Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Matt Gemmell:
Have a great time dude. Take photos!

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Well, here we are at the Costa Terminal in Savona, waiting for our cue to board the Costa Europa. Contrasted to last year, they now have an Internet lounge with free access – but still no WiFi. I expect access on the ship to be forbiddingly expensive, so don’t count on any further news for the next days.

The trip was unusually tiring, probably due to the fact that we didn’t get any good sleep beforehand, but at least this time we found a nice place in town at the Hotel Riviera, and slept about 14 hours.

The ship leaves in the afternoon (it’s about noon, local time) and goes westward to Barcelona, Morocco, Funchal and Madeira. The weather cleared up overnight and it looks like we’ll have an excellent time. Stay tuned for developments!

Posted by Nando:
How boring… a trip across Italy, across Europe… *sigh*

I hope I earn a lot this year so i can go back to London in july 2006!

Very early tomorrow we’re leaving for Milano (Italy) via São Paulo. Then, from Savona, we’ll take the Costa Europa which will swing by Barcelona, then Morocco and Funchal/Madeira. (Click here for a webcam.)

The ship returns to Savona on Oct. 11. After that, we’ll have 5 days cruising around in Northern Italy, finishing at Venice where the Costa Mediterranea will be waiting for us (webcam). This will go to Olympia, then Izmir and Istanbul, returning over Dubrovnik.

If all goes well, we’ll be back Oct.25 or so. I’ll try to check e-mail whenever possible, but don’t count on it…

In other news, Wendy and Joey (aka The Redhead and The AccordionGuy) just got married at a mixed Jewish/Filipino ceremony. Congrats to both!

This should be my last post on the topic for quite a while. Pierre Igot over at Betalogue comments on various posts about the future of MacBU inside Microsoft. Worth reading if you use Office 2004 (I don’t)… and the Mac Business Unit is indeed inside the new Entertainment & Devices division. According to Rick Schaut, who works there, this makes sense; Mac Office users are very different from Windows Office users. I’d tend to agree.

Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman wrote:

Sometimes the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your faithful correspondent lacks for ideas, rants or motivation. Rather, it is that so many fecund fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment, after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit saved us from untimely termination…

…We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea to share a bed with one of your expository subjects…

…In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong…

…We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread water, waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory

Well, I feel his pain; sometimes there’s much happening, but very often it’s not a subject.

However, I’m pleased to report that some marginally bloggable stuff is actually happening inside the twisty, little passages of XRay 2’s code. I stopped worrying about the UI for a couple of months and became obsessed with writing the Ultimate File Item Browser Cache Background Engine. (You should be glad I’m not writing this in German, where this would be one huge compound substantive. )

Anyway, most of it is actually working well enough now, and once I get some weird interactions with volume mount points working, the U.F.I.B.C.B.E. will be pronounced “good enough for a beta”, and I’ll get back to work on the actual file browser frontend(s) it is supposed to be the backend for.

In order to do so most efficiently we (meaning my wife) decreed that a working vacation is called for, where we’ll be away from normal life and mostly offline for a full month. We’ll leave in a few days – details will be posted soon – and proceed to Northern Italy, where two nearly consecutive mediterranean cruises are scheduled. More as it happens!

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

No word yet on where their Mac software division will fit in…

This interesting article shows Microsoft executives discussing Apple as a competitor. At the outset it’s said that the Mac Business Unit is now in the games division… this must be either a joke, or a joke. Ehrrm. You know what I mean…