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Mark's blog. Mark gets excited about this for about 20 mins. every year or so and so the postings reflect that. But hey, there are millions of blogs that are even less frequently updated than that. :-)
This blog is running on Windows SharePoint v3. The site is authored in Microsoft Office 2007 running on Microsoft Windows Vista. SharePoint Designer was used to create portions of the site and to edit the css. Posts are usually made in Word. |
1/11/2007Wow, what a winter we're having. This morning we have seven inches of snow on the ground and there is a fair amount of ice underneath. Yesterday, Cathie, Chelsea and Hope were heading to harp lessons in the minivan when it started to snow and it started sticking so quickly that they decided to turn around and come home. That was about 4:30p. They didn't get home until after 10p. They slid sideways a couple of times flirting with guard rails and ditches. Some volunteer fellows pushed them up the hill, but after that they didn't think they'd make it up the next big dip in the road so they turned off to be out of the way and called me. At that point, they were pretty close to some friends of ours, just a hill at the entrance to the neighborhood. Chelsea drove and Cathie pushed the car up that hill.
I left Microsoft just after 5p and spent the first hour in the parking garage waiting in line to leave the campus. I spent the next three hours inching my way in traffic through Redmond. Cathie and the kids advised me to go on 202 on the assumption that they'd have sanded the hills up from there, but my guess is that people we're slipping and sliding up Sahalee Way because it appeared to be blocked all the way back to downtown Redmond. After spending a half hour in one spot, I decided to go the other way around and it only took forty minutes to get to Cathie. The little CR-V did really well and only slipped once on a left turn into our friends' neighborhood. We left the minivan parked in front of our friends' house so we could just worry about getting the CR-V home which went fine. I'm glad we didn't have to walk since I didn't have my coat with me and Chelsea just had sandals. J After all the winter we've had you'd think that I'd at least take a coat…
We've lived in the Northwest so long now that it seems natural that a few inches of snow is a major catastrophe. I remember when we first moved here thinking that it was pretty humorous how freaked out everybody gets about a little snow, but now I can't remember how we did it before. How does it work out that school never closes in Utah? We're up to six school days missed already.
And now the power is out again. Sigh… 1/9/2007Seattle area's dark and constant gray gets pretty old every year around February, so it is a good time to take off and find some warm sun somewhere. We're heading to Phoenix again this year. Quick flight, not outrageously expensive and pleasant weather. I'm looking forward to it. And maybe we'll miss a power outage. J Boy, ever since the power outage of 2006, every time the wind blows I brace myself for an extended outage. Sigh…
Warren Buffet has said that he feels lucky to have been born when and where his skill (capital allocation) was useful or rewarding. I probably didn't remember the quote quite right and unfortunately I didn't find the original quote poking around with the search engines. Anyway, I feel quite lucky to have been born here and now myself when my fascination with computers and algorithms could feed me. My life would have been quite different if I'd been born somewhere else or earlier. Having no power makes me really conscious of how much of my time I spend goofing around with various electronic devices that require power… 12/22/2006It may be that even if you are out of state, you heard that we had a record breaking wind storm. The newscasters in Texas apparently kept saying "hurricane force winds". We've lived in Washington for 16+ years now and we get a pretty good wind storm that knocks out somebody's power at least once every winter. Having lots of trees and above ground power lines probably has something to do with it. Since we've been here, this one has been, by far, the worst. The storm left over a million people without power.
We live in an "outlying area", so it took them a while to get to us, 6 ½ days. There are still a bunch of people without power. So… I was paying more attention to the wood chopping, entertaining kids and hunkering under blankets reading books than anything else. That means all of my Christmas shopping got put on hold. So those of you expecting something from me, I've probably mailed it by now, but it is going to take a while to reach you. Hey, late arriving presents extends the fun, right? 11/30/2006
Now that I’ve read it, I’m surprised I didn’t before. The book has been translated to English since 1959 and I’ve run across it from recommendations or references before, but I hadn’t picked it up. It’s probably one of those books that everybody should read. Vicktor Frankl’s personal tragic optimism is an inspiration. My copy has a biographical afterword by William J. Winslade that I discovered just when I was curious about the information he provided (when I’d just finished the book). 11/24/2006
Dark Matter is an interesting book exploring astronomer and physicist views of dark matter in the universe in layman language. The central issue is that the measured motion of stars and galaxies doesn't match up with what we expect from estimates of the mass of the visible matter combined with Newton's gravitational math.
I really like books like these. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll invariably run across complaints about accuracy and/or glossing over of something or another. I sympathize with the situation of the author though because the act of translating from papers and language of the field into layman's terms is fraught with peril, particularly in areas with many differing or changing conceptual interpretations of the information.
OK. Clearly any blogpost today should really be about Thanksgiving, but I ran across this origami model that is too amazing. One uncut square: http://chosetec.darkclan.net/origami/mensetmanus2/
The food was wonderful and the company fun, I couldn't ask for more and I'm thankful. Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 11/21/2006
I know that I'm a little slow. Usually we can't wait to see the Pixar movies, but I didn't quite find the time. However, it showed up from Netflix last weekend and I loved it! My favorite character is Mater.
I also enjoyed "The Prestige". Chelsea and I went together a week ago.
I'm looking forward to soaking a Turkey in salt and Apple Cider. I love having a little relaxing time to do some cooking. The holidays are nice because other people take time off too which means fewer fires to put out when I go back. :-) 10/22/2006
Our friend Diane has a website http://dianesmarketkitchen.com. Braden set it up and designed the pages with elements provided by Diane. He did a nice job, don't you think?
The website is for Diane's cooking school. The kitchen is really near Pike Place Market and she takes you on a shopping tour to pick up the ingredients for the class. And then you go back to the kitchen and prepare a beautiful and tasty dish. |
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