want to look at this if you want to go through those patches against gnome-applets. There are by that count 37 unreviewed patches against gnome-applets, which is pretty bad, I agree. I wouldn't write it off to elitism, though; it's just that gnome-applets has been undermaintained for a while and bugzilla can be a hairy place to wade through for patches. Hope people have not forgotten about the patch-status and patch-report cgis I wrote up- hopefully that will make cutting into the patch backlog easier.

Mr. Yum: if you want gnome-blog+spell checking, try Monkey Journal. It's all about the code reuse. :)