Okay, this is getting ridiculous: regular viewers frustrated with our recent spotty broadcast frequency should perhaps take up the issue with the universe at large, because all sorts of distractions and impediments have been cropping up recently on a near-daily basis. Just in the past week we've had an unscheduled server migration followed by a corrupted routing table that prevented our access for a full day, an ensuing server hardware failure that limited our access for three more, and a database cratering (apparently caused by the hardware repair) that required a full night's rebuild. Insert platitude about the likelihood of precipitation occurring only in copious quantities here.

And that's just on the server end. Down here at the AtAT compound, our main production Power Mac suddenly started shutting itself down randomly and without warning. We eventually figured it must have lost a fan, and it was shutting itself off when it determined that temperatures were getting into the red zone (nifty design, if it's true!); we don't have time to find and replace the fan, so the system's currently running with the side door open two inches, which seems to have lowered the internal temperature by 25 degrees, and we haven't had a shutdown since. Pity Anya doesn't have a side door to crack open a smidge, too, because as of today she's running a few degrees hot herself-- and a toddler with a fever and a stomachache requires 130 percent of our attention, instead of her usual 110.

Suppose the cosmos is trying to tell us something? Because it's getting kinda hard to ignore the hints. Maybe we should quit and take up dentistry. Or banking.

On the plus side, at least it seems like Apple isn't suffering the same sort of annoying cosmic roadblocks when it comes to the development of Tiger. Steve said it'd ship in the first half of this year, which is a pretty wide window; it could be three months from now, it could be tomorrow, or it could be six weeks ago (but probably won't be-- er, won't have been-- willn't have not being been-- ah, whatever). All we know is that Tiger's Steve-mandated deadline is June 30th, and now we've got a pretty decent clue that it might hit store shelves quite a bit before then. No, we're not talking about how the ship date for faithful viewer Joao's Amazon Tiger preorder slipped from March 31st to April 20th a couple of weeks ago-- and then moved up from April 20th to April 18th just a week later. (Although that's, you know, pretty enthralling stuff in its own right.)

No, we're more excited about a hint from Apple itself: faithful viewer Stephen Beckwith was the first of several to notice that the company has added a few new categories to its Productivity Tools download page-- namely, Automator Actions, Dashboard Widgets, and Spotlight Plugins. Unless you're woefully out of the loop-- and we mean, more so than we are, which would be tragic on a practically biblical scale-- you recognize Automator, Dashboard, and Spotlight as three of the heavy hitters in Tiger's lineup of new features. And while all three of Apple's new pages dedicated to extending their functionality are currently dead links, we happen to be just optimistic enough to interpret the fact that the links have been posted at all as a solid indication that Tiger will be shipping sooner rather than later.

But is it just misplaced optimism? Faithful viewer CJ Corbett notes that, according to dirt from "multiple sources" posted at macosXrumors.com, "Apple's development effort on OS X 10.4 Tiger is possibly running late" due primarily to "problems with Spotlight, XCode 2.0 and general stability." If that's indeed the case, a release in late June seems far likelier than any date sooner-- but hey, who are you going to believe, multiple independent developer sources with corroborating stories, or three dead links on a random Apple web page?

Actually, uh, don't answer that.