random bits

[cellio]

Turnout for choir practice has been small for a while, and for a few months I've been the only person on my part. I'm actually enjoying that; I think I'm doing a good job with it, and it's easier for me to blend with the rest of my section. :-) (Sadly, we just lost ommkarja, a fine alto, to the west coast. Hope your drive out is going smoothly!)

Sunday night we joined a crowd at Joe's Basement for dinner to celebrate Ralph's birthday. Mmm, good food. It turns out they no longer take reservations for the Pope Room and our party was too large anyway. I forgot to hunt it down so I could find out what the fuss is about. Given the level of kitsch in the rest of the place, it's got to be pretty impressive!

Sunday morning I was beginning to think thoughts about window air conditioners. Sunday afternoon the temperature dropped more than 20 degrees in one hour. Today brought frost warnings. Ahem. Someone failed to read the spec; this is not normative spring weather.

Someone I know just returned from an assignment in the middle east, where he encountered a peculiar weather phenomenon. He observed that there was a lot of dust in the air and that there was impending rain, and that the latter should take of the former. Well, yes and no -- it rained mud. :-)

I now have evidence that my intermittent "monitor" problems are actually graphics-card problems. I'm guessing the connection is a little loose, because I have found a reliable place on the side of the CPU case where a gentle rap fixes the problem. It's nice to know that the monitor I just replaced (for other reasons) is still in good shape, though. Eventually I'll sweet-talk Dani into carrying it down two flights of stairs and it can replace the definitely-flaky, smaller monitor on the file server. We have VNC running on it so it's not that big a deal, but still...