reesesWeb

I finally found a decent grocery store reasonably close to where I live. On the previously-mentioned scale, I'd say it's about 400 millilarrys, for the following reasons:

• They sell beer AND wine. In Montgomery county! (See the third FAQ.) It's not a great beer or wine selection, but at least you can buy a bottle of Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout or Guinness without having to track down a liquor store.
• They have a decent cheese selection. At least half a dozen bries, several chevres, shopshire, and they actually care enough about the different fetas to group them by national style, so you won't try cooking with greek feta, or try putting a french feta on your salad.
• Big, fat, juicy kumquats!
• Decent staff. The checkout person actually held an intelligent conversation without seeming annoyed that I added to his workload by picking his line. He and the bagger actually took care with our purchase, gently handling the produce and baked goods. Our food probably wouldn't have been damaged had they not done this, but it was enough of a northwest coast move that I couldn't help but appreciate it.
• They carry crap as well as "eclectic" food. At Whole Foods, for example, you need to make a second stop afterward to pick up things like Coke. This was the huge advantage Larry's had -- you could buy your mass-produced Frito/Pepsi food at the same time you bought artisan taro root chips. Balducci's doesn't have the breadth of junk, but they do have Coke!

On the downside, just like Whole Foods, forget about being here if it's busy. For some reason, they follow the WF store layout model which encourages slow, indirect flow through the store. The aisles are roughly one cart wide, and they're not arranged on an orthogonal plan. We went on a Monday and didn't have much trouble outside the baked-goods area, but it's very easy to see that a weekend trip would be murder. I'll have to remember to go there on Fridays since I'll be home.

My PowerBook has just started making a really weird, annoying, loud buzzing noise when the power adapter is plugged in. It doesn't do it when I remove the battery, and it doesn't do it when the battery is in, but the power adapter is unplugged. Ergo, I have this feeling it's the electrical dohickey that frobnozzles the stimwiggle.

It being nearly the end of the year, and as I'm desperate for deductions, this is probably as good a time as any to replace this POS -- I mean, it's 15 months old, so it's obviously ready to be retired, right?

Here's a problem. I have no idea what laptop to buy. If the G5 were out, I'd have reason to upgrade. It's not out, and the G4 PowerBooks currently available aren't really compelling enough. I'm not spending another $3-4k for a nominal bump in processor speed.

Because of the insane volume of email I receive, and because of my incredibly baroque Rube Goldberg-inspired email handling system (wc -l .procmailrc returns 458, and that doesn't include the armload of perl, ruby, python, shell scripts and c programs that it calls when determining where to put my mail), and because of the volume of spam passing through the system, I was overwhelming the previous astrogoth.com. This was a box owned by an associate, for whom my small monthly fee was not covering the increasing cost of my impact. It was time to move on.

Whereas we have had DACs forever, and ADCs in some places, the A/V systems of the future will include CAT technology, seen here in an advanced research laboratory under the Indian Ocean.

(A bright spot of the Comcast HD DVR is that the hard drive is pretty much exactly where you would guess it is, based on the location of Poppy's center of...warmness. The downside of this is that a sleeping thermotropic cat is a fairly poor heat conductor, and the cable box is forced to turn on its very loud fan to lower its internal temperature.)

My family came to visit for the holiday. Desperate for something to do, I dragged them around to look a bunch of old stone buildings around town that no one has gotten around to knocking down and replacing with something useful, like the mall to which all the signs around there give fraudulent directions.

While walking by this big rectangular hole in the ground filled with water, probably some runoff from a sewer, whose only purpose is to reflect one of the big, tall stone buildings for observers standing on the steps of another big, old, stone building with some big, stone statue inside, I noticed the fattest frickin' squirrels ever.

Stompers have sure come a long way.