Things that make me happy

I have a feeling that one of the tests of "real happiness" is to be aware that you are happy, rather than just "feeling OK". For the last few weeks I have been particularly aware that I am happy, and that things are going well for me (as opposed to last year, which was quite nasty). I am getting good feed back from customers and colleagues (they like my work), and I'm past that point in my new job when I don't feel properly engaged. I've finally found floor covering for my kitchen that accords with the vision I had in my head, and I should be able to get it installed soon. My cabinet maker's sketches for my new sideboard are just what I wanted, and he thinks he can have it finished before Christmas. All good.

And Stephen Fry has started to write a blog and someone has had the happy thought of getting him to write a column for The Guardian (and if you don't know who Stephen Fry is, I can do no better than to refer you to his performances in productions such as Jeeves and Wooster and Cold Comfort Farm). To find that he is a geek in the very best sense, and verily a Mac person as well - what can I say? It's like a very large, gift wrapped, completely undeserved present!

Closer to home, the lovely folks at Zengobi have issued forth version 4.1 of Curio, which includes the plugin necessary to make Curio documents visible in Leopard's CoverFlow and QuickLook, and numerous other enhancements. Love your work, people!

On a slightly downward note, I've been told that the LookSmart people are selling some of their assets to CNET, and that appears to include Furl. As my friend Alec Muffet says Back-Up Your Furl Databases, ASAP !!! (and his blog has the instructions). Unfortunately, Furl appears to be broken, and will not let me download the zip file of my saved content. Furl is aware of the problem, and one can only hope that there is someone there who can fix the system - they've laid off 25% of their staff in the last quarter, and in my experience engineers always get shafted long before managers.