the calendar says it's spring.

i'm skeptical, and if i weren't lazy i'd show you pictures of the snowstorm we got right after my last post to reinforce my skepticism. on the other hand, we went biking this afternoon. it was great. movement, outdoors, that didn't require brushing snow off anything first! granted, i couldn't really feel my fingers by the end, but the snow was mostly hidden under mud and the sun was shining.

let's just leave it at "spring-like" and hope for the best, shall we?

in other news, i'm still sick. this is going on record as the most persistent cold i've had--coming up on four weeks, i think. had to miss yet another day of work on friday. (in my own defense, i argued with my supervisor for ten minutes before giving up and staying home. seems he doesn't want support techs who can't...well, support.)

linkage:

• picnik: picasa-worthy photo retouching and enhancing, online. very, very cool.
• my tiddlywiki: seemed the most convenient way to document my adventures with xgl. handy.
• i'm productive! reuters says so!
• thank you, npr, for showing the recording industry a little backbone.

the snow melted this weekend, grass appeared, and we all stopped wearing winter coats.

benjamin and i even took a walk at the cobbs hill reservoir (along with half the city), because it was just so darn pretty outside. (we saw all the "oh, it's winter, no one will notice" dog leavings, too!)

but--and this is important--it's not spring. it's march 14th today, which means it's most definitely still winter in rochester. it's critical that no one start thinking, "hurrah, no more snow!" because we will have more snow, probably lots, before the real spring starts. raising one's hopes for warmth in the middle of march is never a good idea in upstate new york.

even so, it's awfully nice while it lasts. it's a little strange to drive home from work in broad daylight, but you won't find me complaining. it's nice to just get in the car and drive on monday morning, instead of spending ten minutes warming up the car and brushing the snow off and kicking yourself for not leaving early, again. it's even nicer to not have to shove the car out of its snowbank. and to be able to drive the speed limit in residential areas and know the car will, in fact, stop at the next stop sign.

i like snow. ask anyone. i like to ski, i like to build snow forts, i like to walk during snowfalls. but spring--once it arrives for good--will be very nice.

readers, i give you beryl.

that's an XFCE4 terminal being minimized. my cube is transparent, so you can see a corner between two desktops in the background.

for the record, i'm running the january 5th build of XGL, the SVN beryl ebuilds from the xeffects overlay, and XFCE 4.4. my graphics card is an ATI mobility radeon X300, running with ATI's fglrx driver. took me roughly a day to get it all together, but it's running beautifully.

i'm going to back to burning up my windows now.

watch this, immediately.

[UPDATE: i had originally embedded the video here, but got some funny display issues, thanks to my *cough* unorthodox page design. just visit the link.]

that's our moon, crossing in front of our sun.

from the source:

On Feb. 25, 2007 there was a transit of the Moon across the face of the Sun - but it could not be seen from Earth. This sight was visible only from the STEREO-B spacecraft in its orbit about the sun, trailing behind the Earth. NASA's STEREO mission consists of two spacecraft launched in October, 2006 to study solar storms. The transit starts at 1:56 am EST and continued for 12 hours until 1:57 pm EST. STEREO-B is currently about 1 million miles from the Earth, 4.4 times farther away from the Moon than we are on Earth. As the result, the Moon will appear 4.4 times smaller than what we are used to. This is still, however, much larger than, say, the planet Venus appeared when it transited the Sun as seen from Earth in 2004.

there are high resolution versions available at the site.

on a related note, pray really hard for clear skies tomorrow evening. it'd be a shame to miss the moon show.

I'd had too much sleep the night before. In bed by 9:30? A waste, made more wretched by the headache I'd been nursing all day. I always get a headache if I sleep too long. I'd resolved not to repeat the incident.

So it was that Benjamin found me at 3:10am, spread out on the couch, glued to the sixth season of The West Wing. He stumbled over in his pajama pants, tufts of hair akimbo.

"Why are you up at three in the morning?" he squinted at me in confusion.

"You did it last night!" I countered brilliantly. (Which was true: He'd been playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a fantasy role-playing game.)

He ignored my retort. "Here, you'll need these for your quest," he mumbled, handing me a pair of used earplugs.

I looked at the earplugs, then at his face. It was scrunched up, as if to keep the rest of the world around the edges. "Earplugs?" Maybe he was hinting that I should turn down the volume.

"Yeah. For your quest."

"What quest?" I started to giggle.

He made a face and tried to hand the styrofoam slugs to me again. "Come on, don't laugh at me, you know what I mean!"

The giggling was getting worse. He sighed and started to turn away, and I grabbed his hand to keep him in place. "Why do I need earplugs for my quest?" I had a hard time getting the words out, this time.

He wrestled away, smiling confidently. "You need them. And you should stop laughing at me." He shuffled back to the bedroom, leaving the earplugs on the coffee table.

I should mention that Benjamin does have a history of sleepwalking. His favorite episode took place many years ago, when he left his shoes on a neighbor's doorstep. It was a secret mission.

The West Wing was still paused. I closed it down and made my way to the bedroom, leaving the earplugs behind. Benjamin lay flat on his stomach. I sidled alongside.

"Benjamin!"

He twitched.

"Benjamin, why did you give me the earplugs?"

A mutter rose from the pillow: "I was returning them to you. You knew what I meant!"

I spent the rest of my waking moments that evening laughing hysterically.