Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

It's been 13 months since I started blogging. I've discovered old friends (who have discovered me online). I've found interesting Google page-ranking algorithm effects that cause my blog to show up in the most amusing searches. I've received emails from Willie Stargell's niece, from Rick Wakeman (of Yes keyboard fame), and from a friend of Patrik Elias' who forwarded my blog post about the Devils star buying sneakers. I'm writing, I'm reading, I'm thinking about writing as I'm reading, and I'm taking many more pictures of everyday things that seem blog-ready.

Our family hero and NJ Devils star Patrik Elias graced the front page of this Sunday's Newark Star Ledger sports section. Word is he's getting better, and word might be that he'll return as the on-ice captain of the Devils. Word is he stopped in at our favorite pizzeria Saturday afternoon, and Elias sightings are a harbinger of good luck in our family.

Word is Saint Patrik can charm those Atlantic Conference snakes (our neighbors across the Hudson) out of first place, too.

I've finally finished moving into the new home office, after nearly 4 months of new home ownership that have featured fixing leaks, removing a two-decades old "media room" complete with lunar-lander sized TV projector, designing a new workspace, installing said workspace, and then migrating all of my compute equipment down two floors.

On Friday, the finishing touch arrived. Not the tres chic bit of Yes-related artwork I'm waiting on, but a Toshiba Portege laptop running OpenSolaris. It has its own bay, in between the bobbleheads and expanded filing section. Kind of a seat of honor.

I'm off to Massachusetts tomorrow (I have promised various sales reps I will not show up in costume, but the threat has made them quite helpful). Preparing for the trip involves synchronizing talks, music, appointments and other file-oriented devices. The OpenSolaris machine is up and running, and my 11-year old son sat down in front of it, not knowing what it was. "Hey Dad," he asked, "what is this?" as he moused around, opened up OpenOffice 2.0, checked out the file explorer, and generally decided it looked and felt enough like something he knows that he would not risk trouble by experimenting with it.

Rather than worrying about retraining costs, and "comfortable" user interfaces, it's time to start thinking about opportunity cost -- of fighting viruses, of therapeutic reboots (prompted by, say, the bug in the wireless network monitor on my Windows XP machine that causes it to balloon to 30 Mbytes every now and then, dwarfing the memory footprint of both OpenOffice and Mozilla), and of configuration tools that require a tweezers, bellows and a fish to deal with their fragility (for example, the bug in MacOS 10.3.9 that won't let me connect to an HP printer over the network; one fine $129 upgrade to MacOS 10.4 and my daughter can print).

I often say that we spend way too long optimizing for the pessimistic cases and not taking advantage of the optimistic cases. I'm full of optimism about OpenSolaris, and the fact that my kids grok it after about 14 femtoseconds of training tells me that I might not be wrong.