Fall has arrived.

It has been raining steadily all day. It's cold. It's gray. I love it.

When I got to work this morning I plugged in the heater in my office; it will probably see daily use until April. I made Custom Box's Costco trip today in Kris' car and the wipers had to fight to keep the window clear through a summer's worth of muck.

Stupendous weekend: much fun had with many friends. Thank you, all. I'm not glum any more.

On Saturday, I joined Nick and Andrew in Portland for a Magic: The Gathering tournament. I hadn't played for a year, and was afraid my skills might be rusty, but I actually did very well; I drew my first two matches and won my third match in unconventional fashion: I decked my opponent (forced him to draw his last card).

I left early, and as I was walking out the door I noticed a dealer table stacked with board games. A local store was having a clearance sale on a number of games. For $77 I left with: Ra, The Princes of Florence, Manhattan, El Caballero, and Quo Vadis. Cool beans.

Our soccer team had a game on Sunday. Though we lost 5-3 (sorry, no big write-up this week), the team played well. In fact, we scored the first two goals of the match! Joel tried his luck as goalkeeper and, after getting settled, did quite well. I'm not sure he's enthused about playing the position much in the future, though. (He also had the best quote of the match: "Someone must mark seventeen!" after the opposing team's #17 had scored three goals.)

After soccer, Mac and Pam and I joined Joel at his apartment. We watched some football and while Mac slept the rest of us played The Princes of Florence. I think Princes is fun, quickly learned (despite a lengthy rule book) yet with some depth of play. My concern is that the game lacks interaction between players. It features a round of bidding during each turn, but this is the only real chance for players to interact. (I prefer games with strong player interaction. My big complaint with the Mayfair railroad games is that there is no player interaction. Same with Talisman.) Still, I'll play it a lot in years to come.

Pam surprised me at one point. She said, "This game's by the guys who did El Grande, huh?" It is. The mechanics in the two games are similar enough that Pam was able to detect authorship.

As I play more board games, I find that I prefer certain authors to others. Reiner Knizia is probably my favorite game author.

It was an eventful weekend in my fantasy sports world, too.

The two Yahoo-based fantasy baseball leagues in which I participate came to a close. Going into Sunday's games, I was ahead 7-4 in the private league's championship and behind 6-4 in the public league's championship. I'd like to be able to tell you whether I won or lost those games but, unfortunately, Yahoo still hasn't posted the results.

Elsewhere, my undefeated Matthews Football League team is now defeated. Shaun Alexander's record-breaking performance for Seattle earned him 36 fantasy points, enough to beat eleven of the teams in the league this week, and tied one other.

My fantasy team in Joel's Yahoo league continues to perform woefully. Alas.

Finally, I successfully predicted that Detroit would upset New Orleans for my football pool, but this prescience was negated by my inability to forecast Pittsburgh's victory over Cleveland and Jacksonville's victory over the New York Jets. I'd like to win one of these weeks in order to make up the $134 entry fee. It'd make it easier to rationalize having spent the money on the pool!

During the Costco trip today, I stopped at Fry's Electronics. I'm now own an Apple iBook. (Dana has already requested stats: 700Mhz G3, 128mb RAM (about which more in a moment), 20gb hard drive, DVD/CDRW combo drive, 12.1" display, OS X version 10.2.)

The salesman was surprisingly knowledgeable and helpful. He listened to my needs (lightweight, portable machine that can play DVDs -- that's about it) and steered me clear of the top-of-the line model ("Just add RAM and this less-expensive machine will be just as good."). I chatted him up regarding file-sharing on the Macintosh. He admitted that, although he's a Mac user, he keeps a PC around for file-sharing. He doesn't think Macintosh file-sharing is very robust (my word, not his.)

My first impressions of this machine:

• It is very lightweight. (Yet another reason I opted for this model instead of the 14.1" model.)
• The aesthetics of the machine, from the computer itself to the operating system, are quite pleasing. It's a beautiful thing.
• Apple still provides inadequate RAM with their computers. This has been true for nearly a decade. This iBook comes with 128mb of RAM, which is the bare minimum needed to run OS X. The computer is noticeably slow when performing screen redraws and other tasks that require paging to RAM. It's stupid. Put in more RAM and charge an extra $100, Apple.
• The Dock, the analog to Windows' task-bar, is not as annoying as I had feared.
• It's easy to get to the UNIX command-line, though I haven't actually toyed with it yet. I'm sure that when Dana finally gets her Mac, that's the first thing she'll do: replace the OS X "Aqua" interface with fvwm or some other geeky window manager.
• Internet Explorer on the Mac is buggy as hell. It's already "forgotten" my home page. At this very moment, it's decided that I can't scroll the form window into which I'm typing this text. Well, to be more precise: I can scroll with the arrow keys, just not with the scroll bar. Huh?
• I want my Google Toolbar! I'm so used to it being present in my browser window, that I feel helpless without it. Must look into other browsers...
• I was impressed with the ease of setup. Now, I'm not one of those that thinks Windows is difficult to setup and use. (In fact, I find Apple's smarmy Switch ads to be ridiculous. They don't make me think that Macs must be easier to use than Windows-based machines; they make me think that the people in the ads are just blooming idiots. I mean, how hard is it to transfer photos from a digital camera to Windows? Not Very.) Still, the Macintosh setup was very easy, even network setup. I haven't checked to see whether the iBook sees my Windows network, but it certainly got it's IP address from my Windows 2000 machine which acts as the office's DHCP server. I'm posting this entry from the iBook.

More later, of course. Like I'll be able to keep from gushing about my new toy...

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — New Old Office   It makes me laugh that I spent an hour this morning re-arranging my office.

2004 — Portrait of a File-Sharer   Thanks to file-sharing technology, ABC has me as a viewer.

2003 — An Old Freak   In which I'm not answering e-mail. In which I don't know modern music. In which my pencam arrives. In which I love book jacket covers. In which I watch Trading Spaces. In which I am old. And a freak.