Telling it like it is

Last weekend we went for a ride down to the new Harley dealership about an hour from where we live. The weather was brisk but not too bad, and we figured we'd be the only motorcyclists out. Not one of us was riding a Harley, and previous experience has told me to steer clear of Harley riders. But we went anyway and had a look at the place. Great architecture - made of parts of the old steel works. There was a cafe inside too called Marley's that did some great food. I was beginning to overcome my bias against HD riders but then it came time to leave. As I was putting my helmet on, one of the dealer sales guys pulls up on some 1920's technology masquerading as a new bike, and parked perpendicular across the back of me so I couldn't back out of the parking space. I looked at him and asked him to move the bike and he refused. In the end I had to do a 38-point turn to get my bike out. One of the other guys I was riding with was so incensed I think he was about to come over...

I swear either our IT department or Windows or both are conspiring to give us machines that are so goddamn slow you can't actually do any work on them. I sat here this morning waiting for 15 minutes for Photoshop to open a 50Mb TIF image. For whatever reason, Windows decided it needed 6.6Gb of pagefile to do that. Now every time I touch a file or open explorer, any music that's playing skips and jumps. I can watch windows redrawing almost a line at a time. I don't know why we put up with stuff like this - I mean you'd think a dual dual-core 4.4Ghz machine with 8Gb of RAM might actually run Windows, but apparently you'd be wrong.

I'm no fan of the global warming alarmists, but it's fun to see England gripped by the sort of weather it should have at that latitude today. Most of the country was closed because of snowstorms sweeping across it. If the climate change people are right, then the UK needs to get used to weather like this. It won't be once every 18 years - it'll be every winter. England closed due to snow.

Skiing today was much better than last weekend. Fresh corduroy with blue skies and shining sun. The top surface became nice and powdery after a couple of hours and it was exactly the sort of snow I'm good on. So much so that I did Powderhorn 4 times and Summit twice. That's pretty much the top of the world for a skier in these parts. Powderhorn top station is 9,740ft up and summit top station is 10,040ft. I wish I had photos to post because on a day like today the view from the top is breathtaking.