Freezing in SLT

President’s Day weekend, and the slopes were packed. I had decided to go with a friend from L.A. who had never been skiing or boarding before, so a lot of the time was spent outside the ski circus. In the end, I had a ton of fun, although the conditions were only average. The snow was decent, with some four inches falling between Friday and Saturday. Sunday saw a few flurries, but nothing that amounted to what the other resorts had seen. Continue reading

Recovering from IMAP crash

One morning I connect to my IMAP server and it tells me there is an I/O error. Terrified, I connect using SSH and find out the hard drive is full of backup files. This in turn seems to have caught Cyrus in the worst possible moment, and I struggle to restart it. Whenever I do, I get weird error messages like this: Feb 21 04:35:15 invent lmtpunix[9573]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery Continue reading

Snow predicted for the long weekend

Looks like Tahoe will be prey to the chill gods. Actually, even the Bay Area is supposed to get its light dusting with snow. The snow level is supposed to fall to 2000 feet, which would still cover a lot of peaks around here. And I am to run out to Tahoe on the weekend with a friend, Mike. That’s gotta be tough!

War of the Worlds (2005)

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise! A revival of the (excellent) Minority Report! That sounds like a reason to go to a theater, doesn’t it? Well, I didn’t go when I could have, and I am happy I didn’t. The movie is a singular catastrophe, and I wished the director and protagonist had chosen a better screen writer. It’s about 100 years after Wells wrote the original, and you’d think it’s time to modernize. Continue reading

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Paradoxically, while I am a huge fan of the history of the Medieval Middle East (in particular, of the Eastern Roman Empire) I didn’t watch “Kingdom of Heaven” in the theaters. Instead, I waited for a sick weekend and rented it from the local store. Ridley Scott set out to do a relatively accurate depiction of the goings-on during the destruction of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. For those that don’t know, in 1099 the First Crusade marched into Jerusalem and captured the city from the Saracens (Muslims). Continue reading

Sunday fun

Leaving on Sunday morning for a full day of snowboarding to Heavenly with a bunch of colleagues (including a bloody beginner!)

Heavy winds in Tahoe

Just when I thought I could have a nice weekend of snow and carefree gliding, the weather forecast tells me it’s actually going to be extremely windy (44mph) over the weekend. Sigh! Snow conditions are still reputed to be excellent, and a few inches of fresh snow may fall on Saturday, making for a nice day Sunday.

Moonbows

The night I arrive, we had a spectacular full moon that had a great time blasting light all over the island. You didn’t need any lanterns or other devices, so bright was it. Looking towards the mountain, we saw the usual rain clouds hammering the upper slopes. All of a sudden, a huge greyish ring forms, and we realize we are seeing a rainbow of moonlight. Is that a moonbow?

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (T. Ryan)

Ok, I’ll give it away immediately: this is one charmer of a book! It’s the story of a woman who escapes an abusive husband and chronic poverty by participating in contests and winning prizes in a big way. She is so good at it, she makes a living with it and eclipses her husband’s earnings. All in all, though, it’s at the same time the story of ten kids that have to suffer through a childhood full of strictures just to find themselves a wonderful family that will stick together forever. Continue reading

Collapse (J. Diamond)

“Guns, Germs, and Steel” counts as one of those eye-opening books that correlate things you hadn’t thought about before, just like “Godel, Escher, Bach” a while back. I enjoyed it immensely, and I was looking forward to whatever Jarred Diamond was cooking up next. Which turned out to be the present book, Collapse. Guns was about how European societies dominated the world because Europe benefited from climatic benefits that no other area of the world had. Continue reading