december 2007
december 30 2007 19:06 est spent half the afternoon on the couch, watching football. i want to go snowboarding.
december 26 2007 14:00 est my christmas was just about as good as it could be. how was yours?
december 24 2007 00:11 est snowing like crazy in michigan tonight. when we landed the other day, there was snow all over the ground. all last night was 50-mph winds and 50-degree temperatures. we woke up this morning, and the roads were dry and almost all the snow was gone. then at about one this afternoon, it started to snow, kind of half-heartedly. a couple of swirling flakes, they couldn't possibly stick, right?
now it's about six inches deep outside, we're supposed to get another three or four inches overnight and then another three or four inches after the sun comes up tomorrow. unbelievable. everything is covered in a carpet of white, except for smooth surfaces exposed to the swirling winds, like the windshields at car dealerships. it's a cold, dry, powdery snow; it would have been great to try snow-kiting at the farm on tuesday but i didn't bring the kite or a board home with me so i guess it will just have to wait until next time.
maybe if i'm really lucky, i'll get to shovel the driveway clear tomorrow at mom's house.
december 17 2007 8:38 pst the big storm is supposedly on the way now, but none of the cascade pass ski areas are really open yet. if you're interested in keeping tabs on what a real oregon snowstorm looks like, you can check out the "ski conditions" page at hoodoo, where the webcam is running even if the chairlifts aren't. and i might have linked this before, but the oregon department of transportation has a great webcam network set up, so that you can look and see for yourself what the road conditions are like before you get in the car and start driving. you can click on any of the little cameras and the site should load a live webcam image from that spot.
december 13 2007 20:48 pst one more to go. when i'm done tomorrow, i might even try to clean the piles off my desk.
the last few weeks have been illustrative; classes make much more sense when they are delivered sequentially instead of simultaneously. for example, my mergers class was all *over* the place for the middle eight weeks of the term. it made more sense to just sit down and read through the book in order, noting all of the important stuff that we'd covered out-of order and putting it back into an ordered outline. the only reason that doesn't work in practice is that some profs actually seem to expect you to have done the reading when you come to class. but taking five classes at a time is definitely a sub-optimal approach to actually learning all of the material.
since i'm using my email address here so infrequently now, i finally went ahead and cranked up my spamassassin settings, so that hopefully all of the really lousy stuff and more of the marginal stuff gets filtered. if you send me something here, and it seems like i haven't read it, that's probably because it went right in the trash. if it was important, i would urge you to try again without using the word "free" in the subject line. in 18 hours, i'll be halfway done with law school...
december 11 2007 21:54 pst things are starting to slow down a little around here for me. it's such a foreign sense that i didn't recognize it at first. i turned in a 40-page paper on friday last week, and now i only have one more exam left coming up on this friday.
i feel good about classes this term. well, about the exams i've just taken, anyhow. if this year is like last year i won't have any results back until the beginning of january. so in between now and then, the trick is to try to solidify my course schedule and to make sure that i don't have any total stinkers. and if i have some spare time while i'm visiting the folks, i'm going to try to set up the php/sql book exchange program to work on the uo network. maybe nobody will use it, but at least i will have made the attempt.
