It's snowing just lightly now, but the NWS assures us that heavy wet snow is crossing the Connecticut border. We hope to get to Matt's basketball game this morning.

Another hard week. I have a doctor's appointment on Monday, giving me a chance to talk about some things. This is getting old.

Today's interesting job possibility from the automated searches for a technical writing job: Supervisor, Airline Reservations. Responsibilities include "management of international and domestic group reservations and air fare negotiation...." I do have a couple of real leads to pursue this weekend.

The collapse of Canadian airline Jetsgo will have little effect on PEI. There was just one flight a week from and to Toronto. This summer, Northwest will fly from Detroit to Charlottetown.

Er, um, ah, garage jumping? Darwin, paging Charles Darwin. Of course, if you outlaw stupidity, only outlaws will be stupid.

As Jennie and Adam train to run a marathon to benefit stroke research, their preparations, and the life surrounding them, are chronicled in the 804.67200 kilometer blog.

We slept in this morning. Well, sort of. Marley is used to having me up by 5:00. I guess that he was concerned and came into our room to make sure that we were OK. Anyone need a 90-pound, cold-nosed alarm clock? It's one of a kind.

Two weeks from today, our product goes to manufacturing, meaning that the software and documentation is done and is ready to be put onto CDs for shipment to customers. Three of my four books are in good shape and one is in deep trouble. Quite often we use a green, yellow, or red coding for project status. Green means everything is going as planned. A yellow project has problems, but the team has a plan to recover. Red means that we're off schedule and don't know how we'll get back. I hope to bring this fourth book from red to yellow today.

Grumble, grumble. I've spent more than a few hours this week wrestling with problems that ought not exist. One had to do with hyperlinks in FrameMaker files. The other involved the stream editor sed. I need to make one change to more than a 1000 files. This works fine on Linux and UNIX, but fails on Windows.

Even though he's lost half of his net worth in the past few years, Bill Gates is still the richest person in the world. On a related note, Microsoft's purchase of Groove Networks has the potential of being a very big deal. Groove has a great concept for collaboration, but hadn't been able to achieve takeoff velocity on its own. It's also very interesting that Microsoft will keep the Groove office and employees in Massachusetts. Microsoft typically brings its development teams to the Redmond campus. One analyst, however, said, "Groove plugs a hole that Microsoft has never built into its software..."

It's going to snow again today and tomorrow, perhaps even in to Sunday. One way to spend time stuck indoors is look at pictures of cats watching images of cats.

[Editor's note: email subscribers may receive between zero and three copies of today's post. The blogging software is behaving in unexpected ways today.]

We're expecting a full house this weekend. Barbara and Scott, Val, & Russell will stay here Saturday night. Sandra's parents are planning to go back to Prince Edward Island in a week and a half. SV&R returned from Brazil last Sunday, where Russell was christened and Val's brother was married. We need a chart on the wall to keep track of who's going where for how long.

Tuesday night's storm moved on to the Maritimes with a lot of wind. On Saturday, we're expecting another storm. Our guests will encounter a sloppy mixture of rain to freezing rain to snow as they travel from the Cape. Average snowfall for a season in Worcester is around 60 inches. I can't locate the latest seasonal totals but seem to recall that we're upwards of 90. The record is 125, so we have a ways to go on that.

It's official. Worcester's new baseball team is called the Worcester Tornadoes. Their web site is under construction. Rich Gedman, Worcester native and former Red Sox catcher, is the manager.

Our first cell phone was one of the bag phones. It was bulky to carry and clumsy to use, best suited for the car. Adam used it for a while as well. The reception was pretty good. I think our calling plan gave us 30 minutes a month. This morning's Wall Street Journal reports on new lines of cell phones targeting the under-13 crowd with phone models such Barbie, Hello, Kitty, and Firefly. The Firefly lets the child call Mom or Dad by pressing a single button. I wonder if they'll make a special model for Massachusetts.

It's difficult to get a good measurement of the snowfall because the wind has caused so much drifting. I'll say that it's about half a foot, but there's a two-foot drift blocking the side door.. Mike's been by with the plow already. The schools in our town have a two-hour delay. (The kids are not looking forward to more snow days. If they lose any more days to snow, they'll have to make up the time with Saturday classes or a shorter April vacation.) We postponed last night's trip to the Phillipston Conservation Commission for two weeks.

It's the wind, though, and the cold that makes it interesting. The temperature is just below zero. When we have a strong northwest wind, we get a downdraft in the stove. The downstairs filled with smoke briefly, but I was able to get enough windows open to air the place out before the smoke detectors went off. Now the downstairs is colder than it was before I started the fire. Once the fire gets going and the stove pipe gets hot, the smoke will flow in the proper direction.

