Today, Astronomy Picture of the Day presents a fabulous photo: In the Center of the Heart Nebula. Although APOD has always been one of my favorite sites, I have been following it a lot more consistently since I subscribed to an RSS feed using Bloglines.
Author: Elaine
Support
Yesterday, I installed Fedora Core 3 on the machine we use as a file server. The previous week, I installed Fedora Core 3 on Jack’s machine, so we are all using the same release now. Since Jack was running SUSE 9.0 before that, I hope this will cut down on the number of questions from Jack that I will have to research before I can answer them. I am a lot more familiar with where RedHat/Fedora Core puts files and how it expects you to do things than I was ever able to become with SUSE.
Folly and friend
My friend, with her new kitten named, appropriately, Folly.
Perl 2004 Advent Calendar
The Perl 2004 Advent Calendar has its first entry up.
To the Library
I have been wanting to take a picture of my mother’s place after it snows, but the weather hasn’t been cooperating with any deep snow falls. I took this photo yesterday as my mother left her condo to go with me to the library.
Cold Snap
The high today, briefly accomplished, was 18 F. Before I moved to the state, I shared the common misconception that Colorado is very cold during the winter. However, at least here along the Front Range, daytime highs of forty and fifty are not uncommon in the winter, and it seems really cold right now.
The horses seemed resigned to it. I looked out this morning and they were all standing in the light snow, with an inch deep layer on their backs. Their fur coats provide sufficient insulation to keep the snow from melting from their body heat. The first winter we had horses here at home it used to bother me that they were not using their nice, new (and expensive) barn when it snowed, but over the years I found out that you can’t pry them out of the barn when it is blizzarding or raining, so I suppose they have their own set of criteria of miserable weather.
Dudley drove me crazy this morning by requesting to go outside, and then scratching the door to be let inside again, because, you know, it’s like COLD outside. By mid-afternoon, he had evidently decided that it was not going to improve and I no longer felt like a doorman for a dog. Damn: he just scratched again.
Eggsactly
When my friend got her chickens last summer, I wondered when they were likly to start laying eggs. My friend said that although they might start laying at five months or so, she thought that the short days of winter would prevent them from doing so. One of them proved her wrong last week. So far, all the eggs (nine so far) seem to come from one hen, since they are uniform in size and color.
Another one …
…for the sunrise fans.
A Trip Down Memory Lane
I was using markup languages for documents when html was just a gleam in Berner-Lee’s eye. I couldn’t remember when I first saw html or a browser, so I found A Little History of the World Wide Web. Odd to think that it has just been fourteen years since he coined the name World Wide Web.
I remember my first impression of html: “hmm…how limited.” (I was used to a rather fabulous markup language called Bookmaster, which was used by IBM to produce documentation.) This was when Jack first showed me a browser running on our XT machine here at home, not too long after we moved to Colorado. “Boy…this is sure going to suck up a lot of bandwidth.”
I was right on both accounts.
Firefox tip – mozex
I am posting this via mozex, which is a hard to configure put powerful Firefox extension that allows you to choose an editor for Firefox (and Mozilla) textareas. Browser support for editing textareas is usually quite poor, so it is nice to have the ability to specify a “real” editor. This NewsForge article explains how to set it up.
I am using Quanta as my editor, since it allows me to preview pages easily.