Mowing the Yard on Christmas Eve

What better way to spend Christmas eve in Texas than mowing the yard? It needed mowing badly and the day was too nice to stay indoors. Besides yard work, Susan and I took a long walk and visited the ducks in the nearby park. After feeding hungry ducks, we walked through a nearby housing development that’s going up to see what the under-construction houses looked like. Slightly higher quality construction than usual but the same old yuppy-palace floor plans. Lots of wasted space and inexplicable design features. My favorite of late is the placement of the closet in the master bedroom – a lot of the newer floorplans are placing it in the bathroom. So you have to use the bathroom as a sort of hallway to get in and out of the closet. Besides seeming highly inconvenient, it must cause quite a problem with humidity. Still, they always manage to sell them so I guess somebody out there thinks it makes sense.

Winter in Texas

Winter has finally arrived in Texas. The weather has been really nice until lately. The last few days it has gotten pretty cold. I believe it was down to 32F last night. But it stays nice and warm here at the office with all the heat being generated by the servers. We still haven’t needed to turn on the heater.

The Windows NT work is all done for now. It will be nice to get back to Unix again. Hopefully some long awaited hardware upgrades will begin this week.

VAIOs and Other Dinosaurs

The Sony VAIO has left the office and returned to its owner. Despite a smooth 24 burn-in of the refurbished machine, I don’t have high hopes for its future stability. But it should be good for web surfing and playing solitiare.

While eating lunch today at Frijoles, a family of Mallards wandered onto the patio. Only in Texas do you see baby ducks going out to eat at Mexican restaurants. A couple of waiters gave them a plate of tortilla chips to munch on.

I also saw some small plastic dinosaurs while I was at lunch. Which got me thinking… how many of you have plastic dinosaurs on or near your computer? Taking an inventory of the plastic menagerie around my computer at home I find a Stegasaur, Triceratops, Brontosaur, Parasaurolophus, Tyrannosaur, Brachiosaur (all gifts from an ex-girlfriend), a blue pterodactyl that for several years sat on the dash board of a red Honda CRX, three other pterodactyls that were gifts from my wife, and finally, two foam rubber human brains (one from NAB ’98 and one from SuperComm ’99). Nearby on my bookself are several small plastic robots and somewhere in a box I think I may still have my bag of over 100 realistic ants. Hmmm… what does it all mean?