Snow Day

Work blogging has sapped my personal blogging interest, so things have languished here. But I’m looking to generate renewed enthusiasm, and so more posts.

Big week here in Washington, with the presidential inauguration. My wife got a free ticket from the church leader to one of the events, on Tuesday; Bush and Cheney families in attendance. 

Snow blanketed Washington today, but, as usual, with nary the ferocity promised by weather forecasters. Heavy snow fell, probably two inches an hour, for a couple hours this afternoon. By my back porch measurement, snowfall doesn’t quite top five inches. Forecasters predicted 5-9 inches coming in the storm.

My daughter and her sleepover friend asked for pizza. I called Dominos. Delivery on schedule and promised within 35 minutes. It’s not much of a storm if pizza delivery continues. The girls want to chow down on pizza and watch the big movie.

Late yesterday afternoon, UPS dropped by the big box—the one we’d been waiting for—with the HP ep9010 Instant Cinema Digital Projector. After major rearranging the living room, we filled one wall with TV programs and DVD movies. Big-screen experience is an understatement. Anyway, the kids are looking for some home theatre over pizza and popcorn tonight.

As for the weather, early snow balked but didn’t much chalk the streets, so we hauled into the aging Volvo for a drive over to the local Apple Store; iLife and iWork for sale today. The store almost immediately sold out of the iPod Shuffle (We have two already, delivered by a friend from the San Francisco Apple Store after Macworld), but still had the iMac mini when we walked in at 10:25 a.m.

I laughed roaringly, turning a few heads for the suddenness, as I looked over the iMac minis on display. What I call the iMac mini mate—the huge, and I mean huge—power supply stealthily hid behind plastic holders with information about extended Apple Care support services.

My 10 year old couldn’t wait to get her hands on iLife `05. She insisted on watching Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote streamed from the Web and bought into the great product promises. She didn’t realize that oldie Stevie has a bigger computer than hers—probably a couple of processors and a couple gigs of memory—while she has an iMac G4.

Around 11:30 a.m., she hooked up the aging—as in four-year-old, first-generation Canon Elura—camcorder and started iMovie HD’s Magic Movie feature to important and create a movie and burn it to DVD. The process, ah, just finished about two minutes ago. I wouldn’t recommend doing that on a Mac mini!