One more month

{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): Wall to the master bedroom and MBR closet All swinging doors (14, plus closets) Fixed doors to the kitchen Drywalls and mud Painting Electrical (all) Plumbing (finish) Bathroom and kitchen tiles Not bad, huh?

It's heaping up!

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! Continue reading

Late, late, late

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. Continue reading

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.