Head out on the highway, Looking for adventure…

While it is still winter, the hint of Spring is in the air, and I find myself drawn to the Road Atlas… with dreams of long sweepers, tight curves, long high-speed runs. My eldest son is heading off on his big adventure, spending a semester in Chile as an Exchange student. He’s leaving Tuesday(!)… Which leaves me with just one son for the next half year. Nicholas is a wonderful travelling companion. So I’m dreaming up an early-summer drive that he and I could do… maybe down to California.

I’m thinking the southbound journey down the east side of the Cascades/Sierra, and then up the coast for the return.

As the scheme develops, I’ll let you know, but if you have any “must drive” roads suggest them in the comments!

Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye

Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye
Microsoft’s marketing materials for a past version of Windows used the phrase, “It just works.” But the only computer that tagline honestly describes is the Macintosh. Don’t translate that in your mind as, “Yeah, so what, the Mac is easy to use.” Any new computing environment takes some getting used to. The easy-to-use aspect is nice, but not all that significant. When Mac users say, “It just works,” what they mean is that you spend more time on your work, and a lot less time working on your computer.

Bingo! Nice to see something I’ve been saying for… ever, validated once again. If you want to spent endless hours futzing around ON a computer, your best choice is honestly a Linux box. If you want to just get stuff done, go with a Macintosh.

If you want to spent your days swearing AT your computer, go with Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft tries real hard. They spend billion$ on thousands of programmers and flog them mercilessly to come up with every possible way to make Windows “cool”… make it “usable”… make it “work”. But in the end you realize that is exactly the problem. This is an Operating System created by commitee. Mind you, so is Linux, but it is made by a commitee that never sees or talks with each other.

MacOS X is really a INTERFACE, not an operating system. The OS underneath it is yet another UNIX variant, but the average computer user would have a hard time noticing that. It is an amalgam of NeXTStep and FreeBSD, both solid UNIX variants with a long history of excellent performance. What Apple has done is tweaked the user interface with all those years of knowledge and experience they gained with the Macintosh, from 1984 to 2001. OS X is hardly related to the “real” (or as Apple calls it in a sugar-water reference “Classic”) Macintosh that was shipped in 1984. Instead it is the tried and true, been in development since the late 1960s, UNIX, with an Apple created User Interface on top.

I’ve been managing UNIX systems of various flavors since 1989… SCO (long before they turned evil!), SunOS 4.X, A/UX, AIX, Solaris, NeXTstep, FreeBSD, Linux, Irix, etc. They have been great multi-user systems, perfect for their task, but what Apple has done is build a UNIX that is suited best as a PERSONAL COMPUTER. That is all about interface, and nobody builds better UI than Apple.

So… tired of fighting your computer? Tired of running the computing equivalent of bending over in the prison shower? Tired of running a spam spewing robot without your knowledge? Tired of cleaning up the mess of backdoors, trojans, viruses, worms, etc?

Get a Macintosh.

Gone Skiing.

Many of you have noticed I haven’t updated the site in several days… that is because I’m on vacation. Once a year I visit my parents, who have had the remarkable foresight to retire to a ski resort. Yeah… tough life but I gotta admire their smarts for that! So we bring the grandkids and test the limits of my long-gone lateral meniscus on the slopes.

It seems that 4 straight days of fixed-heel skiing is all my knee can take anymore. I left the telemark skis at home this year to lighten our luggage load, and I’m paying for it now. The on/off alpine/telemark shift helps me last the whole week, but relentless fixed-heel skiing wears me down. I realize to many people this is completely counter-intuitive, but Telemark turns are much easier on my bad knee than fixed heel alpine skiing is. In alpine boots, every shock is transmitted into my knee as bone-to-bone contact. On tele’s impacts are transmitted through a bent knee… so it is far less stressful.

Of course, my toes are happier, as my tectonic shift from leather (Asolo Snowpines!) to plastic tele boots a few years ago leads to a yearly loss of a toenail or two. The suffering we do for fun! I still haven’t fallen for the overly Alpine, up to the knee Tele boots… and have a barely-over-the-ankle Garmont “touring boot” for my freeheeling pinhead ski style. I also have tele skis that are 200cm long… some Wolf Cold Smokes. I guess I’m a throwback to my 80’s tele retro beginnings. I still have my snowpines and 205cm Karhu XCDextremes in the garage at home.

The week started on old snow and sunshine and I was happy to not have the teles, and pin-skiing on hard snow is no fun really. But the powder arrived yesterday and I stare longingly at the free-heelers and banged my knee up so bad I had to take today off.

Back on the slopes tomorrow and I suspect you won’t see another word here until sometime next week.

Tough life, but somebody has to live it.

(oh, and I had to fix my parent’s wireless network… ugh.)

A footnote: I skiied a few days ago for half a day without poles. I found it a liberating experience! I tend to be a lazy, hip/foot focussed skier anyway due to my bad knee, and as such the poles become sort of useless. Telemarking for 20-some years has given me great balance and edge control (all alpine skiers should spend time on teles, or even snowboards, to truly learn edges and balance. I snowboarded for a few years back in the 80s.) so I can shift edge to edge without much upper-body fuss. I don’t do much serious mogul skiing anymore as the loss of all shock-absorption properties in my right knee make it excruciating. I can do it, I just can’t function for days afterwards! As such, I have found poles to be sort of plastic and metal appendixes… useless extra stuff hanging off the end of useful bits.

It was great fun to ski without them. I may continue to do so.