Winter

Winter is officially here. There's not much snow up in the mountains yet. I rode the Alpine Loop yesterday. Except for about 20 deer, I was the only one there. It was quite cold. I definitely need better gloves and shoes for next time. It's probably going to snow this week sometime. That'll be the end of my weekend rides around Mt. Timpanogos until April. I can still hike around it. I always descend quickly, one of these times I should slow down and stop at a few places to take in the view. I almost hit a young little deer on the way down, not really though, it ran across the road right in front of me. On the other side of the road was a steep hill and it was frantically trying to scale that to get away from me. It only succeeded in running in place for a while and kicking up dust until I passed. Seeing all those deer made me wonder how many there actually are around here. They're usually very well hidden when there're more people around.

I got a new Eee PC, I like it a lot. The keyboard is not too small for me. At half the size of most laptops this thing isn't just allegedly portable. It'll fit in my coat pocket and on those little foldout desks in the lecture halls at school and will be nice for trips. All I need is a spare set of batteries though and I'll be set for anything. I recommend installing Xubuntu on it. That's what I did and it's nicer than the Xandros installation that it comes with, you can even install Windows XP on it if you want. Skype video is pretty sweet. It's good enough for all of the programming projects I'll need to do for school and writing on this blog and checking my e-mails. It won't run games that require more than a 800x480 screen resolution, but that's okay with me. The operating system and all the packages I have installed including Open Office take up less than 2 gigabytes of memory.