I'm sitting around, working at home, enjoying a cup of freshly-brewed decaf, listening to some bjork, and I take a break to check ars technica. I am a good technocrat, and I am rewarded for it. An article on xmlstarlet, a command-line xml manipulation tool. Hey, I hadn't heard about that, and that sounds plenty cool (and handy) -- I've been wanting something like that for a while. I check fink and -- lo and behold! -- there's already an OS X port of it. Awesome! Oh, and hey, here's an article on Open Source Mac, a directory highlighting some of the best OS apps for OS X. Most of the stuff there isn't new to me, but there are a few surprises, and it looks like some apps I abandoned a while ago have come a long way. Outstanding! Wait, there's AbiWord -- I haven't used it for years, and here it is, polished and clean and ready for OS X. Spectacular! Oh my god, that's wonderful, I've been looking for a good open-source word processor for a long time and of course I should've thought to try AbiWord but I was underwhelmed when I tried it on linux but now it looks like it's come so far, and it may be perfect for my needs and oh my god look there's a Cocoa del.icio.us client and oh my god life is so awesome!

Life is wonderful! Life is love! I've never felt so alive, so excited about software! I've never felt this way about software!

Wait a minute. I've never felt this way about software. It's not just cool, I'm having a fucking chemical reaction to it. What the hell???

No. No, it couldn't be.

I check the trash and pull out the coffee package.

It is. I've been drinking caffeinated coffee.



This is bizarre. One of the reasons I gave up caffeine in July was because I simply couldn't feel the effects of it anymore. I hadn't noticed the effects of it for years. All I noticed was what happened when I stopped drinking it. So I quit, and the process was, all things considered, pretty smooth. I haven't eliminated all caffeine from my diet -- that's virtually impossible to do in this society -- but I've ingested only minimal amounts. A little bit in a piece of chocolate, a little bit in a jack and coke, things like that. Once or twice I got a cup of caffeinated coffee to keep me sustained and going, and I rationed my consumption over the course of several hours. And, well, I guess it worked, because this is the first time since then that I've just had a real, solid cup of coffee, and man oh man, oh man, can I feel it.

Crazy.

Well, it's good to know that my efforts have paid off. Now I guess I can brew a new pot of decaf, get back to work, and enjoy the remnants of this buzz. Carry on, folks.