Important safety tip! Do not try to bicycle on ice. It doesn’t annoy the ice, but it doesn’t work, either.
Another tip! If the road is wet on a North facing slope, and it is 39 degrees, there’s a good chance there is ice underneath.
And another! If you notice ice on the puddles in the gutters, there might be more ahead.
I had my first wipeout this morning, on the hill from Sudbury north into Maynard, on 27. I think I scared the driver behind me. One second everything is fine and the next, with no apparent transition, the bike and I are sliding sideways down the road. No harm done, but I will be more vigilant!
Month: April 2009
Microsoft EULAgy
As I was planning this post, I thought I would check the fine print in the End User License Agreement for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2004 for the Mac.
I can’t find it.
The Microsoft website does have the license for the Windows version of Home and Student 2007, but only as a self-extracting EXE file. (A) I don’t have a way to read that, since my XP won’t run under VMware and (B) Office on the Mac says to load the original CD to see the license. Well the CD is at home.
For such a lawyer-crazed company as Microsoft, they sure make it hard to find out what their rules are. I guess that is deliberate.
Anyway, AFAIK, I can’t use Home and Student for work related things. Consequently, last week when I gave a talk at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, I used Keynote.
Evidently I am a Windows Pirate
May I rant?
I have a Macbook Pro, which I like, well, quite a lot. When I first got it, I gave it to my wife to run Windows XP, using Boot Camp. Why? Because I love her more than the Mac.
It turned out that she doesn’t like the trackpad having only one button, so I got it back, and I happily run MacOS.
The copy of Windows XP on the Mac is an OEM copy for computer builders, which I think is fine, since I replaced the hard drive.
Last night I had to run Windows in order to run Turbotax Business, which unaccountably is only available for Windows. I fired up Vmware Fusion and had it boot the boot camp partition… and Windows refused to run because it had been installed on a different computer.
Um, no, Microsoft, this is NOT a different computer. I added a layer of emulation, but every transistor and wire is identical to before. I am not sure how this behavior is supposed to benefit Microsoft shareholders.
And yes, by rebooting directly into Windows, it works fine.
Unclear on the concept
I am so mad at myself for forgetting to take a photograph of this.
Earlier this week I spent a few days at the famed Claremont Resort and Spa in Berkeley, California. I was there for the Hot Topics in Parallelism workshop, but that isn’t the point.
It used to be that in bathrooms, one had a “heat lamp.” This was a dull red PAR type bulb in a ceiling fixture, typically with a twist knob timer. You turn it on and it runs for 10 minutes or whatever while you take a shower and dry off.
Now I know that California is Eco-Groovy, and Berkeley is about the epicenter of Eco Groovyness, but at the Claremont, they have replaced the bathroom heat lamps with, … wait for it… compact fluorescent bulbs.
They still have the 10 minute twist knob timers and everything.