Litter Pearls. If you own a cat and do one new thing this year, let it be this: switch to crystal litter pearl cat litter (the link is to one brand, there are several). It's so amazingly good. First, there is no smell. Honest to God, no smell. Ever. Smell is gone. Second, the crystals absord the pee, so when you scoop, you only scoop the poop, which is faster and easier. And there's none of that clay clump breakage you get with the clumping litters. This is what the future is about. This is progress. Only twenty years ago you had to empty an entire pan of litter and fuss with trash bags, now the miracle of science has brought us silicon dessicant and litter pearls. I [heart] the 21st century. [megnut]

We once calculated how many kilos of cat litter we were taking up 4 floors (clean) and down 4 floors (dirty). Cannot remember the figure but with two cats at home it was an impressive number. Must find the Italian equivalent of crystal little pearl .

Google has updated its index (I'm back to the top ;-), but recently I saw a few hits coming from Altavista, so after a long time I visited the search engine for some ego-surfing and just to check how it works.

Surprise surprise: I'm the first Paolo also there. This makes me think that they have started using something similar to Google's ranking system, based on links from other sites. This would be the only explanation for my blog to show up there (yes, I know I'm not famous). Anyone noticed something similar?

A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed the latest version of Connectix Virtual PC. This is not the first time I use Virtual PC, but I had not been using it for a while: the last time I used it it was still under MacOS 9 and on a machine quite slower than my current dual 1Gz PoweMac.

Anyway, after struggling a little with the Windows 2000 installer and the network set-up, I now have Windows running in a window on my Mac.

There are a few new features that make this application more enjoiable and usable than before, for example the Dock/Start menu, which allows me to run Windows applications from my MacOS X Dock.

Performance is not incredibly exciting, but let's say that it is fully usable. I'm running IE and Radio in the virtual machine, and a kind of interesting thing is that I can access the copy of Radio running under MacOS from the Windows browser and Radio on Windows from my Mac. This is the main reason I purchased the upgrade: it's the ultimate testing environment, especially with the ability to run several Windows versions at the same time on the same hardware, each one running from a different IP.

I think that the most interesting aspect of Virtual PC on MacOS X is that anyway, Apple got us used to run a virtual machine to access all MacOS 9 applications trough the Classic environment (also if I almost never run it anymore), so in some way running another virtual machine to be able to use a bunch of other applications does not seem as weird as it did before. Besides, running Windows on a Mac offers a great feature not available on "real" Windows machines: you can quit Virtual PC and get back to a Mac .