I felt so great this morning I even got to work a little early. It was for naught, though, since I wasn’t able to leave early. I’ve somehow grown a bunch of new 4PM meetings. Not only that, but I started feeling rather sleepy in the middle of the day. Somehow my early morning energy ran out by mid-day.

So I was going to watch some more sessions from the Apple WWDC, but after I got through just a little bit I realized I wasn’t going to retain much of it. I think I may actually get to sleep early today! I’ll believe it when I see it.

Starting last year, I think, Apple posts videos from the sessions at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to iTunes. It took all summer to get things up last year and I was kind of hoping it would be quicker this year. Geez, it only took them a couple of weeks. I downloaded several sessions, including a couple I missed, and started watching one tonight. It was a session I attended late in the week, when my attention span was reduced by the lack of sleep and surplus of alcohol. At least it started to make sense now that I’m watching it again.

I was really thinking I should get to sleep, but I’m watching a video, and it’s even an educational video about the innards of the Mac OS. Yeesh.

Today at the gym we did another partner sprint: row 200, swing (24k) 20 times, and run around 2/3 of the building and then rest while your partner does it. We did it for five rounds, I think. The last time we did it, I was partnered with a 19YO girl (yeah, give me a break, I’m old enough to be her father) and today I was partnered with a 25YO guy (and I’m old enough to be his father, too, really). One of these days I’ll say, “I felt great coming into the workout and I did great,” but this isn’t the day. I did do pretty well thanks to Jorgen the 25YO, but I felt like throwing up during the skills part of the workout. My hay fever came back with a vengeance yesterday and I took some Claratin last night, which meant that I was dopey all day.

OK, to be clearer, I felt DOPIER THAN USUAL all day and sleepier as well. That plus my brother-in-law going to the ER in the middle of the night and had me on edge. My genius sister decided to abstractly twitter about the ER visit this morning and then they turned off their phones to get some sleep and this just panicked everyone. I figured they were sleeping so I wasn’t too worried (just left a couple of phone messages around) but I even got a call from her friend in Chicago. Anyone who has been in an ER knows how you get prioritized when you’re not bleeding out or not breathing, especially in the middle of the night. I figure the longer it took him, the more likely it was for him to be OK, and I think it took them 4 hours from 2AM to 6AM. I still haven’t heard WHY they had to go in at 2AM, but whatever. I’ll ask them after they have a couple of days to rest up. Speaking of which, I should quit typing and hit the hay myself. But I’m not all that bright when it comes to time management in the evening.

I should, however, quit iTunes before I start watching another session video. “Managing Kernel Extensions” is sounding awfully good…

I have been sneezing all day. I wonder what plant species decided to have sex today? I thought I’d get my revenge, however, and hacked the heck out of the rhododendrons and nandinas in the front yard. I had to give up when I filled up two garbage cans (and when things started to look like hell). I don’t have the skills my dad had, and he called my style, “Chop chop.” I suppose you could also say that the soul of the gardener comes out in his work and my soul is filled with hack and slash, at least when it comes to plantlife.

I finished another Harlen Coben novel today and I’m well on my way with another Barry Eisler novel. I should probably get out and DO something, but books keep me away from the sharp objects that the plants are dreading. You know how it is.

I’ve been gaining weight lately. I looked at myself in the mirror a couple of weeks back and looked kind of pudgy. So I eventually got on the scale and I think I’m up five pounds. If you’re not a dude, you may wonder how I can have a brand-new medicine cabinet with a mirror behind the shelves, one on the front of the door, and one on the back of the door without actually looking myself in the mirror. But if you’re asking yourself that you’re not a dude. I look particularly at where I’m shaving without seeing my face. I look at if my hair standing straight up or whether I need a haircut but I don’t look at how much grey is there. I can look at various specifics without seeing the overall fat old greying guy who is standing there because, well, I’m a dude. That’s just sort of the way it goes.

Back to the weight gain, I sort of had a cheeseburger on Friday, but I’m not counting it because of several accounting tricks I’m employing. One is that it was blue cheese and not cheddar or swiss. I’m not counting crumbly cheeses. The second reason is that it was paid for by work, so I’m pretending it was forced on me. Don’t go telling me I could have had a salad instead, because that would assume that waving a tasty not-quite-a-cheeseburger under my nose wasn’t a cruel trick by an employer who knows how to manipulate his employees. What I’m saying is that I’m blaming others for my fallibility. It’s more fun that way.

