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First the mouse: yesterday morning, was fully awakened out of a doze around 7 a.m. by rustling sounds. Yup, some varmint was stealing my cattle. I took out the earplugs to listen better and the sounds stopped. Went back to dozing and several minutes later the sounds started up again. I got up and went to look for them, and a small dark shape darted across the floor.

This time it was darting away from my closet, so I placed the no-kill trap to block the hole in the back of the closet that I thought the mouse was coming through, and embarked on the beginnings of a clean-my-room project. My room had recently once again reached the point where crossing it on foot was hazardous without a compass, hip waders, and a local guide, so that's probably just as well.

One of the first things I found was a ziplock sandwich baggie containing a couple of small cookies. I had set them aside to eat later a while back, but had forgotten about them. I picked them up to eat them and discovered a mouse-sized hole in the bag; the cookies themselves had all been scraped by tiny teeth or paws until they were just thin shells of their former selves.

When I continued around the room, I found a small cardboard box containing a piece of foil-wrapped chocolate that I'd hidden away some time ago; there was about a quarter-inch hole in the box, much too small for a mouse, and the foil was shredded all over the surrounding stuff, and half the chocolate was missing.

So apparently the mouse has been living on cookies and chocolate and aluminum foil. Yum. I began to think perhaps the mouse wasn't using the closet hole at all, but was instead nesting somewhere in my room, perhaps even in the base of my bed. I went through a couple of piles of clothing, and carefully examined (and removed from the room) some small cardboard shipping boxes containing packing materials. Eventually, late last night on a last sweep through the room after I heard some more suspicious rustling, I found the other, larger, hole in the back of a different part of the closet; this one had mouse droppings around it (which the other one hadn't). I relocated the trap and went to bed. Today I'll probably try to get some more cleanup done.

So that's the mouse status. The other half of this entry's title refers to the fact that I've acquired Mac OS X 10.4, better known as Tiger.

Actually, this past week has been one of technology acquisitions for me. Got a 30GB iPod Photo; I don't have much use for the photo capabilities, but it's double the hard drive size of my old iPod, and it has a much nicer interface (in that when you click, you get tactile feedback so you know you've clicked).

So there were several deliveries to my house; one of them, of course, was a customer-service annoyance, in which the UPS delivery guy brought a package (on second delivery attempt) to the wrong condo, left a second-delivery-attempt note on their door, and drove away. I found out about this several hours later via the package-tracking website; called UPS, was told that if the driver had left the area it wasn't possible to get a redelivery attempt that day. No apology, no acknowledgment that their driver had made a mistake; bizarrely, they seemed to think that the driver had tried to deliver the package to my roommate, and I just hadn't heard the doorbell. I corrected them several times, but it didn't seem to stick. Anyway, they redelivered the next day, and I wrote an annoyed letter to Apple requesting that they stop requiring an in-person signature. Turns out that FedEx is far more flexible than UPS on this; when the FedEx guy delivered Tiger, I asked if I could have left a signature waiver on the door, and he said sure, no problem. This is not the first time that I've found UPS more obstructive and less flexible than other carriers.

After all that buildup, this is gonna be an anticlimax: I haven't played with Tiger enough yet to see its full power. I ran a backup for most of yesterday, backing up the entire disk before installation; while it was running, read some subs and had a nice phone call with Stephanie B; then yesterday evening set the install running and hung out with Ananda & Sam. I played with it a little last night after they headed out, but I was too sleepy to do much. I did discover that the vaunted search system, at least so far, doesn't seem to be any faster than the old one, and I got a few Spinning Pizzas Of Death (the OS's indication that the application—search in this case—is so busy it can't even be bothered to talk to the UI system), but those speed issues may be because indexing is still going on. Oh, and I discovered that if I delete files from a list of found files, there's no visual feedback whatsoever—no indication that I've done anything at all. Really annoying.

(The searching and deleting was because I was trying to find unnecessary large folders and files and delete them, 'cause I'm running very low on disk space.)

Anyway, so far everything seems to work okay, and I'm looking forward to playing with various new features.

Today: more magazine stuff; maybe more room-cleaning. And Lola was already planning on going Prius shopping today, so she offered to take me along. I'm leaning slightly toward a Honda Civic (assuming I'm right in thinking that my car can't be repaired), but interested in the Prius too, so a test drive in which I don't actually have to drive should be fun.