I’m laying in bed with a pair of cats around my feet. I’m typing this on the Powerbook and posting it to the Web wirelessly (admittedly, not using Blogger) while streaming music from the iMac in the other room to my headphones, and IM’ing with John, who is configuring my IP phone remotely from his desk in Portland. Pretty sweet.

I figured out a few things tonight mucking around on the computers.

• iTunes was not showing up on the PC because I had the firewall blocking all incoming requests to port 3689 (iTunes’ prefered port.) Strangely, iTunes on the iMac told me this but the Powerbook didn’t. Hmmph. Once this was fixed, life was good.
• I started screwing with LDAP and the Directory Info Manager to see if I could set up services to share Address Book info between machines, but gave that up in favor of simply exporting -> importing the data manually. Someday I’ll figure that out, right after I figure out
• …iCal, whose calendars can be export -> imported across machines as well. I really want to set the thing up to simply publish/subscribe, but still have had no luck. Because it’s a pain in the ass to do all this manually.
• I have an HTML file that’s 873KB in size; it’s a table which lists the number/title/artist/size of every song in my master iTunes library. I used a script called iTunes2HTML 1.0, and it worked better than Apple’s Library Summary.
• Blur’s new album is really good. I’m digging it a lot.

This is the Internet Calling. Just when I was about to give up hope (and was avoiding making the call to ask about it), I got home yesterday evening to find a package on the table from my friend John. A few months ago he promised me a VoIP phone for payment of services rendered—a freelance job we worked on ran out of steam. I opened the box to find a pretty Cisco 7940 IP Phone. I plugged it into my router, waited for it to figure out its network settings, and then my name and the 10-20 logo appeared. I picked up the handset and dialed the house. A moment of silence, and then the house phone rang. Pretty sweet! I surprised my Mom by calling her at work; the call is not unlike talking to somebody in California, where there’s just enough of a delay to screw up your conversational timing.

Jen is feeling punky with the first bug of the season, unfortunately, so she was in bed when I got home. I chose a quiet task upstairs and continued painting trimwork in the Anxious room. I hope she’s feeling better tonight, because we have our first catering tasting downtown. Maybe the promise of good food will help her recover.

Do You Like Good Music. More music added to the server last night; I found a bunch of stuff that didn’t make it over and ripped a few more CD’s. I also installed iTunes on the PC server and loaded the library over there. It’s funny—the PC shows up on the iMac like butter but I get time outs when I try to look at the iMac from the PC. Same behavior that happens here at work (I thought it might be an internal network thing.)