The state of my hard drive is good and strong…ly packed, going back to Seagate for warranty replacement. The whole process has been long and painful: first getting the drive to recognize that it was dead, then trying to extract it from the G5 (whose drives should just slide in, but one of mine—for whatever reason—was stuck), and finally trying to pack it to Seagate’s exacting requirements. If you don’t pack the drive in an electrostatic bag or a SeaShell case, surrounded on all sides by at least two inches of foam rubber, then we may declare your warranty null and void. Can they really get away with that, legally? Beats me, but it looks like other hard drive vendors pull the same crap.

On the upside, this gave me an excuse to go visit The Foam Man, a longtime business that I’ve never before had reason to visit. The shop consists mostly of some cutting tools, more foam than you can shake a stick at, and a jovial guy behind the counter. Oh, and the demo couch: left side is the original padding, right side is the replaced foam padding. Idea is you sit on the couch, not in it.

On the downside, the foam and shipping cost me twenty bucks; not the cheapest in-warranty repair cost I’ve ever had.

The state of Andy and Julie’s wedding was good and strong. Andy is an outgoing guy who makes lots of friends, and it showed in the sheer number of his wedding guests. The wedding itself was more laid-back than I expected, and the post-wedding reception was far more elaborate. Saw old faces such as Joel and Matt—old enough that I was glad I still remembered their names—and helped Neil develop a couple truly awesome “million dollar” ideas. (I didn’t tell you this, but: whammy bar on a piano. As Brian pointed out, how else are you going to be able to play Bulls on Parade?)

Truly a pleasant evening—so pleasant, in fact, that it made Friday feel like Saturday. Saturday, in turn, felt like Sunday. Sunday then somehow felt like Saturday again… leaving me tired and feeling like I my weekend was shorted on Monday.

The state of Metal Gear Online is good and getting stronger. I’m still bad enough to stick to the beginner servers—where it’s hit-and-miss whether or not you’ll find a team who tries to work together—but I’m not an entirely lost cause. Last night, courtesy of a combination of S. Snake as the Metal Gear Mk. 2 and a bunch of people who wandered around alone, I scored my first victory as Snake in a sneaking mission. (Sneaking missions put Snake—and a little robot with a stun whip, if there are enough players—against two teams. The two teams are trying to kill both each other and Snake; Snake tries to collect three dog tags from the two teams.) I’d be happier, but my victory was definitely not the result of anything I did.

The state of learning Ruby on Mac OS X keeps getting…wait for it… better and stronger. I don’t know how I missed it before, but the MacRuby project looks like it might let me realize a long-time goal I’ve had about writing a “real” Mac application. Thing is, I’ve always hated programming in C (and am too lazy to learn Objective-C), so it was obvious I was never going to get very far. This may change that, and gives me hope that learning to program Ruby will have more benefits than simply letting me try to learn Rails.

What program would I write? …beats me.

…

(Bet you all can’t guess what my favorite part of Bush’s State of the Union address was each year. Good and strong are—IMO—hilarious ways to describe the state of the union, and their funniness compounded with each year they were used.)