I've decided to keep with Mac OS X 10.1. I think it is a good compromise between the original design intent of NeXTSTEP and a decently modern operating system.

Sometime in the medium-term (two to three years) future I'm going to be living outside the city, which will mean limited 'net access -- possibly only UUCP, or dial-up PPP if I'm lucky. Cruising Freshmeat or VersionTracker will be a serious pain in the butt, and doing it regularly will likely be impossible.

I have decided to use Objective C and the Cocoa framework for all projects in the near future. Don't get me wrong -- Ruby will still have its place, and I'm not above O'Caml, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, or any of my other tools. I have just found that ObjC + Cocoa + (possibly) the OmniGroup free code does most of what I need it to, and I feel like I am making good progress in learning it all and putting it into use.

Work

I'm still looking for a job. There is a bright side to it, though -- I'm starting to look at menial labour as a way to make enough to pay the bills and put my share of food on the table. While that may not seem like much of a bright side, it does mean that I'll be able to let my mind wander at work, and I won't be too burned out when I get home to work on my projects.

The part that sucks is that my resume for menial labour is pretty limited -- my last experience in a gas station (where I'm most likely to start applying first) was six years ago. I'm worried about the "over-qualified" label getting in my way. I won't know 'til I try, though.

Puppydogs

Neko is doing pretty good. It seems that Tracey has been a little lax with her -- her obedience has taken a few steps back. Karma is doing great, though. I have her responding to both her own commands and the same commands I use with Neko.

Other stuff

Getting Ellen set up on a Mac. I'm giving her my iMac, because I never use it anymore -- my iBook does everything I want it to, and it's a bit faster. FreeBSD has been a bit of a pain for her, as she's a recovering Windows user with very little time to learn something new. I figure OS X.1 will be good for her -- it's dead friendly, and stable enough.