clarkbw's 5th sentence of 23rd page: "'I lost the ring', he said." Tim Powers, "The Stress of Her Regard". (Actually page 24; 23 has only two sentences.) The protagonist's name, incidentally, is MichaelCrawford. I just read this again after almost 20 years. It was even better this time around; I stayed up until dawn reading it, because I couldn't stop. Speaking of compelling reading, the Boston Public Library has my reserved copy of Stephenson's "The Confusion" waiting for me.

I just deleted what I think were the last of the GNOME 1.4 library packages from my machines.

My Olympus D-490 digital camera is on the fritz: it gets exposure all wrong when taking pics outdoors, and seems to have burnt out two SmartMedia cards in two weeks. It's only three years old. Looking at another Olympus, a C720. Olympus was known for low power consumption back then; I don't know how it is now, but no longer have time to indulge in careful product research.

It turns out the metacity bug I mentioned in my last diary entry (where my windows drift downward) is really an X bug with an interesting history, according to GNOME Bugzilla entry 110377. What it appears to mean, though, is that metacity is dying at random intervals, and being restarted automatically, and the only way to tell is that the windows drift.

Orkut: "Lisp", 458; "I hate Java", 480. Readers are requested please to join "Libertarians Make Me Laugh", and maybe post something funny.