If my three-week silence on this site hasn't made it obvious yet: I've officially moved to Dreamwidth. Find me over there for new content. Most posts will be friends-locked. If you leave a comment on something recent, or add me on Dreamwidth to your access list, I'll see it and add you back. In another three weeks, it'll be the 12th anniversary ( Read more... )

Question: Does anyone reading this still plan to stay on LiveJournal? In case you haven't heard, LiveJournal seems to have recently (and silently) removed HTTPS support from the site and also moved the servers hosting everyone's journals to Russia. The news has not been received well by the tech crowd. Several people I know have switched their ( Read more... )

All of Pittsburgh is operating under a new regime for riding the bus as of Sunday. I was eager to try it out for myself today. To be fair, perhaps "regime" is a stronger word than I mean: it's not like these changes are groundbreaking or earth-shattering or anything. Mostly the Port Authority is trying to take another small step towards the ( Read more... )

If San Francisco is where they send the meteorologists who have no forecasting talent - "Today it'll be 20°C with clouds in the morning and sun all afternoon, just like every other day for the past 68 years" - the inland north must be where they send the ones who also wanted to be comedians. "It'll be -10° overnight followed by freezing rain, then ( Read more... )

The count of seasonal snowfalls rises suddenly to three, thanks to a light dusting over the weekend and then a heavy two or three inches over the second part of the day yesterday. Today we hung out around -5°C, and tomorrow the high is supposed to be -12. Now that's winter! The snow was so pretty last night, sticking on the tree branches and ( Read more... )

Sort of a frustrating weekend on balance, this time around, during which seemingly simple tasks turned out more complicated. The chief example of this was upgrading the version of Ubuntu on my desktop. Perhaps "upgrading" in quotes - it's a very peculiar kind of operation that nominally brings your system forward in time, regresses several ( Read more... )

I had sort of intended tonight's post to officially announce my Trump the Trump commitment for December, but that was before I got sucked into some reading of a very different type. I don't think any harm will come if I postpone the Trump stuff for one more day. We can't have all politics all the time here. Or - since I have to admit that ( Read more... )

Well, the weather got the hint, at least. It's colder and the yardwork season suddenly seems like it's coming to a close. I filled almost another two bags of leaves today, but there are very few left on the trees at this point. After doing the front yard last week, I probably won't cut the grass again; some raking next weekend should be it. ( Read more... )

I made up - well, re-wrote - a song for today:"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas."
That's not true at all!
It's 11 degrees and wet;
We haven't had good snow yet;
The autumn leaves still in the trees won't fall.

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas."
Soon that won't feel strange,
And the normalest thing will be
This warmth and greenery
( Read more... )

Back in Pittsburgh as of last night, after a happy Thanksgiving. I know I've been not wanting to travel much recently, but a three-day break was very pleasant. It was about the right length, too. I require much more physical activity than I can ever get at my parents' house. Coming too around these eating-based holidays, I can also get really ( Read more... )