The Weatherman

I just returned from a long weekend at North Lake Tahoe.

We stayed at a wonderful house in Tahoma. We arrived on Wednesday evening and left this morning. I went skiing on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Alpine Meadows.

Why Alpine? Nice staff, great terrain and a great price - $39/day.

The first day I was skiing on my own. It was a beautiful day. I got 5 runs in before 10am. The snow was very fast. I then traversed to other intermediate runs to get some of the kinks out. Finally, I hiked over to the backside and skied the large bowls. I ended that off with a nice beer at the Ice Bar (my favorite place on a sunny afternoon). After that I did a quick cruiser run on the back side and returned to the front side via Our Father. I finished off the day with some more cruiser runs off the top.

Brian joined me on Friday. Although it was windy and snowy, we had a great time. It was cold so the snow was relatively light (not Utah powder but not Sierra cement either). It was a bit slow going since visibility was poor but overall it was pretty awesome.

Saturday was partly cloudy and cold. They said the temp on top was 10 degrees. Throw in a 20mph wind and you get a -4 degree wind chill. Yep, it was a tad chilly. It was bearable, at least until Brian did a header and froze his eye brows…definitely a site.

Overall, a great time. I definitely felt like I was back at my best by Saturday…too bad I didn’t have another day. I have some Tahoe pictures at my site

A few months back I put together a new system (Shuttle SN85 G4, 1GB Ram, 160GB SATA drive, DVD burner) and made this my main linux desktop (Fedora Core 2 32 bit). I had some issues installing 64bit Fedora Core 2…although I plan on trying 64 bit Fedora Core 3.

Anyway, my older PC (Sony P4 1.5Ghz, 384MB RAM) has been sitting idle. And it has a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350. I had this setup and working before my hard drive failed - the second drive failed.

So, the Sony still has a 40GB drive (I plan on picking up an 80GB drive soon), and I thought it be fund to install Gentoo 2004.3. I’ve been meaning to give Gentoo a try for years but never had the free machine. It’s currently performing Stage 1…so I have a little time to kill.

So far the install has been very easy. The instructions have been awesome. Anyway, I hope to have a working gentoo installation within a few days. Stay tuned.

We’ve been having some work done on our house. We recently had one bathroom remodeled. We had the bathroom gutted to the studs, had some water damage fixed, and then rebuilt. It turned out great and you can see pictures at paulandsteph.com.

The next project was to transform an unused room into my office. It had this ugly wood panelling and not much else. So that room was gutted and we had new drywall installed, grounded outlets, and cable run into the room. It’s basically complete but I haven’t taken any new pictures.

Within a week or two we’ll have our windows replaced. Our home (built in 1948) has the original windows…and they suck. The window replacement will only take a day or two.

After that we’ll have our second bathroom remodeled…We don’t know the details for that one yet. I’m still in the “what do I want it to look like” process. Anyway, that will probably be it for the year.

So why are we doing this? Well, with a baby due around the end of May we need to get things up to snuff. It will be easier now then later.