It's Labor Day and I'm at work. Not that I'm working all that hard, but it's the principle you see. Why am I here? Well, I dropped off Kooma at the airport this morning, a morning wherein I got only a few hours of sleep. So I was dying and Oracle is much closer than home so I drove here and went to sleep at my cubicle. And since I'm here I might as well finish a few things that I should have done last week. Hey, it's only fair. Many times I tell myself that I should go to work on Sunday to finish some project, and yet I never do because work is oh so far away. Now that I happened to be in the neighborhood it only seemed right that I should stop in and get something done.

I got my bonus at the end of August. $3850, a bit less than the $4000 I usually get, which translates to about $1550 after taxes and deductions. Most of that went immediately away to pay Mom and Steph for past payments I owe them (5 checks totalling $1250). But even with Chris keeping the $1000 for summer school which he didn't go to I'm still positive in my bank account, which is surprising since the vacation was quite a bit. Then I got $300 for the Federal Tax Rebate, so my bank account should be at almost $1000 now. Tempting to spend it on something stupid (which I did a little, I bought Stylus Pro for my Epson printer -- it allows you to print Postscript to their printers -- but I just realized that it probably is client-only software; no print server which means I still won't be able to print from Mac OS X).

But that was only $60 so if I stop now I'm in good shape. I also have a budget that I've sort of been keeping to for the last few months. It's only for computer stuff ($50/month), games ($100/month), and books ($50/month). If I overspend in one month, the extra counts double as a penalty. Computer stuff I've stayed positive by not buying software, or at least buying really cheap shareware. Games and books are both quite negative. Games is especially worrying since with even $100 a month I'm still falling behind. The answer will have to be to refocus and trim down on what I buy. That'll be hard to do. Certainly I should not buy Ogre miniatures and Cardboard Heroes, which although they look nice don't add content to a game. SJG is just putting out way too many nice peripheral items, like miniatures and their special edition hardcover limited runs. Must. Stop. Drooling.

So anyways. I'm at work with maybe one or two other people on the floor (I can hear them moving about occassionally), running tests and working on some problems. Plus reading and goofing off. Writing of which, I've been reading the Mac OS X Server Admin Guide, just because I'm curious. Yes, Mac OS X is built on BSD and most of the pretty GUI configuration actually just changes text config files. But it's still impressive how much easier it is (though one way to make it easier is to not try to configure every little option -- a sensible strategy that works for most users). Like setting up Apache -- it's just a few screens of checkboxes and radio buttons plus some typing in and it configures most everything I would want to have configured. Strangely though, it doesn't use Sendmail as the mail transfer agent, but some other program.

Once again I'm back to using Internet Explorer. Opera is *so* close, but it crashes too often. I can handle the cookies not working right for some sites, but I hate to be doing something and then having my program crash on me. Not that Internet Explorer never crashes, but it more like freezes which at least gives me the chance to finish reading the window. Sigh, every browser for Mac OS X is a preview or a beta. But that's the way Mac OS X is right now. Still, I'm not in the camp of people outraged that Apple would charge $20 for the Mac OS X 10.1 CD (it won't be available as a download because it's big and you need to run it from a CD or other bootable volume -- too complicated for Mac users, no really). I've been using Mac OS X as my one and only Mac OS since late April, and I don't regret it. I'll gladly pay for an upgrade CD (and since it's not a license I can borrow or lend it without feeling guilty).

A rare event in the gaming industry (unless you're one of the larger game companies like TSR then WotC then Hasbro), Multi-Man Publishing aquired The Gamers. This gives Dean Essig more time to concentrate on design and art and he doesn't have the headache of running a company anymore. MMP is one of the up-and-coming game companies that has the money to do quality work (mostly because I think Curt Schilling puts way too much money into the company, but that's idle and unsubstantiated speculation on my part). It should be a good thing, but I'm still a bit sad that The Gamers is gone.