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I’ll admit to being a bit ticked that Thomas Vanek of the Buffalo Sabres was not on this list of the Top 25 most significant players of the NHL’s first half for the 2008-2009 season.

He was third in the league for goals scored. He was tied for first in power play goals. He went to the All-Star Game. The Sabres — should the season end today — would be a playoff team. That is a mark they missed last year, when Vanek was not playing as well as he is this year.

Of course, looking over stats for this, I discovered that Derek Roy had had six game winning goals — which tied him for sixth in the league. Not too shabby.

A wonderful passage about the best hamburger from How I Met Your Mother:

Marshall: Just a burger? Just a burger? Robin, it’s so much than just a burger. I … I mean, that first bite, oh what heaven that first bite is. The bun, like a sesame-freckled breast of an angel resting gently on the ketchup and mustard below. Flavors mingling in a seductive pas de deux. And then … a pickle … the most playful little pickle, and a slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce, and a patty of ground beef so exquisite … swirling in your mouth, breaking apart and combining again in a fugue of sweets and savory, so delightful. This is no mere sandwich of grilled meat and toasted bread, Robin. This is God, speaking to us through food.

Lily: And you got our wedding vows off the Internet.

Having once been a newsroom intern, I have a soft spot for newspapers and newspaper people. It’s a bit disheartening to see the scale of layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers.

Even though some would newspapers are anachronistic or dinosaurs, this mashup still represents good people trying to do important work.

A while back, Microsoft announced their Silverlight software. I didn’t think much of it, but now that they have announced the Azure platform, I realized that they have developed a Forgotten Realms theme in their products.

Let’s look at this, while we’re in the beginning of the trend, to see how this relates to the the SSI “gold box” Forgotten Realms games:

Based on this flimsy evidence, I suspect the next major product platform from Microsoft to be related, somehow, to “radiance.” (As in Pool of Radiance, of course.)

We might also expect a future initiative centered around “darkness,” but I consider that less likely — or, it may already have happened, given the reverse chronology that seems to be at work. (See Pools of Darkness.)

I’m really going to have to dive into one new feature in iTunes 8: last night, I discovered that it has per-podcast settings. I’m pretty sure the settings were only available globally before, and I didn’t see anyone else talking about this change yet.

These settings can override the defaults for:

• how many episodes to download
• how long to keep episodes.

This is tremendous, although unfortunately it will lessen the opportunity for third party tools like Cast Away. (However, I’ve found Cast Away extremely complex.)

I’ve been using zsh for a while as my preferred shell. I have a hacked-together zshrc file, and yet really wanted to use it across multiple systems. Some of those systems are running Mac OS X, others Solaris, and still others Linux. Executables are in a different locations and even have different switches across this range of systems, so my cobbled zshrc was not helping me.

As I was about to fall asleep last night, it finally hit me that fixing my zshrc would be a good thing to do. I jotted down some notes about an idea to reorganize it, and did something about it today.

Of course, since I’ve checked my zshrc and other dotfiles into a Mercurial repository, I could experiment without fear.

I created three top-level functions, with one “case” statement in each. Case statements may be evil in some fashion, but they are one of the things I like about shell scripting. These statements do allow the script to make choices based on the host, operating system, or shell that it was running in. (Yeah, it’s a zshrc, but I sometimes do stupid things — like sourcing it in bash on the one Linux system that won’t let me switch to zsh. Site5, I’m looking at you.)

I separated all the important sections of my zshrc into their own individual function calls. Each of those function calls was placed into one of the applicable case statements.

The case statement functions figure out the conditions the zshrc is running in, and then run the other functions to set up my environment.

The changes tested well from first try across the various platforms and hosts I log in to. I did have a minor problem with the `hostname` command, because Solaris doesn’t have a “-s” flag for it. Eventually, I solved that — and the odd “uname: error in setting name: Not owner” error I got, even though I wasn’t directly running `uname` there — by replacing `hostname` with `uname`.

Thankfully, it works for me, and it should be a little easier to manage changes in the future.

