A never-flagging sense of wonder...

Two items tickled the neuron paths this morning, prompting me to wonder...

(a) A sign proclaiming an organizational meeting for a group that would, among its other goals, seek "meaningful change."

This led me down the following path: Are there really that many groups out there who work to seek "meaningless change"? (Ridiculous, I know. The use of the cliché is intended to marginalize The Other, as in "We stand for meaningful change, our opponents don't.")

(b) A box of an even dozen sympathy cards on sale a few doors down.

I can understand buying a dozen invitations to a party, or a dozen Christmas cards. Buying a dozen sympathy cards seems a pretty morbid thing to do (unless, I suppose, you are friends with a bunch of people who belong to a group like Heaven's Gate, but now I am digressing, morbidly...).

* * *It is a glorious morning out there! The sky is clear, the sun is shining, and the air temperature is just cool enough to let you notice it.

It is such a great day that I'm not even minding having been in the store for the past two-and-a-half hours by myself!

* * *The time alone has allowed me to explore why NeTraverse's Win4Lin wouldn't allow me to set the Windows screen size to a default 1024x710 pixels.

Trying to make the adjustment via the Control Panel did not work.

Trying to make the adjustment via the Linux utility winsetup didn't work.

Attempting to use the --geometry 1024x710 command line parameter didn't work (I modified the Properties associated with the X desktop icon).

Supposedly (if I read the docs and Web support page correctly) any of these should have done the trick, but didn't.

I then ran /bin/win --geometry 1024x710 from the command line and found out that the correct command line parameter format was:

/bin/win -g 1024x710

It's this kind of thing (disseminating poor and/or out of date help information) that's going to kill small operators in the end, and what makes the situation worse is that writing good documentation and coordinating the information to be written are two of the most difficult things in product development. Arguably, they are even more difficult to manage than actual code development.

But I better put away the soapbox before I manage to change my mood, which is still as sunny as the great outdoors.

Customers are coming...

Cheers...

How time flies...

I find it difficult to believe that it's been nearly a year since I've been up to Williams Lake. Where has the time gone? The above view was shot from the south end of the lake, near where it feeds Williams Creek. The image was "stitched" together out of 5 individual shots and then reduced to fit in my LJ (the full-sized final image is something like 3500 pixels wide).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After closing the store today, Drew went off to camp overnight with some friends, and Lee and I went off to Williams Lake. Galina had been at the house all day and didn't feel like going anywhere (the issue was moot, as Sasha was having - and continues to have - a bad day, and she was watching out for the animal).

At any rate, Lee and I stopped at home long enough to drop off our stuff and, basically, wash our hands. I managed to snag the Kodak DC120 and pass my eyeballs over a mushroom book, in case we happened to run across the elusive morel mushroom. I have yet to see one in the wild, but that's to be expected, as I really don't know where to look or what time of year. My gut tells me I'm probably looking in the right places, but that it is too early, still. Natalie also spent some time with Sasha, but there is so little that can be done.


I'm not much for naming photographs, but if I had to name this one, it'd be The Last of the Snow. This is near a pretty good patch of chanterelle mushrooms (but I'm only 4 months too early), on a slope that gets very little sunlight. I figured if there were any fungi growing anywhere, it'd be here. No joy, I'm afraid, though Lee did find a couple very old, very disintegrated, woody looking dark brown mushrooms in the grass near some fallen trees.


We crossed the bridge over the spillway and I went up the grade a bit, staying in the woods. There are many rocks here, and I was looking for one that might be big enough to come back and lie down on at some time during the summer. At one point in my search, I looked up and saw a sharp contrast between aspens seemingly throwing their arms up to the sky in supplication, and the dark trees I stood among, forming a dark frame to the white supplicants.

I need to get out more.

* * *I have a 6-pager to do tomorrow, and need to do some last minute tax work. Other than that, I think I'm going to shut off the computers for the night and go vegetate.

Cheers...