Eggnog.

Goddamn, this stuff is good.

That is all.

no movement, no life
cold, bitter wind rustles leaves
deserted campus

I haven’t been paying all that much attention to the upcoming Leopard/OS X 10.5 for a while, though I certainly like what I’ve heard about it. As I was languidly cruising one of the Apple rumor sites the other day, though, I came across this screenshot, which intruiged me, because I hadn’t heard of the Zettabyte File System, much less any support for it in OS X.

So off my fingers flew to Google, which led me to Sun, whereupon I let out an involuntary gasp of geekish delight. What was the source of my pleasure? ZFS represents wholly automated storage management. Here’s how Sun puts it (emphasis mine):

The centerpiece of this new architecture is the concept of a virtual storage pool which decouples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory, allowing for much more efficient use of storage devices… space is shared dynamically between multiple file systems from a single storage pool, and is parceled out of the pool as file systems request it. Physical storage can be added to or removed from storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services…

Maybe this is old hat to you, dear reader. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Next Big Thing I’m all excited about is actually yesterday’s news. It’s new and awesome to me, though: finally, the ability to simply throw more disk storage at a desktop-level machine instead of moving files hither and yon on external drives, or going through the copy/backup n’ restore hassle of replacing devices with ones of greater capacity. This has great implications for home DV editing (as well as disturbing implications for those users prone to generate cruft). Still. Freaking sweet.

I came back to work this morning and went through my morning routine- read my e-mail, checked my voice mail, opened up all the usual ssh connections to servers, and checked my site stats.

I was surprised to find hits on Christmas. I got hits on Christmas Day?!? Apart from the one guy from Singapore who found this place through a Google image search looking for an Uncle Sam hat, they were all deliberate hits; no referring URLs.

I don’t know whether to feel warm fuzzies because some folks actually took time out of their holiday to check for updates, or pity because, well, jeez, certainly nobody’s life could be so empty that they’d visit this site on Christmas, right? I mean, unless they’re all Buddhists, Jews, Satanists (hi, Chad!) or Witnesses or something. Heck, I’m as much of an Internet junkie as anybody, but even I didn’t touch a computer on Christmas.

But anyway. I hope your Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Solstice/secular winter observance was a good one. Mine certainly was, though my perception of holiday success is, as is often the case, heavily dependent on the food I cook and the reception thereof. Happily, the prime rib and madeira sauce (the latter’s recipe wheedled out of a former colleague) were a smashing success on Christmas Eve, so I could have gotten a box of broken muffler bearings for Christmas and still been content.

And now, back to the grind.

The latest Photoshop Phriday theme was about rejected/bizarre holiday albums. For the second time in two weeks, one of my submissions was accepted! Yay!

Unfortunately, four other images I submitted were not. I was disappointed, of course, primarily because they didn’t make the cut as determined by whatever arcane methods Lowtax & Co. use, but also because they were now condemned to obscurity, never to be seen by anyone, all my efforts wasted.

Then I remembered, oh yeah, I have a website.

Yesterday our department held its Christmas party. Much schmoozing, a little shop talk, and the ingestion of tasty tidbits was the order of the day. One interesting twist to the festivities was that atop eight of the tables in the ballroom were small buckets of Lego bricks.

The people seated at each table were tasked with the creation of a centerpiece, tableau, or other such spontaneous objet d’art, and given an hour to do so. At the end of the hour, everybody in the room was to mill around and cast their votes for the winning table, whose prize was the confiscation of everybody else’s Legos.

I am pleased to say that our table’s Christmas diorama was the crowd favorite, by "an overwhelming margin", according to the tuxedo-clad MC. If I may, I would like to take a quick moment to cast aside the civil constraints of the Christmas spirit and say that table 6 owned your asses. That is all.

As soon as I can figure out how to get the photos off of my phone without paying Motorola $30 for their phone tools, I’ll post them here so that you, too, may bask in the glory of table 6’s unfettered genius.

UPDATE: Here’s the photo from the phone.