This is quite an up / down week, with all kinds of — let’s call them — interesting things happening.

On the negative side:

• The air is so dry, that I wake up every night with a mouth so dry that my tongue feels like rasping through death valley
• At the same time my nose is regularly clogged too, so the open mouth is a necessity to survive the night
• My laptop died while trying to go from standby to hibernat mode. It managed to screw up it’s registry and boots immediately to a blue screen. Luckily the also installed Ubuntu Linux booted fine, and I was able to copy all of my files to an external firewire harddisk. (Note to self: Try to figure out why Ubuntu treats the harddisk of the Dell Inspiron as a VERY slow hard disk. The ususal hdparm tunings (-c1 -d1 …) didn’t increase the speed above 3 MB / s, which is just almost unbearable slow)
• My Linux server had a fit yesterday and crawled along with a load of 9000. A mercyful turning of the BRS brought it back to life.

On the positive side

• I don’t have a laptop at the moment, so I’m continuing to read the “Baroque Cycle” — at the moment 100 pages or so into “The system of the world”
• Several new projects are materializing in the not so distant future
• We’ll be able to pick up our Prius after a short time waiting this friday
• In related “picking up new things”, the MacMini has shipped and I expect it on friday too
• We’re going to the theater tonight to see Homo Faber
• Friday night without kids (but a new car)