Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

This has nothing to do with William Blake.

I really like Tiger.

First, Spotlight is brilliant. Smart folders are excellent. While I do a fair amount of freelance projects and use Macs at home constantly... I really wish I was using a Mac full-time at work. I go between a Win2k machine and a Mac -- 95% of the time on the Dell. Spotlight would be so helpful here at work because I'm always forgetting how I filed things. I don't have nearly the amount of files at home as I do here.

Second, my phone finally syncs with iSync and Address Book via Bluetooth.

Third, Mail is a little uglier, but it's way faster and this is on my dual USB iBook (a G3!).

I like Dashboard, but I wish it weren't a separate layer. I'd like to have the weather floating on my desktop all the time.

I haven't even played with Automater yet.

I really didn't think I would see a huge difference with Tiger, but I'm happily surprised.

Oh and iTunes supports podcasting, which is great. Safari and RSS is nice, but I won't switch from NetNewsWire. It works perfectly and is an app I wouldn't want to live without.

Thanks to John Gruber for keeping us all up-to-date on Tiger details. It helped me make the decision to finally go pick up a copy.

Jamestown

I haven't completed verified this, but thanks to research on Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and good old Google, I believe I trace back to the first female colonist in the US. Her name was Margaret Foxe Forrest and she sailed on the second ship to Jamestown with her husband Thomas Forrest.

She didn't do well and died pretty soon after arriving. Her maid, however, survived and became the first woman to marry in Jamestown.

I trace back to her through my fourth great grandmother.

None of this means much of anything, of course, about me -- but I find it interesting.

Buy Me a Gin Fizz, Love

I never listen to the Grateful Dead anymore. There was a brief stint toward the end of highschool and the start of college when I attended a few shows and got a bit intrigued by the whole thing. That was over 10 years ago, so I've filed away all of that somewhere in my brain.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe in DC with some folks from a work conference. I hadn't noticed it, but we were sitting underneath some Dead photos. A young girl at the table pointed to a photo and asked, "Is that Jerry Garcia?"
To which I replied, "No, that's Brent Mydland, he played keyboard for The Dead. He died pretty young, around ten years ago."

It was weird--the information just flowed out from some dusty corner in my brain. I forgot I knew the names of any of those guys. In fact, I kind of forgot about the Grateful Dead. Most of their music isn't really what I'm into listening, but I've now remembered (and will be downloading), Black Peter and Stagger Lee, among others. I've also found the first Dead show I went to online to download.

I think part of why I liked the above songs so much is that they each tell a story. Stagger Lee tells an old story from 1895. I believe Black Peter was written by Robert Hunter (perhaps with Bob Weir) for a dying relative. They both fit in with the more (albeit, alt) country that I listen to often.

Anyway, it was good to remember what I forgot I liked, about a band I don't ever think about anymore.

Sun

For the first time all year I've had to come inside out of the sun because I felt my skin burning. I know I shouldn't, but I do like that feeling. At least when I know I can escape from it easily.

I expected it in Alabama, but late April in Alabama ended up being a lot of chilly rain and thunder.

I also expected it in Washinton, DC, but mid May there ended up being some sun and a lot of rain.

I guess I had to wait for early June in Boston and I had to run to the store to buy a cheap chair to sit on outside. I sat on my new chair and read some of Autobiography of Malcom X. I haven't read it before and I think it's important that I do.

They're reburying Emmett Till today. It's hard to believe that's a true sentence.