Getting ready for Seattle

Gradually getting ready to go; spent altogether too much time last night and this morning on lingering household computer issues, and not enough on taxes. Hopefully I'll have time to deal with them today while I'm supposed to be working during lunch. Makes sense anyway, since I ought to copy the forms before I send them.

Did a preliminary test-pack -- I'm going to need a second carry-on for things -- mostly gifts -- that are light but bulky. I'm using the flower_cat's new purple suitcase that we got at Costco last year; the second carry-on will be an ancient Hartman duffel that my parents bought in Japan 30-odd years ago for a similar purpose. It'll squish down into the suitcase for the trip home.

I'll be taking up 50 or so copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song -- hopefully there will be some dealers to take some of them off my hands when I get there.

!@#$!@$@#%@# $^%$^#$&#%^#$ MAC !@#$%!

Stupid goddamn Mac filesystem is secretly case insensitive. If you have a directory called Tracks and a file called tracks, rsync complains about not being able to delete the directory when it goes to transfer the file. THIS IS JUST FSCKING WRONG!

The Mac may have Unix in its distant ancestry, but it is not Unix. When I get back from this trip I'm ordering a real computer.

Given a strong desire to be able to collaborate cross-platform, I'm probably going to have to make an ugly hack to work around this stupidity. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean I'm not going to get bitten in the arse by it somewhere else.

In other news, the ribbons we had overnighted seem to have gone astray; it was apparently delivered to a nonexistant address in another city. Their tracking site doesn't say what address it was actually addressed to, so it's impossible to tell why it went astray. Remind me never to have things shipped by FedEx.

Got cope?

No.

The last couple of days I've been particularly low on cope. I absolutely lost it last night when I knocked over the pills while I was sorting them. Tonight I nearly lost it between discovering that MacOS is brain-dead in an unexpected new way, and discovering that our badge ribbons had been delivered to a nonexistant address.

Lots of things haven't gotten done. I'm exhausted. OTOH I'm packed and the sales tax is in the mail. I suppose that's something.