The Hawaiian flight from Honolulu to San Francisco made it in record time: 4h 19m! This was due to a generous jet stream that gave us an excellent tail wind.
How unfortunate that said tail wind and jet stream were causing a major storm in San Francisco that forced a shutdown of the airport… In the end, the whole flight took 5 hours, as usual, and I made it home in time to be deprived of sleep by the wind.
Continue reading{moszoomimglink:Kitchen tiles}The list of things to do is shrinking and shrinking. Remember, I presented it last month, and here is a new colored version (green: HAPPENING; grey: DONE):
Not bad, huh?
The webcam says it all: it’s dumping snow in South Lake Tahoe! Great news, since it appears part of a system that will take us into the weekend, which will be devoted once more to snowboarding. This time the company sponsors an offsite, and that means Monday is included again (and again, I won’t be able to snowboard one day because I am going to be assisting beginners).
Hooray! I almost thought this snow season was beyond saving!
Just came back from Ninole, with a day-long flight that managed to be by far the fastest I have taken. The plane made it into the Bay Area from Honolulu in 4:19, and then had to park due to heavy winds for 40 minutes (sigh).
The house is well, with the tile work in progress and the electrical close to rough-in. That means we still have a few weeks to go, but then it’s final inspection and I can my refi done. That’s going to be a huge thing for me, finally to be out of the strictures of a construction loan!!!
Continue readingPresident’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. Mt. Rose surprised us with over a foot of fresh snow! Oddly enough, the Nevada side had much better conditions. The top of Galaxy had some serious powder cover, and I had a great time sailing through it.
Continue readingOne 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
Feb 21 04:35:15 invent lmtpunix[9573]: DBERROR: critical database situation
Of course, I have not the slightest idea what to do. At least there is a hint to a recovery tool, no?
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!
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. But the story unfolds unchanged, with only minor variants, and we are faced with an invasion that is ridiculous to say the least.
Continue readingParadoxically, 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). A hundred years later, the resurgence of Islam that came from the Turkic tribes of Anatolia forced the destruction of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Continue readingLeaving on Sunday morning for a full day of snowboarding to Heavenly with a bunch of colleagues (including a bloody beginner!)
