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Wow, it’s cold out there today. In fact, it’s booger-freezing cold, which I is a technical term I use to refer to the fact that when you step outside your boogers immediately freeze up.

Alex and I walked over to Blockbuster to return our movie, and it was maybe a quarter-mile but by the time we got back home my cheeks were burning and my fingers were chilled (even through my thick ski gloves).

It looks like the rest of the week is going to be more of the same. Winter is definitely here.

I just bought a new hard drive online. One terabyte. One hundred bucks.

Holy cow. I still remember my first hard drive, a forty megabyte monster that sat on my desk and was bigger (and much louder) than the laptop I’m using to write this. It cost something like four hundred dollars used. Now, for a quarter of the price, I get twenty-five thousand times more storage.

Isn’t technological progress marvelous?

Tonight I was out walking to the grocery store and noticed the moon was pretty darn bright. It turns out that tonight it’s at perigee (its closest orbital point to Earth) and in fact is closer than it’s been in the past fifteen years.

Evidently that makes it about 14% larger than any other full moon this year, and correspondingly it’s 30% brighter. Wow.

I saw this as I poked around some blogs this evening. Absolutely classic.

I often crack myself up as I’m working on projects for clients. For example, I built an online survey system for a local company, and to demonstrate it I entered a few sample questions so they could see how it works:

If these guys aren’t Monty Python fans this won’t mean much to them, of course, but at least I get a good chuckle out of it.

And lo, the Lord did look down upon Longmont and bequeath beautiful 60-degree weather so those therein need not hangeth their Christmas lights in freezing cold.

Dirk sent me a request for proposal for a web site. It’s for a well-known educational institution who shall remain nameless, but in the request it includes this caveat:

Wow. That means after we’ve designed and built the entire web site, database, and content management system, they can walk away without paying a dime.

If any web development firm bids on this, I pray for their souls.

“Doing appears risky, because it exposes you to criticism and perhaps failure. Experiencing is hot right now: being part of the social network, helping maintain that online tribe you belong to. Getting your ducks in a row is not nearly as powerful as actually doing something with your duck.”

— Seth Godin

Don’t you hate it when you’re sitting there and suddenly your tongue feels a little something in your mouth and you maneuver it around a little bit, getting it out from between your teeth, and finally you’re able to pull it off your tongue and you see that it’s one of those little pieces of a popcorn kernel and you throw it away but then you think… wait a minute, the last time I had popcorn was two days ago.

Yuck.

So on our trip from UT to CO yesterday we weren’t too concerned about the weather because the forecast called for maybe an inch of snow in the morning. But of course we didn’t factor in the Wyoming Wind, which is a nasty beast that just laughs at hapless motorists on interstate 80. It was whipping around at 40+ mph, blowing that little inch of snow every which way.

The stretch from Laramie to Cheyenne was particularly bad– at times it looked pretty much like this:

Then a moment later the wind would die and suddenly you could see the road again. Add the fact that the roads were slick and icy, and you have a pretty nasty set of driving conditions. But we made it through the harrowing half-hour there and managed to get home without incident.