Tonight my sister and I went to the Harris’s house for dinner because their eldest daughter Alice, her husband Clint, and their kids Meredith and Owen were in town. Clint is an Assistant Professor of Russian Liberal Arts at the University of Montana and we started talking about Russian literature. I told him I wanted to read more Dostoyevsky but was unsure of the best translation and he told me to look for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I mainly mention this because if I don’t write it down I’ll never remember it. In any case, he suggested several books, and I’m hoping that they’re not as long as I remember Russian novels being, but I’m sure they are. Now I have a list of Russian novels to add to my lengthening list of books I need to read, and he reminded me that I need to read more Cormac McCarthy as well.

I thought I’d get to sleep early, but I didn’t get home until late and now I”m searching Amazon for Russian literature. I can’t say mine is an especially interesting life, but sometimes I wish it was a bit more boring. At least so I can get some more sleep.

It’s kind of anti-climactic, really, that my new computer is set up. It’s prettier, the external monitor is bigger, and I have a new wireless keyboard, but other than that it’s all about the same. I suppose it’s a little faster as well, but when you think about it, the things that have changed are fairly minor. That being said, I’m still glad I got a new computer and the little differences should make themselves apparent as I use it. It’s just sitting here, typing, I can’t see a big difference. But really, I could be typing at almost any Mac keyboard and it would all be the same.

I’m taking a day off from the gym tomorrow because my sister’s friend Alice, who we’ve known much longer than most of the people in the gym have been alive, is coming to town from Montana. It’s probably a good thing that I’m taking a day off; I’m so tired this week that I can’t even remember how many times we’re supposed to be doing a particular exercise. Today I thought we were doing several rounds, and I wasn’t paying attention to the time. SImple addition would have told me that one round was taking 27 minutes, so multiple rounds were out of the question. I suppose simple addition eludes me on a normal day. For some reason, college calculus displaced all the arithmetic that I learned in grade school. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten the calculus and I’m relearning the simple math. It’s much more useful except when I’m golfing. Then I need really big numbers.

So I got my new laptop today and I’ve already tried to kill it. I can’t be content with letting the Mac do it’s thing, I have to have two boot partitions (the latest released OS and the beta OS) and a data partition. I have a lot of data to copy from the old laptop and there have been a couple of instances already where I thought I broke my brand new toy. But, for now, it seems to be working and copying data back and forth.

I go to the gym and I get a good workout, and that’s all that should matter, but sometimes I like to see if I can finish faster than the others. Today, however, I did something that made me happier than finishing faster than other people. The thing that made me happy was our group — a triple of Jorgen the new kid, Sprint-to-the-death-Sean, and me — finished in 21:12. I think you have to be a rocker from the late 70’s to get that reference and it also just reinforces how much older I am that most everyone else in the gym. I’m afraid this either means I’m a big geek with questionable musical preferences (which I am) or that I’m suffering from a lack of oxygen to my brain because my feeble musculature is taking it all.

The worst part is that I have part of a song from 2112 stuck in my head, “We are the priests of the Temple of Syrinx.” Oh yeah, Geddy Lee, Take off to the Great White North.

It was suggested that I might be sore from the workout yesterday and that was very much the case today. My back was a little sore and my front was a lot sore. Imagine my joy when I found that my hay fever had returned because every sneeze made my abs hurt.

Fortunately, I made a trip out to the countryside to the Dixie Mountain Strawberry Festival which is in the middle of nowhere down some dusty dirt roads. Surprisingly, that didn’t seem to bother my hay fever at all. And the strawberry shortcake didn’t hurt at all.

Now I’m off to feed my addiction to mysteries. Friday I finished The Final Detail and Saturday I read Darkest Fear, two consecutive Myron Bolitar mysteries by Harlen Coben and I’m off to read the next one. Or sleep. Whichever comes first.

First, I must apologize to all the people in class on Saturday morning who had to listen to my kvetching but dear god there’s no way I was going to end up a workout with a frigging burpee/broadjump combination without complaining about it. I suppose rowing could be more vomit-inducing, but really, ending with Beck’s burpees?

