Improvements...

Ahh, now that's much better. Yesterday I updated my firewall. This afternoon, after paying a visit to livejournal.com, I noticed something odd in my cookie manager; that prompted me to try again to get my home computer and livejournal to co-operate. It took some doing, including going online with all my defenses shut down briefly (scary!), but it seems to be working properly now - I can edit and otherwise modify my journal from home. So that's fixed. (I'm slowly getting the hang of livejournal; it wasn't until yesterday that I realized what "Friends" are for!)

I finished The Pencil, and I've started in on McCullough's bio of John Adams. So far, it's very interesting. I keep picking up echoes of "1776" (although, of course, it's actually the other way around). Speaking of the latter, I think I'd like to find a good bio of James Wilson (the 18th-century jurist, not the 20th-century philosopher); from what little I know of the rest of his career, I suspect that the play maligns him unjustly.

Because my department has a site license for Mathematica, we're allowed to get free home-use licenses as well. I didn't know about this until just recently, but I jumped at the chance - a personal copy runs in the thousands of dollars, or did the last time I looked. My copy arrived yesterday; I'll be installing it this weekend. At last...

Life is pretty good at the moment.