Two Crows Joy

This was not a great morning to wake up early. I woke at three, and felt very awake. Finally, after tossing and turning for a while, I decided to get up. It wasn’t until I looked at my computer that I remembered the time change, making it even earlier than I thought. It will be a struggle to stay up until nine tonight. I did look out the window to see if I could see the Northern Lights, but no such luck.

It was a little windy this morning, but sufficiently pleasant that I took Dudley out for a walk at nine while the horses ate breakfast. We saw deer and Dudley briefly chased them without much conviction that he could catch them. While we were up on the plateau behind our house, I saw two large crows flying together in the wind. They took turns dodging into each other, for all the world like kids playing chicken. Made you jump! I don’t know if they were fighting or playing some weird corvine game.

First Snow

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It had mostly burned off by late morning, though I still saw a few patches of snow when I took Dudley for a walk in the afternoon. The high was about 40F today, which seemed cold considering several days ago the highs were around 80F.

Desktop

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My Linux desktop looks much like any other Graphical User Interface. Actually, my monitor rarely looks like this, because the window manager has four presentation spaces, and I usually dedicate a different function to each space so I don’t have this sort of visual clutter.

Convention gear

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Jack is wearing his hat for “MileHiCon”:http://www.milehicon.org/, a science fiction convention being held in Denver this weekend.

Daily Rotation

Via today’s “Langa List”:http://www.langa.com I discovered the Daily Rotation which acts as a headline aggregator for a variety of technical magazines and weblogs. It has some limited customizing features (based on cookies) but does not require a userid.

MT-Blacklist

I’ve just installed MT-Blacklist from Jay Allen of The Daily Journey. I had been waiting until it had been tested a bit more, but two comments linking to pornographic sites in an hour changed my mind. The plugin was very easy to install and configure, as stated in the documentation.

Dudley

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The carpet in the hall has been a big hit with the dogs. I don’t think they approved when we replaced the wall to wall with wood flooring.

Painting and Party

Painting the kitchen went well. My friend showed up at noon Friday with soup and a plan. She didn’t think I had blocked enough areas with making tape so we did that first. Then we spent the next few hours trading brush and roller until we completed the first coat. The biggest area was the ceiling which we did mainly with the roller. The rest of the room required careful work around the counters and cabinets. It is a very pale shade of yellow now. It is not a big difference from the old off-white, but looks fresh and clean.
Continue reading Painting and Party

Sunrise

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Living as we do at one end of a valley which runs east to west, the apparent movement of the sunrise along the horizon is very evident. At the time of year, the sunrise is centered between the ridge to the north of the valley and the ridge on the south side of the valley.