I went to the post office to send a letter just now -- at 9 pm. The Shibuya post office (a state-run business!) is open 24 hours a day.

The 'book is back! They said it would take a week at least and maybe two, but after less than two days my iBook (complete with a new and free logic board) is sitting on its desk again. Which is funny, since the VersaPro was displaying some really weird display problems today, too, which made me reboot in panic. So to finish my report about this week, here is my opinion about the best feature of Mac OS X (the fonts look so much better, especially the Asian ones) and the list of programs I had installed so far:

• Thunderbird (email client)
• Firefox (web browser)
• SharpReader (a newsfeed aggregator, I cannot live without those anymore)
• JEdit (my favorite text editor, Notepad is just useless. Had to install Java first which does not come with Windows.)
• Cygwin (bash, vi, perl, ssh, tar, gzip). Cygwin is a really wonderful project. It is a compatibility library that brings large parts of the Linux API to Windows and a huge collection of Unix applications building on top of that. And installing it has become very easy.
• StuffIt Expander (uncompresses files, but did not work, maybe because I refused to reboot after installing it)
• WinSCP (secure file copy program, but I had problems with it, so I used Cygwin instead)
• PuTTY (ssh client, to connect to Unix servers, but I switched to Cygwin after I had installed that anyway)
• Gaim (a multi-protocol chatting client, quite impressive feature set and the most popular project on Sourceforge)