Chilly In The Morning

Its clear, which means its cold. Its 39'F, which is too cold to race down a hill on a bicycle an hour early to get started on my work. I'll do that tomorrow instead. By then I might be caught up and can come in an hour later. And its supposed to be 10 degrees warmer tomorrow.

I am liking my new PC more and more. Windows 7 is kinda like the advertisements for Windows 95, if Windows 95 had worked as fast and intuitively as Windows 7 actually does. Yes, its taken them 18 years to reach full operability, but they did eventually reach it. On average, any scientific or engineering discovery takes 17 years to reach a store shelf. Average. The computer industry is generally quicker, since software code pushes out to customers almost immediately, or is sold and reaches the market within months or years depending on expense and customer confusion. This means layered cheap solar is another 10 years away. But at least you can get LiFePO4 batteries off the shelf for projects. I understand that Black and Decker uses them in their tools now.

A few years ago I would have had to pay for MS Office for my PC. I'm a writer and use a word processor. Now I have Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and Database functions in a free download called Open Office. It will run native MS files too, so I don't have the hassles of bad conversions like MS Works did. Very irritating, having to clear garbled symbols from my novels by hand, keep in mind. This just works.

I've had a Hotmail account, with no numbers in it, since 1993 or '94. Back when Hotmail was new, and wasn't owned by MS because they wanted the Hot name for their Hot Office project, which got stomped by Palm who trademarked HotSync for their PDAs and kept the name, causing MS to rebrand with "Active" instead of "Hot" but Hotmail still works all these years later. The online office is something Google eventually did. This meant that MS couldn't sell Outlook because you could just use Google for free so why bother? And we do at my work. So now they offer a fairly high end version of Outlook for free download at MS and it works great. I also have Google mail and calendar, but Bing's desktop pictures are really pretty. And their news interface is better. I still want a Killfile option for news I dislike. If I could Right-Click Dennis Rodman out of my news forever? That would be great. There are many people in this world I don't care about, and he's just one of them.

A few days ago Bing had a nice clean parorama of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. I met Zabriskie's grandson in Tecopa Hot Springs decades ago, part of my degree is field work. There's a lot of old miners and prospectors retired at a trailer park there. In the winter it's warm and there's free hot baths, which ease aching joints. Many of the roads in the area are being ground up or just plain evaporate in the summer heat so the roads are gravel or washing out entirely. Used to be pavement. Not anymore. There was a Pleistocene Lake at Tecopa, a tiny patch of tallgrass prairie (native, 6-7 feet tall, extremely rare), and the Amargosa River that feeds the salt flats at Devils Golf Course in Death Valley goes past there, then loops around the mountains and flows down from the South. This is a good time to visit Death Valley.

The flowers just bloomed but are probably dead by now since they only bloom a week, and the weather is nice. Warm, not hot. Windy I'm sure. Rich people are in Palm Springs right now, warming up after the coastal chill in LA. Working on their skin cancer tans.

Around here the grass is coming up tall, very quickly. There's pollen all over my car. The trees are leafing in and the sap is running. Days get longer and the sun is sometimes warm enough to overcome the chill of icy winds bursting down off the Sierras. It's a good place to be. I wish my Mom could enjoy it. Sigh.