Achoo, I say, cough

I was, past tense, making an effort earlier this month to start getting up at 6:30—or at least, to start having my alarm go off then, so I could manage to get out of bed by 7. What happened in the interim? Getting sick, just in time for twentythoughts’ visit here. There was a sense of inevitability about this particular illness: everyone else in the household has had it, and it’s surprising that my immune system held out this long. I was laid out Sunday and Monday, but I’ve been getting incrementally better each day since. Today I’m still coughing but I don’t sound like I’m going to eject a lung.

Naturally, this has slowed down… everything. The personal coding project I was working on came to a dead stop, and I have yet more essay-ish LJ entries that are just a paragraph or two and “insert actual thought here.” The point of getting up early was to see if I could carve an hour or so out of the day for my own stuff; it’s difficult to do that in the evenings without seeming anti-social, and like it or not, my brain seems to be in higher gear in the mornings anyway. (At least, mornings when my head isn’t full of cold germs.)

Even so, I’m making slight progress. After getting the new laptop I decided I shouldn’t hunt for more excuses not to try using it as the desktop at home, too: it’s just a matter of unplugging a few cables from the G5 and finding a place to stick the laptop, after all. So I’m doing that, and just leaving Parmesan “headless,” connecting to it with VNC when I check things on it. (It’s still the iPod sync machine, and a couple of my older mail accounts are only checked by it, not by the laptop.) I’d still like to upgrade the display at home, but that’s going to wait a few paychecks, I think, given upcoming travel.

And speaking of upcoming gadgets and paychecks, there’s the iPhone. Am I going to get one? I’m weighing it, but I gotta tell you, watching reactions to the thing is vastly more entertaining than owning one could actually ever be. I’m not sure there’s been another product in the history of consumer electronics which has generated so much attention. Which means, of course, many confident predictions of success or failure from people who, to date, have seen nothing but photographs of the damn thing.

I have my opinions on that I might foist off on you another time, but the real question for me is whether I want to buy both a new phone and a new iPod together. I’ve been looking for a new phone, and the iPhone will meet or exceed what I need to varying degrees (not without downsides, but even so). My 4G iPod mini does fine, mostly. The times I’ve considered replacing it, I’ve considered one of the hard drive models, so I could just sync everything.

At any rate, it’s time to shut down here, take my various pills (yay), and get into the office. Hopefully I’ll be able to start ramping up my online presence a little again. (I may talk about Twitter soon, too—I’m guessing from the crickets greeting my last post that, in fact, none of you are on it.)