It was a surprise to find my short story in the issue 4/2006. (Story title "Kala jolla oli polkupyörä", Fish with a bicycle.) I took part in the Portti short story writing competition in 2006, but never realized that they would print my piece. (I got a honorary mention.) Well, there it was.

Perhaps I can now state that I'm a science fiction author (with one published short story). But this may well be the last one as well - I don't have currently any craving to write fiction. Too much writing nonfiction at work I guess.

Two days ago I started doing Time Machine backups of my iBook over the wireless connection to the same external disk on the iMac. The first backup (over 35 GB of data) took about 10 hours, the next one less than one hour. A bit too long for my liking. One reason may be the slow wlan connection on the iBook, the 802.11g-version instead of the newer 802.11n. But there may be also some software bottlenecks involved. In any case, doing the backups is quite simple, even if it takes a long time. I have the firewall enabled, and just a few allowed software packages, which should limit the risks of over the network backups.

I have to once again say that Leopard is one smooth beast. Running simultaneously a lot of programs on many different accounts on the iMac has hardly ever slowed it down. Perhaps once or twice there have been slight pauses in watching EyeTV, when I have been recording programs, doing Time Machine backups (both from iMac and iBook), and downloading software and music from the net (SXSW 2008 Showcasing Artist torrent, for example).

It now seems that 10.5.2 is one of the most stable Mac OS X releases ever. At least I hope so.

One of the great new things of Leopard is the ability to make Dashboard widgets from web pages with Safari. I have made a couple of good ones, of weather services for example. The Leopard Dashboard seems to be a valueable tool, compared to Tiger where it was more like a toy.