Dad is off in Europe on business, so Sarah and I took Mom out to dinner for Mother’s Day.

Mom: Thank you very much for buying me dinner.

Me: Well, I can’t exactly have you buy us dinner on Mother’s Day — even if it is a silly holiday that was made up by the greeting-card companies.

Mom: Well, you two sure put a stick in the eye of the greeting-card companies, seeing as neither of you got me a card.

Well, I did revamp the front page of her website today, so hopefully I’m not in too much hot water.

In other news, my Mac is coming along nicely. Most of my files are transferred and converted over, even my emails. Due to numerous hard drive cleansings, I had emails in .pst format (Outlook), .mbx format (Outlook Express 4), and .dbx format (Outlook Express 6). Considering that these Microsoft formats are not even compatible with each other on the PC (let alone compatible with Apple Mail on the Mac) I am surprised it was possible at all. But after hours of scouring the net and filtering out unbelievable quantities of misinformation, I finally figured it out. Maybe I should write down the process for posterity.

Edit, from April 2003: Boy, I wish I had written down the process for posterity.

I’m still getting the hang of Mac — still saying, “Oh, the File menu is at the top of the screen, not the top of the window,” things like that. But overall, I like the user interface quite a bit. I even like “the Dock”, which is a little strip where you can put shortcuts to your programs and files. Some people disagree with me on that one, though. For example, Andrew Orlowski says in The Register:

Like an unloved Liberian-registered container ship full of nuclear waste, the Dock is making its lonely way across the screen, being bounced from port to port. It was at the bottom, now it’s on the left, and hopefully soon it will run out of locations to take its foul cargo and slither out of our consciousness forever; only to live on as a ‘do you remember…?’ tech trivia question, like the DEC Rainbow or Microsoft’s 8-bit MSX games console.

Anyway, now that my PC is growing even more useless (if that can be believed), it is time to break it down for parts. I offered the motherboard and chip “real cheap” to J.C. Flores, but he politely turned me down. Damn. That J.C. was always a sharp one. Well, anyone who wants an overheating, unstable 1.4 GHz Athlon on an Asus A7A with 256MB DDR RAM, let me know. Operators are standing by.