Journal of a Sabbatical

March 6, 2000

back on track

Today's Bird Sightings:
bufflehead
goldeneye
red breasted merganser
great cormorant
herring gull
great black backed gull
American crow
black duck
mallard
Canada goose
mourning dove

Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake, Faith in a Seed by Henry David Thoreau

I finally finished the Antarctica trip entries. The last few took awhile because after South Georgia I wrote less and less and less each day until the final day, Feb. 8, I wrote nothing at all. The Falklands part of the trip was very rushed - that's where we made up the time lost to the storm. I'm glad we skimped on the Falklands rather than on South Georgia, but I have this nagging feeling that I missed something significant in the Falklands. Guess I'll have to go back someday.

I installed Bird Brain 5.0 and have exported the records from Bird Brain 4.0 but have not yet actually run the database upgrade because it takes all night. One of the guys on the Antarctica trip is a Bird Brain user and we were talking about this upgrade in the Santiago airport on the way home. He said it actually did take all night and then some, but he has 28,000 records. I don't have that much data in it, only about 2000 or so records, but the manual says to let the upgrade run all night. It reminds me of the old days of RSX-11M when a new operating system release could take all day to install and there were some operations where the software helpfully told you to go get some coffee while you waited... Anyway, I had put off ordering the upgrade until I got back from the trip. I didn't realize that entering a date in the current year would crash the entire Mac until I tried it. Guess this is what you would have called in the old days a "mandatory upgrade" as in if you don't install it we won't support you anymore ever...

Fake productivity seems to the be the main theme for today. In addition to finishing the trip journal, and fooling with Bird Brain, I reorganized and pruned my Netscape bookmarks file. That took forever. I had way too many bookmarks. Many of the sites don't exist anymore. Some I can't imagine why I bookmarked them. I want to make another pass through them and prune and organize some more before I fully switch over from version 3 to 4.7 because 4.7 doesn't have the nifty feature to sort the bookmarks. So despite having installed 4.7 months ago, I only use it for accessing my brokerage account and a couple of other things that don't work with version 3 anymore. I guess I am letting technology pass me by.

I picked the title "back on track" for today's entry yesterday, somewhat optimistically. The idea was to catch up on all these nagging little projects that seem to hover half done. For example, I migrated the MRFRS volunteer database from Touchbase to Now Contact as an intermediate step to something more practical - Now having the advantage of actually knowing about Touchbase and being able to upgrade from it, but having the disadvantage of not being a popular PC contact manager. The next step is to pick something more widely known and popular that runs cross platform and upgrade to that. Sometimes I think I'm just postponing the inevitable, that I'll be forced to use only Microsoft software because the entire US population does. But while I still have a choice, I'll exercise it.