Yes, I’m still sick, but it’s turning into a sinus thing instead of a throat thing - I don’t know whether that’s really better or worse, but at least it’s different. But none of that matters, because today I got the first half of my graduation present from Chris - namely, a 512MB DIMM to help beef up my G4. (The second half of my present is another 512, but it hasn’t shown up yet.) I’ve been sitting here all evening quitting things and launching them again, just to marvel at the fact that Photoshop only has to bounce twice before opening instead of, like, ten or twelve times. And now I can leave memory hogging things open all the time if I want to! Except that the only real memory hog I have is Word, which I haven’t really had any reason to leave running since I graduated. But still. I could if I wanted to. Eventually my little G4 will need to be replaced by a hefty G5, but my lack of RAM was the only thing I was unhappy with, really. OS X uses both of my processors more efficiently than OS 9 could in its wettest of wet dreams, so I think it will be a while yet before I have to start customizing towers on the Apple site.

At the risk of allowing my site to degenerate into SickBlog (again), I feel I ought to point out that my current state of congestion is such that I pretty much can’t breathe at all when lying completely down unless I’m under the influence of some heavy-duty cold medicine. Normal sick person napping requires about twenty minutes of pillow adjustment before I’m able to gain the use of even one nostril. Thankfully, I have the kind of boyfriend who will bring home ice cream and heavy-duty cold medicine and not even object to the fact that at least half of the couch has been taken over by pillows.

I asked Chris to write a post for me because I am too sick to write a post, and he said that he would and that this is what the post would be: “Emma got me sick.” So that’s my post for tonight (even though it’s a god damned lie).

Yesterday I managed to avoid going outside at all. This in and of itself is neither shocking nor interesting. This morning, though, I woke up sick - sore throat, swollen tonsils, awful cough, mild fever, the works. Have I been getting sick for a while without realizing it, or did I get sick yesterday from one of the two delivery guys who came to my door - the only people from Out There I came into contact with? (Chris isn’t even a little bit sick.) Or is this new particular plague perhaps entirely homegrown, delivered by nobody?

Either way, I need some tissues and some soup and more movies to watch, because I doubt I’ll be going anywhere tomorrow either. At least we have digital cable (and movies on demand).

Given the number of PR people who send me press releases in a given week, I’m assuming that Nick Denton’s new paid advertisement blogs will be popular among that crowd - but will anyone else actually read these things? It’s interesting that one of the perks is the promotion of the adblog on Gawker sites and other weblogs, but I wonder whether that’s promotion in the sense of ads for the sites, or in the sense of posts about them? And does anyone even read Gawker itself anymore, apart from the ones who also read things like People?

I was surprised but pleased when I heard that Alfonso Cuarn would be directing the third Harry Potter movie. The only other thing of his I’ve seen is Y Tu Mam Tambin, which was great, but probably about the farthest thing from Harry Potter I could have imagined. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I saw Prisoner of Azkaban this afternoon and was impressed. It’s a different sort of thing altogether from the first two, and I think they’ll suffer badly by the comparison. POA felt much more authentic; there’s a depth that wasn’t even approached in the previous movies. I won’t say any more, but here’s A.O. Scott’s review, which I more or less agree with.

In addition to my G4 and a positively ancient Performa that no longer even boots, I’ve got this first-gen bondi iMac sitting around that I’d like to do something with. It’s too old and crusty to run OS X, but I’m not ready to turn it into an aquarium just yet. What I’d really like to do with it is install Linux, just for the sake of having an iMac running Linux. Chris and I have looked around at YDL and Mandrake PPC, but here’s the catch: this iMac doesn’t have a functioning CD-ROM drive, since it broke years ago and I’m unwilling to put any more money into a computer I don’t really use. So, ideally, we’ll be doing a net install - but this seems to be easier said than done with Mandrake and perhaps not even possible with YDL. Has anyone successfully installed a PPC Linux on an iMac (or any other Mac) over a network? If so, I’d like to hear about it.

The Plog is Amazon’s new gimmick, and I think I hate everything about it - from the name (which sounds like something that might go wrong with one’s toilet) to their list of “the best and most popular” weblogs. Amazon recommendations are always iffy at best, and having them pretend to be a weblog doesn’t seem to help anything. It’s always driven me crazy that if I buy something like a digital camera, Amazon assumes I’ll want to buy more digital cameras - rather than, say, camera accessories or batteries. I’ve never once bought anything shoved at me by the Gold Box, and I doubt Plogs will fare any better in the getting-my-money department.

So I guess when I say “posting will be light,” I really mean “posting will be nonexistent,” but at least I’m back in New York now. I did indeed spend a lot of time with hammocks and grilled things and dogs, and to top it all off my mom and I hit IKEA bright and early this morning. It was probably the best time I’ve ever been there - we showed up about ten minutes before they opened, but they let us in anyway. The place was almost completely empty, and we didn’t wait in a single line or fight our way through a single crowd. And now I have bags and bags of new apartmenty things to find places for, as well as a new window box full of herbs that I brought back from Massachusetts. Hooray for long weekends!