I had a wonderful lunch with Buzz today. We met at Opa-Opa, a steakhouse/microbrewery in Southampton. It has a very nice feel, the service was good, the food was good, and the menu has a variety of funny bits. I'm definitely going to start going there for steaks, rather than the chain we'd been going to before. My favorite part of the menu was the series of parenthetical statements for how well-done you wanted your steak. For "extra well done" it says, "Don't even ask for it. Old Charlie tends to get real excitable. (Just a friendly piece of advice.)" The version on the web isn't as good. Buzz and I caught up on a variety of things and spent some time talking about the revisions we need to make to our class for the fall. We're on the same page.

I found more spam in my wiki today. I hope there is a special place down below for people who spam wikis. Someplace dark and slimy that involves fire and lots of screaming for all eternity. I've noticed that a lot of wiki admins leave the spam in place and simply revert the current page to the previous version. My guess is that this is just peachy as far as the spammer is concerned since that means that the spammed version continues to be accessible to web robots -- often multiple spammed versions, as they tend to hit the same sites over and over again. I generally restore a clean version of the page and wipe out the page history. I lose the history, but at least I don't have spam sitting around on my site. I wonder how much your googlerank goes down if you leave spam accessible on your site...

After I got back to the office this afternoon, I set up my new desktop machine: a dual 2-ghz G5. It's the bottom of the line from Apple, but kicks the pants off my old machine. Their new tool that sucks across all your old applications,files, and settings, is really sweet. I hooked up the firewire cable before I left for lunch and when I came back, it was ready to go. I still have a bunch of stuff to check, and I want to leave the new machine running for a few days until I'm sure it's reliable before I pass on my old machine. It's going to one of the support staff to use to work with 10.4. It's great to have a new machine. I don't like the new keyboards much. My old keyboard had a thicker plastic border around the outside of the keys that was large enough to rest my hand on. This one doesn't, so I keep pressing the control-key and wondering why my mouse thinks it's right-clicking. That was very puzzling for several minutes, until I realized that I was actively doing it just my resting my hand near the keyboard.

I named my new machine sukerfisxego. It looks like the big brother to my laptop, which is named sukerfisxeto. Sukerfisxeto is the word for "Silverfish", although literally it means "little sugar fish". Sukerfisxego means "gigantic sugar fish". It fits.

Yet another komencanto has expressed interest in joining our local Esperanto group. The group is really starting to take off. Weird, that so little happened for so long and now, all of a sudden, there is a real groundswell. I'm starting to get really excited to see where it goes. When the first couple of new people started coming, I tried not to get too excited. I figured they'd come once or twice and then stop. But they haven't -- and they're actually learning to speak Esperanto. It's great!

StevenBrewer