It's a little discouraging to realize that the World Database of Happiness can fit in a Microsoft Access database. For those of you familiar with Access, you know that:

a) It isn't very big.
b) Only one person at a time can add to it.
c) It's easily corrupted

So, in this ever-changing world, we can take comfort that some things are just what they say they are: chicken (PDF document).

Our niece, Lori, has been keeping a journal of her life and times as she makes the move from New York to Los Angeles. She's done some good, fresh, and sharp writing.

We know that it's just spring training. We know that most of the name players sat this one out. Nevertheless, it would have been nice for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees. They didn't.

Last week, Bill Lee was on local TV, promoting his new book. He said that he had watched the Red Sox-Yankee series in Hawaii last fall. After the 7th game, he met up with some Yankee fans. "I hear that Steinbrenner is moving your team to the Phillipines," he said. "Yead, he's going to call them the Manila Folders."

We're scheduled to make a presentation to the Phillipston Conservation Commission this evening regarding the upgrade of our septic system at the camp. Because we're close to water that eventually feeds into the Boston water supply, we had to get state approval, as well as the approval of two town departments. We're as ready as we can be, but the weather may force a postponement. The NWS has issued a winter storm warning - 6-10 inches of snow, high winds, plunging temperatures, and ice. "This high wind watch has been issued due to the potential for
sustained winds or frequent wind gusts to hurricane force." Right now, it's a balmy 40 with a bit of light drizzle.

Today's entry in the "What were they thinking?" Dept. - In late January, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute appointed Bennett Lebow, the CEO of a tobacco company to its board of directors. The CEO resigned yesterday because he thought that his presence on the board might be a "distraction." More here.

Sandra's parents rode with us to the going-away party for niece Lori. On the way there, we made a stop in Wrentham for shoes and coffee cups. It was my first visit to John and Suanne's, a fine house from the early 20th century. Their lot extends into a quiet wooded grove in back.

Everyone had a chance to ask Lori pretty much the same questions - When are you leaving? What airline are you flying? What kind of car will you buy? What's your apartment like? What are your job prospects. She answered each person with grace, as though it was the first time she'd heard the question.

After I took my turn asking the questions, she and I talked a bit about job searches and wireless networking. She is also maintaining a blog to track the activities related to her move.

As blogging continues to gain in popularity, bloggers are increasingly at risk when they write about their work or when their writings online appear to conflict with their day jobs. Some companies do encourage their employees to maintain blogs on their own web sites, but the focus of those blogs tends to be narrowly technical.

Sometimes, when my thoughts lack stamina (I have a new coffee cup this morning, by the way.), I take a look at the Astronomy Picture of the Day web site. Yesterday's was particularly spectacular.

On our way to my father's house yesterday afternoon, we saw sap buckets hanging on the sides of the sugar maples. It was a good day for collecting sap. The temperature had been below freezing overnight and then up into the low 40s during the day. Some of the larger farms, particularly in Vermont, have elaborate systems of tubing that bring the sap down the hills to the sap house. This was a small operation, a few buckets on a few trees.

My father is doing pretty well. He's without pain most of the time, but complains that his back is not very strong. Nevertheless, when we arrived, he was backing the Jeep into the garage in preparation for the snow storms that may come this week.

Sandra had a question about knots. My father has a World War II-era book about basic seamanship that includes some pages of illustrations about knots. The book provided the information they needed. My father has other, even older reference books, on metallurgy and welding, notably, books that he picked up in trade school and in his early years as a welder. Both Sandra and I write technical reference material. Our documents, though, are ephemeral. The goal in our business is to replace the old with the new as quickly as possible, to put very little into print because anything that's in print is regarded as out of date. On the other end of the scale, my father finds technical answers in books that are 60 and 70 years old.

My automated search for a technical writing job brought me a listing for an Animal Facility Manage - "this position oversees the husbandry, health and well-being of laboratory animals. "

Today we'll attend a going-away party for our niece, Lori. She is moving to Los Angeles later this month. Lori is the daughter of Sandra's brother, John.

OK, so I start a web search for the lyrics to Happy Trails, figuring that would be a nice sendoff for Lori. I found it here (Caution, all of the links in this paragraph play music.) I found it on the Kids' Pages at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences web site, part of the National Institutes of Health. I started looking around the site and found lyrics for a bunch of other songs, such as Louie, Louie, YMCA, and that perennial kids' favorite, The Ballad of the Green Beret. Overall, it is a great resource for lyrics of songs that are ingrained in the popular culture. Without Google, however, I never would have found it. A site on environmental health sciences just isn't a place I'd look for song lyrics. "The Sing-Along pages are included," says the authorization page, "because sing-along activities are particularly useful for motivating young children to learn to read and to improve their reading skills."