In four years in Tucson, I remember it snowing exactly once. Actually I don’t even remember the snow itself, but reading about it the next Monday morning in the Wildcat, because I had slept through the snowing (and immediate melting) and it having snowed was newsworthy enough to be on the front page. Not that the front page had to be terribly newsworthy when it came to the Wildcat. Although I think the Wildcat probably had more content and journalistic integrity than mX does, and I always pick up a copy of mX if I am going through Town Hall station at the right time of day. The price is right.

I have been rewriting bits of my website in PHP in order to improve my PHP coding skills. It’s painful because Perl (on which most of my website is already written) is about a million times more powerful in almost every regard. It’s sticky to configure I guess, and is horrible to maintain if written by someone who is unskilled in the ways of the Perl. This is why companies that do OpenSource web development tend to stick with PHP, which bundles itself with everything and dumps everything (including kitchen_sink_faucet_on()) into the same global namespace. Hence the need to brush up on PHP and the loathing of said PHP.

I have also been introducing Tristan 賢 to some of my music. Some of it seems to be taking. I have this dream that he won’t be as conventional in his approach to things artistic as my dad is. He has to figure out what he likes on his own though, and he will do that, but it is fun to show him things that he might not otherwise see or hear :)

“Have you ever seen the valle with snow on it?” “Yes.” *punch* ... “Ouch!” “Stupid! How can you see the valle with the snow in the way?” This exact conversation happened every year on gUe's birthday.

Poughkeepsie train bridge during the winter. A place where it actually gets cold in the winter.

Canyon de Chelly with snow.

I went today.

As you can see, Salt Lake is very white and fluffy today. Last night my mum had a collegue over for dinner from Siberia (originally from Ukraine). He was interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, he had to leave early in order to finish up his science experiement. (more pictures...)

I'm always so pleased with myself after shoveling the first snow storm from my driveway. By the time the second one comes along I am already tired of snow. At least that is the way it is in the Northeast. Today was one of those days that I am glad to be able to work from home. It looked like it was still coming down pretty hard at noonish, but I decided to start shoveling anyway, at least to make it easier to shovel for real when it stopped. However, while I was out there the flakes slowed, and then dissipated completely, and finally the sun came out. I took some photographs, but I am only going to post one because I was a dolt and was shooting with my digital set to 3200, so the quality sucks. Tonight I had dinner with Joe, Cicely and Brian. I'm going to miss Action Tuesday; mostly for the company though, and less for the TV.

I don't know how they do it in the rest of New York, but here in the Hudson Valley they cancel all schools at the sight of a solitary snow flake. The main effect of that on my life is that back when I used to listen to rubbishy commercial radio they would spend hours listing all the schools which had been canceled when it snowed.

I have the option of working from home, so when we have lots of snow I usually do. I did eventually shovel my driveway at about noon. This was the first time that I really needed to shovel. Last year I moved into this place at the tail end of winter and missed most of the real precipitation. Anyway, I had a great deal of self satisfaction when I was done, so I took this picture before going to work:

The DacDriveway

I was actually somewhat surprised at how many people actually showed up for work. At the end of the day, when I was leaving, the night made everything look very cool, so I snapped off a couple more photographs:

They are a bit noisy (digital equivalent to film grain), since I had to shoot them at ISO800. Even so, the shutter speed was something like 1/4s for most of these photographs, so you can see how the anti-shake feature of my digital (Minolta Dimage A1) works in practice. Usually absolute slowest you can handhold a camera is 1/30s. I could have probably compensated for the red shift in these photographs (due to the tungsten lighting and long exposure times), but I actually kind of like what it adds to the mood.

It really sucks that it is dark at five o'clock. On the bright side, I will be skiing soon.