Some things never change.

I've never spent as much winter time at our family's home on Pawtuckaway Lake in NH as I have this season. So I've been seeing some things that I've never seen before.

One day last week I was looking out at the lake. The sun was glistening off the ice. The bright white snow was a contrast to the evergreen trees and the deep blue sky. It was very pretty.

It made me think that maybe the winter here is the prettier time of year. Summer may be nicer, but winter is prettier.

One of the greatest shortcomings of summer on the lake is that on weekends the power boating traffic is nearly overwhelming. The noise and crowding is a dramatic contrast to the relative quiet of the summer weekdays. Last week, while admiring the winter beauty, I also thought, "amd it's so peaceful and quiet seven days a week."

Then we got a big snow.

The past two days were the first weekend since we got any considerable snowfall. So the snowmobiles arrived.

While the snowmobilers are not as "in-your-face" as the power boats, there're definitely there. You can hear the roar of their engines across the ice in the woods of the park. Every few minutes one of the machines will appear on the shoreline trails, or out on the ice.

Also the pristine beauty of the snow on the ice has now been marred by a squiggly web of tracks.

So some things never change. Weekends are not so peaceful here, even in the winter. Today I'll learn whether things quiet down during the week. My brother says it does.

Anyway it's still pretty pretty.

 Tim O'Reilly on Piracy

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of the great computer book publisher O'Reilly & Associates. He's written a very good article on the true effect of online "piracy": "Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."

Thanks to Doc Searls for the pointer.

 DeepFUN

Bernie DeKoven has a series of articles about the process, act, nature, and community, of having fun. I think alot -- if not all -- of this is very relevant to the more general goal of creating satisfying "shared experiences", which is of great interest to me.

 BMac Meeting Visit Report

Here's the BMac Meeting Report that I promised a few days ago. Excerpt: "I went prepared to criticize... I thought I'd say, 'These kids don't know how to run a good user group. Why I remember the Golden Age...' But instead, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty good."

 Photo-Journalist

Catherine Leroy was a photo-journalist in Vietnam during the war. The LA Times has this feature about her.

 Hello.

I'm still here. I've just been a little distracted for the past few days. More soon. I promise.

While you're waiting, mull this over: Scifi.com reports that, "Matt Frewer told a chat on SCIFI.COM that he's trying to resurrect his most famous character: Max Headroom." Full Story (Thanks to Boingboing for the lead.)

 BMac

I went to the BMac user group meeting last night. It was good. Full report later.

 Going to the big-city

Later today I'm heading down to Boston for a few days. I'm going to visit with some friends, plus I have some business stuff to do. I'm kinda sorry to say that I've decided to expand my job search to Boston. I've been looking up here for about 6 months with no success and I'm thinking that it's time to bite the bullet. It's only an exploratory thing right now.

 Cold!

I'm such a wimp... But I really don't like this cold. It was 4 (four!) degrees when I woke up this morning.

Yesterday was actually very nice. It got up to around 40 degress. It's a sign of how cold it gets here, that 40 is considered "nice".

Here's a webpage I created that shows that temp over the past 24 hours.

 Game On!

Web 404 Error version of classic computer game BREAKOUT.

 1984 Arrives 18 Years Late.

This is just beyond belief!

Associated Press (by way of www.news8austin.com and boingboing.net):

High school students nationwide may be surprised to know that the Pentagon knows their name, address and phone number.

A provision of a new federal education law requires high schools to hand over the information for recruiting purposes, or risk losing federal funds. And they must give the military the same access to campuses that businesses and college recruiters enjoy.

 An Ocean Of Storage

OceanStore: "OceanStore is a utility service like electricity," says Kubiatowicz, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "You save your data on what looks like your local hard drive but it is really a large distributed service running in the background. The data is then copied and spread around the world so it's extremely hard to destroy."

 And the Beatles Were McCartney's Previous Backup Band...

From the Seacoast Mac mailing list:

Working as a computer instructor for an adult-education program at a community college, I am keenly aware of the gap in computer knowledge between my younger and older students.  My observations were confirmed the day a new student walked into our library area and glanced at the encyclopedia volumes stacked on a bookshelf.

"What are all these books?" he asked.  Somewhat surprised, I replied that they were encyclopedias.

"Really?" he said.  "Someone printed out the whole thing?!?"

 Where it all started.

RealVideo of the original 1968 Doug Engelbart presentation where he first introduced the mouse, and many of the user interface concepts we use now.

  Palo Alto Murals

At last night's GeekMeet I was telling about the sidewalk murals in downtown Palo Alto. Here are pictures of them.

 Odd Todd is NOT a terrorist!

Odd Todd: "...I looked up and noticed alot of people were staring at me. At first I didn't know why. They all had these sort of blank worried looks on their faces. Then I looked down and saw that I was holding a test tube full of weird green stuff and I was about to open it up on a crowded subway."

 Those wacky Romanians.

Here's a piece I wrote a year ago about one of my favorite seasonal milestones.

...Throughout history humans have often been a little weirded-out by this time of year, with its short days and reduced sunlight.

The Druids spent hundreds of years dragging really big rocks to a field in Britain to build Stonehenge so they could keep track of the seasons...

 Busy, busy.

The holidays have kept me a little busier than I'd expected. Catching up...

Winter has hit hard here in New Hampshire. Lisa, my sister-in-law, says that she expects this to be an above-average harsh winter. This prediction is based on the fact that it's started earlier than usual. And she's right. We've already had three or four snowfalls this year. It's not uncommon to have few or none till after Christmas.

We've had some snow-cover on the ground -- although just a little -- for over a month now. And the temps have been pretty low. Nightimes have been in the teens four nights this past week, and below freezing for 16 nights in the past three weeks.

So anyway, it's winter -- and Winter doesn't even officially start for two more weeks.

T-Day

I spent the long Thanksgiving Day weekend at my brother's house up in Vermont. It was a 3-in-one weekend. Not only did we celebrate turkey day, but also the 1st birthday, and Baptism of North, my nephew.

With three different celebrations overlapping I ate an extra specially large amount of food over the weekend. Very good food though. Lisa, my brother David's wife, roasted an excellent turkey with all the fixin's. And my mom brought one of her legendary Apple pies.

Way up there in VT it's even more winter-like than down here. It must have snowed 6-8 inches over the three days I was there. I was able to put my 4 wheel-drive to good use.

Everyone up there was all a-flutter about the fact that the ski-slopes were able to open unusually early. Lisa read me a bit from the local paper about how the nearby hill was opening this early for only the second time in 50 years. Actually, she read it to me like three different times. She is a Vermont local, and expert skier. She was excited.

Anyway winter is here. Spring starts in 108 days.

Stuff I'm involved with:
EAA Vintage Chapter 15
Prescott Park Arts Festival

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