“Well, you know, I think when you go into a bar and you serve the country, you deserve to have your chicken wing not be alligator-clamped onto a booklight. That’s what separates us from the Russians.”

— Merlin Mann, You Look Nice Today: “Aunt Nancy”, approximately 15:52

Note: In case you wondered, StupidFilter rated that quote as “not likely to be stupid.”

Yesterday, I traded in “Fighterjet.”

I feel pretty raw about signing away the title for my 1998 Subaru Legacy GT 2.5 Limited. (Frankly, I’ll never remember the correct order “GT,” “2.5,” and “Limited” are supposed to go in, even after 10 years — 3273 days, to be exact — of car ownership.) Looking back, I took delivery on July 1, 1998.

What do you say about a car you owned for 122 months? A vehicle that was there to transport you through the highs and lows of life?

Well, the brochure for our new car says, “Few things connect to your life at more points than your car.” Amen. I’ll take a stab at a few notes in haphazard arrangement, below.

This will all seem melodramatic, and it is. There are, I’m sure, people who don’t get attached to their cars. My wife and I are not those people. However, I am beginning to realize that you can only really get attached to one car, and thereafter you realize you simply can’t do that again. This is my struggle this morning, and my usual tendencies to hang on are amplified by how long I had that Subaru.

Fighterjet was the first car I ever picked out and bought myself. The two cars before it dropped into my lap, by the generosity of my family, and being young, I did my level best to destroy them quickly. The Subaru had 40-some miles on it when I bought it, partly because I drove it a few times and partly because the test drive area around the dealership was so large.

Every girlfriend I had in my adult life rode in Fighterjet. One of them helped me choose it. The car outlasted all but one of them.

My wife and our first son rode in Fighterjet. In fact, it was the car that Aaron and I had to rescue from the snowy parking lot at work — its door had been jammed open by ice so the alarm was sounding — so that I could collect the bags we’d left at home and return to the hospital with them. The baby was born a day later, and perhaps we’ll be more prepared in the future.

Fighterjet didn’t have LATCH anchors. Oops.

When I bought Fighterjet, I didn’t have any music in MP3 format. Having an iPod connection was unheard of, because the iPod wouldn’t ship for years yet. But it had a CD player and a tape player, not to mention weather band radio. (Weather band radio is really dull.)

Luckily, I had obtained my first digital camera nine months before Fighterjet, so I was able to document the car pretty well.

The month I brought Fighterjet home, I went to Macworld Expo in New York City. It was the first of five such expos in New York (and that was a particularly whirlwind trip), but it was even more memorable for a big product introduction: the original bondi blue iMac. Fighterjet, meanwhile, was “Rio red.”

Hearing about the color of my car, Kristi laughed and said, “Oh, it’s pull-me-over red!” I got exactly one ticket with Fighterjet.

The Sabres had only been to the Stanley Cup Finals once in their history when I started driving Fighterjet. Now, they’ve been there twice. And had a few conference finals appearances, too. (Did Aaron and I drive Fighterjet to that playoff game with Philly? The one that created the wall of sound in the atrium of HSBC Arena? Correction: Aaron says it was this game against Ottawa.)

I drove to a lot of Ultimate games in Fighterjet. Cleaning it out, I had a regulation Frisbee in the trunk. Along with a wiffle bat and some wiffle balls — you never know when an impromptu game would break out.

I spent one long day in Fighterjet, stuck on the New York State Thruway (I-90) for about 15 hours, one winter. There was a big snowstorm. Some of you lived through it with me, and others have probably heard me talk about it, so I don’t think I need to say more. At least that time, I was prepared.

That incident taught me that if you can’t tell your car from other snow-covered cars in the vicinity, you should probably stay home.

Fighterjet drove through a lot of snow, and barely broke a sweat over it. There were a few close calls, though. Once, I hydroplaned through the turn from 96 onto 332 — no wheels gripped, they only slipped. There was one Christmas morning, driving to Cuba, where we spun 180 degrees together; thank goodness the next car was so far behind us. Another morning, going to work and sliding slowly, sideways, into and kissing a (thankfully) snow-packed guardrail.

