I'm enjoying my long weekend. Yesterday I worked through the first exercises in Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. My first program didn't work at first -- then I found three typos -- enough to disable each part of the program. It was easy enough, however, that I can imaging building a variety of really simply apps like that to support various aspect of the intro biology labs: random number generators and timers, for example. Currently, we have some javascript things to do that, but they don't work very well. Since we're going to have OS X down there pretty soon, we can build OS X apps to replace them. My longer term goal is to re-write the application I wrote to draw phylogenetic trees as a grad student. It is a long-term goal, but possible if I can find the time.
Today, we went down to Holyoke and I bought a 
d-link print server. I used my linux box as a print server, which was adequate, but when I got the ultra 2, I discovered that the parallel port isn't supported in openbsd. Worse, it uses the weird wide serial ports and the printer, an old Apple laserwriter, uses the weird Apple serial port -- try to figure out what cables you need to make that work! So I left the linux box running until it started to flake out a couple weeks ago. Since then, we just haven't been able to print. So I finally decided to break down and buy a little hardware print server. The one I got lets me hook up all the old printers we have kicking around: the laserwriter, the ink jet, and the cast-off multifuntion device I picked up on the loading dock last fall. At first, I was frustrated that I couldn't get it to print to printers 2 and 3 via lpd -- all lpd jobs seem to go to the first printer, regardless what printer name you talk to. Then I discovered that it talks Rendezvous! So all the printers just show up and are easy to print to. I've never liked Rendezvous much, but in this context it works great.
Lucy is coming back from her cruise tonight! She's been gone for a week. The doggies will be particularly glad to have her come home. I got them out for reasonable walks most days -- today we took a long walk up past the chancellor's house and over Orchard Hill. But Penny has been psychotic with the house unoccupied for hours at a time. She chewed up so much stuff that we've finally started crating her when we leave the house. That has her even more freaked out. Hopefully with Lucy back, the house won't be unoccupied so much and she'll settle down.
StevenBrewer