Random notes

Started: 2007-03-22 20:23:11

Submitted: 2007-03-22 21:12:21

Visibility: World-readable

Now that daylight savings time has started, I can do my Thursday lunch-hikes after work. (Given the average daily temperature, it's cooler after 1630 than at 1200.) Since it's been warm and spring-like for the past two weeks (earlier this week Boulder had a string of highs-in-the-70s days), there was no snow or ice on Mount Sanitas, even on the permanently-shaded north-facing slopes on the east ridge trail.

(My newest conundrum: Not only are there a large number of climbable mountains in the greater Boulder area, but there are multiple ways to climb them. How am I supposed to be able to weigh the relative merits of an ascent of Green Mountain via Gregory Canyon versus an ascent of Bear Peak via Fern Canyon? I'm still torn between wanting the snow to melt so I can actually climb Mount Audubon without snowshoeing four miles, one way, to the summer trailhead versus wanting the snow to stick around forever so I can snowshoe everything in sight.)

Last week at Hacking Society, Zan Lynx loaded me his copy of The Jennifer Morgue, the sequel to The Atrocity Archive, which I read in January. It's a distinctly amusing book, but not for everyone. (My reading binge subsided after finishing Off Armageddon Reef, but I did manage to read Naked Economics and The Ghost Brigades.)

Two weeks ago, Kiesa's notebook Blue finally died. She acquired a refurbished Dell Latitude D620, which she named Adara, and put me to work getting it up and running. I effortlessly (albeit unintentionally) annihilated the Windows partition and installed Ubuntu, which hosts VMWare to virtualize Windows XP. (No word yet on how happy XP will be registering itself from within a virtual machine.) Last night I finally got around to getting VMWare Server (one of the free versions; it's almost as functional as the expensive copy of VMWare Workstation my employer installed on Darnassus) up and running, booted the Windows 2000 virtual machine Kiesa used on Blue, and installed a brand new Windows XP virtual machine. I managed to accomplish all this while watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which was amusing but not actually worthy of my full attention. (I wasn't sure what Davy Jones reminded me of: tentacle porn or Cthulhu. Or both.)