Yippee I love coffee.  And I'm having some right now...

Today I plan to take my life in my hands.  My computer life, that is...  Last week I did something bold, strange, and unsuccessful.  I switched my email connection to our office Exchange server from POP/SMTP to Exchange.  This took a while, involved many false starts and reconfigurations, but ultimately "worked", except that now things are slow as molasses.  Not good.  However I am assured that things are slow because I have Office XP instead of Office 2003 ("we're from the government, and we're here to help") and so today I plan to upgrade my machine from Office XP to Office 2003.  As I said, I'm taking my [computer] life into my hands.  If this doesn't work, I may have to commit suicide.  Stay tuned. 

Last night I had one of the best dinners of my life.  Shirley and I went to Brandywine, a little hole-in-the-wall French restaurant we love in Woodland Hills, where we've been going "forever" for romantic dinners.  As usual, we had their made-at-the-table-the-old-fashioned-way Caesar salad, and as usual, we had their-cooked-at-the-table chateaubriand for two, rare.  Unbelievable.  If I could have one meal before I die (and see the paragraph above), then this would be it.  We had a 2001 Stag's Leap Cask 23, which was awesome - the best Cask 23 since 1997, IMHO - and for dessert, flourless chocolate cake with 1970 Dow's port.  Incredible.  Happy Valentine's Day, Shirley! 

DFL - Celebrating last place finishes at the Olympics.  Because they're there, and you're not.  Now that's cool...  [ via Dave Winer ] 

Gerard Vanderleun reprises a classic: Where the Buffalo roam.  Perhaps coincidentally, Moab, Utah, is also where the mountain bike riders roam; I'm planning a week long trip there this May.  Excellent. 

Cool rumor of the day: the Apple video iPod.  "Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display...  Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed."  Great stuff - a bigger screen, and a touch screen instead of a click wheel.  I might have to get one :) 

The case of the disappearing teaspoons.  I love it. 

The other day I considered the day performance didn't matter anymore.  And a reader reminded me of another great Jeff Attwood post: despite the incredible slowness and sparseness of features, this is really really cool.  Which concludes: "And that's why C, C++, and even assembler are still part of a developer's toolkit.  I argue that they are of increasingly diminished importance, but I would never propose that every application should be written in .NET."  Indeed. 

Perhaps related, the Guardian notes Survival of the Unfittest.  No, this isn't a story about Unnatural Selection, it is about Lotus Notes: "Imagine a program used by 120 million people, of whom about 119m hate it.  Sound unlikely?  Yet that's the perception one garners in trying to discover whether Lotus Notes, IBM's 'groupware' application, is - as readers of Technology blog suggested - the 'world's worst application'."  D'ya know what people hate about Notes?  The #1 thing is that it is too slow.  Hmmm... 

Which is why todayI'm taking my life into my hands...