Telling it like it is

To celebrate what is most likely the last decent riding weekend of the year, Mike, Dwayne and I went for a day-long ride over East Canyon, to Trapper's Loop, over Monte Christo and up to Bear Lake today. Fantastic weather, great riding, and me finally back on a motorbike after Accolade / BMW Of Salt Lake's miserable excuse for service that robbed me of my ride all summer.

I've just finished the free mod for Valve's "Portal" game - Portal Prelude. Great mod - new rooms, new graphics, new voices and music, but bugger me with a splintered barge pole - it's hard! The ending is a bit of a cop out - like they couldn't figure out how to finish it, but other than that, if you're a fan of Portal, Portal Prelude is a nice (and free) addition.

The stock market had a temporary rebound today to the tune of over 900 points. Everyone is celebrating and patting themselves on the back, proving they've not learned anything. My guess? Tomorrow, the downward spiral will continue.

Bingo! Bush is now the most unpopular president this country has ever had. Now that's awesome news. Sadly it still means 23% of the country aren't paying attention though. Bush most unpopular president ever

We finally replaced our ageing Dell laptop with one of these new Dell Minis. Boy is it small. It's as wide as the span from my thumb to my little finger, and the keyboard is so small that typing on it involves a lot of use of the backspace key. It's teenie tiny small. Fact of the matter though is that it's faster than the old C600 that we had - about ten times faster. Plus it has a solid-state hard drive too which is sort of neat.

People wonder why we moved out of England. This is a clear example of why - it's because England is well and truly broken. A rail company's dipshit employees deliberately put an old lady on the wrong train, where she's told to pony up £ for a penalty fare because she had the 'wrong' ticket. A good samaritan fellow passenger decided to take up a collection to cover her penalty and was promptly threatened with arrest for begging. What makes this even worse is that this was Virgin Trains. Why the fuck does anyone still live in England? England is broken

Nice. A couple of inches of snow on the valley floor this morning, means a foot or more up in the mountains. That's a good start to the season. It'll melt and waterlog the soil so when the winter snow comes, it won't soak in or melt off. I wouldn't be surprised if we have power outages today though - all the trees are still in full leaf so the branches are all heavily laden down with snow. I suspect there will be more than a couple that shed branches on to power lines.