Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

We have snow. It's not deep yet, but it's enough for a proper white blanket, covering the street, not just the sidewalks and parked cars. In the wee hours, with little moving but snowplows and salt trucks, it's peaceful and pretty. In the morning, shovelling it off the sidewalk will be a little annoying, but I won't have to drive in it (snow's not too bad by itself but other drivers, some by stupidity or inexperience and others merely by impatience and grumpiness, often make it so), and I choose to heed the tranquil beauty now and put off thinking of the morrow's work to clear it until the time to step outside and do it has arrived. With luck, the salt and sand will have been adequate and local drivers will have all gotten their remembering-that-the-does-this-every-year freakout over with on Monday night, and rush hour will proceed smoothly; but this day, that's somebody else's problem.

[Edit: Television news quoted a former plow driver who said that although this isn't a lot of snow, it's unusually slippery ("the worst he's ever seen"), so local folks please take that into account. (Simultaneously consider local television news tendency toward fearmongering, of course.) Looks like the "if" at the end of the next paragraph will be moot, unless things clear up really quickly once the snow stops falling.]

I did get out of the house today to take care of several small errands. Not my most critical ones, but a couple of time-sensitive ones and a few easy ones. I was pretty tired afterwards, feeling like my energy had been nickled-and-dimed away on a series of small stops. Everything I really wanted out of the way to feel ready to hole up if other drivers freak out or we get more snow than predicted got done. If the city stays sane and we only get the few inches forecast, then I can see whether I've got the energy to tackle one or two important things, or run off to visit family or go see anniemal. I'm prepared either way.

I'd planned to write a lot during the day, not just leave my quote-of-the-day entry to say it all, but my attentions and energies needed to be elsewhere. Perhaps hot cocoa and LiveJournal will make a snow-day afternoon agenda. Maybe.

In the meantime, here, ( admire a cicada (35K Jpeg) )

"In music, at least, the best way I know to get it to pour out your mouth and hands is to pour it in your ears!" -- siderea, 2005-12-08

I'm trying to use Visual C++ for the first time. I want to test something under Windows. Usually if I want to write anything in C I just do it all under Linux/Unix. (Hmm. I wonder whether any of the distros in the house include a Windows cross-compiler...)

So far, I've decided that this user interface is designed for folks who have really huge monitors set to many many dpi.

(And so far I still don't care for working in an IDE. I see all the potential advantages, starting with the "click on a compiler error message and have the editor cursor jump to the relevant line" thing, but I keep getting irritated at having to navigate an extra layer of UI, not having 'vi' as my editor, not having complete control of how windows are arranged on the screen (or on different screens -- editing on one computer and compiling on a different one is something I've done for decades), and not having my usual shortcuts handy. I don't know whether I just haven't found the right IDE yet, I'm more sensitive to the flaws in current IDEs, or I'm just too set in my ways and need to get over it. In the 1980s I used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and very quickly found out how to invoke the compilers from the command line so I could skip the IDE and work more quickly. The only thing I used their default UI for was the debugger. Every time I read about IDE features, I think an IDE really ought to make things easier for me, but so far they just feel like they're getting in my way.)