We also got to make the acquaintance of a very friendly bird (a Cockatoo, I think) who was visiting the festival with her keeper. She stepped right onto Scott’s good arm and allowed herself to be petted and photographed:

After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we’ve got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home!

I’m waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.

On Friday afternoon we were told that what we though was a mild-to-moderate shoulder injury Scott suffered while out on a bike ride was, in fact, a lot more severe than that — basically, the accident broke both the left ball joint and shoulder blade in several places — and surgery was required to put Scott’s shoulder back together.

He went under the knife first thing Saturday and is now home recovering. The vacation has been canceled. Long-term, Scott will be just fine, and everything could be much, much worse — which I’m infinitely grateful for — but I am also bummed about the lost vacation. We don’t travel home anywhere nearly as often as I would like.

There’s a lot of interesting things going on out there in the world to blog about, but I’m not feeling very bloggy right now. Please feel free to peruse my blogroll for a list of folks doing a much better job of this blogging thing than I am.

While we were out for a walk, we spotted some Jamba folks out offering free samples in San Mateo this afternoon. They were kind enough to let me snap a photo even though we were carrying Starbucks drinks.

Recent IM conversation with Scott:

Me: Microsoft announced six different versions for Vista. What a support nightmare that’s going to be.
Scott: yep
Me: I’m going to stay the hell away from Vista for at least 12 months after it’s releases. You, OTOH, will upgrade to it as soon as you possibly can
Scott: You got it. Probably on my new $4000 dream computer.
Me: *shudders*

I’m the kind of Windows user Microsoft probably hates: I just want my OS to run the applications I choose to install on it, and to stay the hell out of my way the rest of the time. I don’t need a high-end desktop searching feature — I know where my personal data is and how to find what I’m looking for. I don’t want fancy 3-D versions of the alt-tab app switcher or funky integrated media capabilities. I have iTunes, an iPod, and a very nice TV and TiVo in my living room for that. I just might end up with the lowest-level version of Vista just so that I don’t have to deal with all the add-on crap the other versions will include.

Buying the low-end version of an OS kind of goes against my grain, since I more or less consider myself to be a power user. But in this case, I suspect I’ll be much happier without all the bells and whistles.

At any rate, I am quite serious about waiting at least a year post-release to upgrade (I waited a lot longer than that to go from Win2K -> XP). I have no intention of upgrading until the inevitable missed bugs, security issues, and driver problems all get resolved. Let some other schmuck do the sweating and swearing; I am not going to waste my time dealing with Microsoft’s mess for them.