The Substantially Similar Weblog

The New England tourism industry has been hit hard this year by a weak showing of autumn colors. This Japanese Maple in our front yard has finally turned brilliantly red, though:

Breaking news! As of about 10 seconds ago, we’ve received our first snowflakes in Boston. So long, Autumn. I’d post photos, but the flakes are almost invisible.

I spoke too soon. It started out just barely visible:

But pretty soon it was snowing cats and dogs:

And now it’s sticking!

(front)

(back)

Today’s forecast reports:

Any travel is strongly discouraged. If you leave the safety of being indoors… you are putting your life at risk.

Above is our front yard picnic table and our back yard picnic table as of this morning—they might be totally gone by the end of the day. Good thing it’s no weather for a picnic.

Incidentally, if anyone has any ideas about how to take good quality digital photos of snow, or how to use the GIMP to get better whites, please let me know. I did a little fiddling with these shots, but it’s really much brighter out there than these images would have you believe.

Being both sick and snowed in inspires me to file bugs and ask mailing list questions. For example, this bug with mplayer that prevents me from playing AAC files that I’ve tagged with mp4tags has been bugging me for a couple of months. And I just learned that sending a USR2 signal to openbox forces ‘reconfigure’, which is quite useful if you script changes to the rc.xml file.

Now if someone could help me with this strange, intractable Apache bug my day would be complete.

November 13 is a tad bit early for me. But at least it’s pretty. Unfortunately, in Boston, it seldom stays below freezing for long, so this will soon be a mixture of mud and ice.

Unfortunately, my blog layout gets screwy if a photo associated with a blog entry is longer than the entry itself. So I need to lengthen the entry to fix it. In order to do that, here is a Robert Frost poem, “A Patch of Old Snow”:

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.