Denouement

Every time I think I’m about to lose my mind, I eventually reach a day where I can take a break and go dancing. And every time, dancing makes all of the troubles of my world fade away. Wednesday featured a dance practice where I danced more than not (rare!). Mandy made an appearance, and during that appearance made a hilarious discovery: the Obviously Gay Guy, who was/is overly friendly with both males and females (including Mandy, who didn’t think much of it because the guy was Obviously Gay), isn’t actually gay. She pointed out his ex-girlfriend, and his soon-to-be next girlfriend (I was already aware of all of this, but had been unaware that Mandy didn’t know), and commented about how uncomfortable around him she now felt.

Thursday’s west coast lesson featured a Very Nice Looking pair of moves (it’s too hard to describe with words: you end up putting the follow’s arm behind her back, in both a normal and whip step, and then spin her out at the end) that I can actually do, and can actually see myself using in the wild. w00t.

Once again, I’ve not been getting enough sleep. I know this not because I’m hallucinating, but because my arms are becoming exceptionally weak. As in “I’m not sleeping enough for my body to repair itself” weak.

Thursday night I had a caffeinated beverage at Jessica’s suggestion (we all passed, incidentally: the Beanery staff knew our names, and we knew theirs), and joked with Brian that I’d be up until 3:00 am because of it. (“Joked” because my Mountain Dew regimen has rendered me immune to the effects of caffeine.)

Except that I was up until 3:00 am that evening.

I didn’t stay up that late because of the drink, however; rather, it was because I was oblivious to the fact that Ars Technica’s review of Tiger was 21 massive web-pages long. Or, rather, was oblivious until about 2:30 and page 18… and at that point, why bother stopping?

Incidentally, that review is hands-down the most authoritative look at Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) that you’ll see. I learned a hell of a lot from it, and appreciate my new OS much more because of it.

Speaking of new OSes: Friday night I stayed up late doing a clean install of Tiger on my G5. Six hours from start to finish (excluding time for backups, which I made earlier in the day), and I had a clean OS install on a freshly formatted hard drive, with all of my files and settings back where and/or how I wanted them. [I figure a fresh install for each OS upgrade isn’t all that unreasonable; it makes sure the OS is fine, cleans out the cruft I’ve accumulated, and gives me a chance to make sure all of my programs are up-to-date.]

That’s pretty impressive, to me. Clean installs used to be a huge pain in the ass back in pre-OS X days, mostly because I’d wade through the Extensions and Control Panel folders and weed out all the unnecessary things that were cluttering them up. Another huge reason is because computers Back Then were quite slow compared to computers of today. (I mean: this computer has dual 2.0 GHz processors! I’m old enough to remember a time when computer people had no need for the “giga” prefix—even to describe hard drive capacities….)

For all that time spent installing 10.4 and getting things just-so, I haven’t actually spent any real time beating on the new features of the OS. Yesterday evening Dashboard allowed me to—without moving more than a finger—inform my father that it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy outside; Spotlight generously allowed me to build my own search query to find (on a whim) all images on my drive that were more than 1000 pixels tall; Safari 2.0 was just effing fast. These aren’t exactly deep nuances (with the possible exception of the custom Spotlight query) of the new technology at my fingertips.

Tonight, before watching more video game run-throughs with Brian, I discovered (I know, I’m slow sometimes) the Wikipedia Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense page. Check it out, if you don’t already know of its existence; it’s like the big brother that Bash.org always wanted.

 

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