Friday was a long day. I got up at 4:30AM to get in line for an iPhone. I figured there wouldn’t be anyone there, but my friends from Apple were giving me this whole song and dance about how nice the new phone would be and how there would be a long line, etc, etc. But I remember last year when there was a huge line at the Apple Store and there were rumors that from 9AM to 10AM there was NO LINE at the AT&T Store. The AT&T Store ran out, of course, and didn’t get restocked for a while, but there was that golden window where you could just walk in on the first day and get an iPhone 3G. Well, I kind of figured the same thing would happen this year, but I also figured that I’d better make sure I wasn’t wrong.

So there I was at 5AM, the only one out on the streets of downtown Portland. And the ONLY ONE IN LINE at the AT&T Store. Let’s see what I posted on twitter:

4:38 AM Jun 19th from Tweetie

I’m going to stand in line to see if I can get an iPhone.

5:04 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

Arrived at the AT&T Store and it’s raining. I’m the only one in line.

5:35 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

People are finally starting to arrive to work. But I’m still the only one in line.

5:42 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

Two young and cute girls out jogging stopped to ask me what I’m doing. Sounds like they’re coming back at a sane time.

5:45 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

The first mentally unstable person stops by to bark at me.

6:04 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

Some store personnel have arrived and now there are five people in line.

6:59 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

The line at 7 (right before they started selling preordered phones). I was right. http://twitpic.com/7ssbr

7:41 AM Jun 19th from TwitterFon

The cheery door greeter is about to get my iPhone inserted in an orifice.

Just so you won’t have to click on the twitpic link, here’s the picture of the line.

There were only about a dozen people in line. By the time they actually started letting us in there were about twenty people there and only a third of the people had preordered their phones. The people with pre-orders were supposed to get in at 7 and the rest of us were supposed to get in at 9AM. Lucky for us, they let us in a little early, and I got my 32G (29G if you ask it) black iPhone 3G S.

So far, I’ve only noticed that my new iPhone loads the game “Peggle” faster than the old one, but I’ve played with Voice Connect (voice dialing) and that works pretty well. Yeah, I feel like a sucker, but I’m happy.

OK, so just for the fun of it, here’s a picture of Megan’s boyfriend Nadeem up at Twin Peaks on the day before the Apple WWDC where they brainwashed me into buying more Apple stuff.

Ah, how much simpler life was before I was brainwashed.

There was something else I was going to say but I can’t remember what it was this early in the morning. It is now 5:13AM and I’m standing out in the rain, in front of the AT&T Store to try to get an iPhone 3G S. I know it’s foolish but the worst part is that I’m the only one here! I got here a whole twelve minutes ago so I may eventually get company. Good thing I brought a book.

It was pointed out to me that I seem to be saying, “I’m tired. I’m up too late.” on every posting and it was suggested that I just get to sleep earlier. That makes much too much sense for me. However, I may make an exception tonight because I’m getting up at 4:30AM to get in line at the AT&T Store tomorrow morning to see if I can get a new iPhone. We’ll see how that works out.

And, yes, I felt very tired at the gym today.

Hello, I’m Todd and I’m an Apple fanboi.

I know I”m a big sucker for liking my Apple stuff. It’s a little more expensive and sometimes just as frustrating as my PeeCee trash, but I’m a computer geek that can deal with most of the grief. I hate having to keep a version of Windows on my Mac laptop so I can do those few things that require Windows, but at least I have that option. I’d much rather sit around and be smug about my Mac than have to curse at a Windows machine all the time. I have to do that at work already and I don’t need to do it for my leisure time too.

But I bought this nice shiny new big monitor — not huge like my sister’s, but big enough — and I came to the realization that the connectors work with the new laptop I just ordered, but don’t work with my old laptop. I was hoping that I could use the little goofy things like the new wireless keyboard and the monitor while I was waiting for the new laptop, but I guess I’m SOL. Also, I think the correct thing to say about this is, “D’oh!” The monitor, while expensive, was made to hook up to the new laptop and has a camera, speakers, and a magsafe power adapter. I’m good to go when it arrives.

I was getting relationship advice at the gym again, and I was reminded that I’m no spring chicken and not getting any younger and that if I didn’t step things up that I’d be dead before anything happened. To follow the tortured animal metaphors further (or is it farther?) a leopard can’t change its spots. And speaking of Leopard, I think I’ll be off to play with my Mac some more. Instead of sleeping, like I should, I’ll probably be playing Peggle. Oh, the life of a single geek.