I didn’t have a cell phone when I bought Fighterjet.

Baxter was in Fighterjet when I hit my second deer with the car, and, as a dog, he was pretty freaked out by the sudden ordeal. I really thought that was the end of the line, but the insurance didn’t total the car. I haven’t taken Baxter with me to get take out since, as I recall.

The car got its name from the view I got sitting in the driver’s seat, looking back through my regular and oddball lane-changer mirrors. It reminded me of the rearview cameras you see in fighter jet films on TV, looking back on the tail of the plane. Dumb, yes, but I couldn’t think of a better name.

I can’t remember how many sets of tires I put on the thing. The first one involved a lot of anxiety while reading reviews on the Tire Rack Web site. The Dunlop Sport SP2s, later, were utter flops.

Fighterjet helped me move between apartments and houses. Thrice. And, I think it helped move Lloyd’s family once, and maybe others. I forget.

I drove it to Pittsburgh and the Adirondacks and other places, but I also think of destinations I never went.

After giving up this car, I wonder how many cars I have left in me. How many more will I own? My sense of mortality is briefly heightened.

I miss Fighterjet, but it was time to move on. I feel like I’ve abandoned a friend — but that’s silly. Hopefully that feeling will fade, because, after all … it was just a car.

I’ve been thinking for a few months that Mac OS X 10.6 (or the like) would be introduced to developers at WWDC 2008. I’ve said as much to those unfortunate enough to be within earshot. I haven’t mentioned it here … and in recent days I’ve felt less confident about this gut feeling based on the public WWDC session schedule.

If Apple was trying to return to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X, my thought process went (after the CEO announced just such a push), a developer preview would almost have to be shown at this WWDC. That has lingered in the back of my mind. It also provided a reason to go to the conference if you were interested more in the Mac track than the iPhone.

Now there are rumors flying around, based on various strings in Apple software and from other sources, that there will be a preview release of Mac OS X 10.6 at WWDC. And it’s being referred to with the moniker, “Snow Leopard.”

If, as these rumors say, the upgrade will focus on reliability and security, then the general lack of room for schedules on it is more plausible. The name distinguishes it little from Leopard, but maybe just enough.

However, unless this release were more like the free-with-$20 shipping Mac OS X 10.1 update, who would buy it? Would Apple charge $129 retail for stability and security? It seems that there would have to be more.

I can definitely see that security could be enhanced by greater adoption of certain features — some reasonable candidates for further enhancement since Leopard — which are the focus of several sessions at WWDC, according to the published schedule.

Since I’m always watching for when old rumors swing back around, I’d guess that one additional change we could see is the mythical “Illuminous” user interface. (Assuming, of course, that this is not the unified interface style we already have in Leopard.) It usually takes two years for fun old rumors to become reality, if they ever do — that’s enough time for many to have forgotten about them and for actual development work to have taken place. A new interface with a new name would jack up the value of a new OS in some people’s minds. Moreso if it actually works better than the old one.

If the lack of PowerPC support were true, then this would be an astounding announcement. It would cut off upgrades for a large (but ever-decreasing) percentage of the Mac population. Already, Leopard itself was limited to G5s and the newest G4s. This could have an interesting effect on those institutional customers who bought G5s for their compute power. Let's recall that although the Intel Macs have been out since January 2006 and the transition was relatively quick, the high end Power Mac and Xserve systems were the last to be replaced. For a while yet, there can still be Apple PowerPC-based systems that are less than three years old.

Ah, we’ll see what happens Monday. You never know with rumors. I have no inside information and even I wouldn’t make any important decisions based on these musings.

Does anyone else think that Apple has some ulterior motive for promoting Viva la Vida, the track on the new iTunes ad featuring Coldplay? That maybe its lyrics are indicative of something going on at Apple?

“When I ruled the world,” indeed.

No matter. I find it a fantastic visual treat and now the haunting music is stuck in my head. I would not be surprised if it were featured at WWDC 2008 in a few weeks.