Last weekend saw us in Yosemite, hosting Lois’s brother. On the way to picking him up (after the first u-turn…) we saw a Bobcat cross the road and amble into the brush, looking back at us once as if to say “you’re not getting out of your car, don’t even act like you are”. We survived his or her disdain, and with Alvin in tow headed up to Yosemite, I’m not counting the dead boar on the side of the road as wildlife. At Yosemite we saw Coyotes, a grand 6 or 8 prong buck, and 5 other deer, and also a Coyote that was just waiting for us to feed him. Weird to be stared back at, instead of running like we expected, he clearly was waiting for us to feed him. Bad news really, it’s not good for them to be dependent like that, and I just know some idiot tourists have been encouraging them with food.
Anyway, Alvin was the master of ceremonies for tire chain installation/removal for the pass, while I turned the wheels appropriately, feeling rather guilty and/or woose-like.
All in all, it was a good time, if a long day. Drove about 360 miles all told, starting at 6am or so and getting back at 9:30pm. Surprisingly, got about 39mpg, despite rain, snow, and my lead foot.
The geoeye satellite that google uses to create google maps managed to photograph the inauguration from space. Here are the two resulting pics, click to view the full sized versions. That isn’t shrubbery, it’s people, about 1.9 Million of them.
Via Makezine:
If you look carefully, you can see where the big screen TV’s are, from where folks are standing.
I just watched the inauguration in Sproul Plaza, with an estimated ten thousand of my fellow Americans. Packed together on the ground that has seen the birth of the Free Speech Movement, and inumerable protest marches over the decades, we all watched another chapter in this American story begin. It looks like it was the largest ever gathering at Sproul Plaza.
Today, I begin again as well. Today, I will look at what I’m doing, and how I’m doing it. I will look at my priorities, and see what is good, and what is not.
I will hold close this new light, this new aspiration to bring the best of ourselves out, and see how I can translate that into my everyday. I will see what I can do to improve not just my lot, but that of others.
So now that I’ve had a chance to more-or-less integrate my computer, I figured I should share specs.
Mac Pro, 2.8Ghz x 8 Cores (2xquad core xeon harpertown processors)
10Gb of RAM, as you can never have too much.
1TB disk, soon to be expanded to 2TB or possibly 4TB, as 1TB SATA drives aren’t that expensive these days. Or I might wait for 2TB drives. The system is 64bit, so it can hack the volume sizes. The 1.5TB drives aren’t stable yet, so I’m probably just going to wait until I actually need the storage. I have a 1TB backup disk and a 500GB external drive on Firewire 800, so I’m not really hurting at the moment.
Two Superdrives, which I’ve found to be really convienent as I can do burns and use the other drive for something else at the same time.
24-inch Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP monitor, which is quite nice, and a lot cheaper than the apple option for pretty much the same screen. Bonus, it has a card reader so I can import pictures easily. It seems to be somewhat over-saturated in color, which is making for some interesting color management problems with photoshop work, but it sure looks pretty.
And finally, I opted for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. It rocks. Graphics are really nice, I can turn up the options on things like Spore and see all sorts of things that I didn’t before.
