Teleidoscope

Sat, Jan 06, 2007

Site Design Changes

Posted at 10:34 pm MST to Code

I have started to make some changes to the looks of this blog and the Techlands pages. If anything turns out hideous or unreadable in whatever brower you use, please let me know.

The new background color for the weblog posts is supposed to be a sort of cream color. I hope it doesn't come out mustard yellow on anyone's monitor. If it doesn't work, I'll switch to a lighter green.

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The Torment of Sisyphus

Posted at 3:08 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The snowstorm yesterday dropped another 15 to 18 inches of snow on my yard. This morning I dug out, which wasn't too difficult, since the snow was still light and fluffy. I swam the truck to the end of the driveway, leaving skid-plate marks on the snow the whole way, so I must have been very close to high-centering. Then I swam it up the hill to the nearest place that had been plowed, and drove out to the paved road to get my mail.

About an hour later, the winds picked up in a howling ground blizzard, blowing around all of the snow that was laying around. The drifts are getting impressive. The only sign of my work is the fact that the truck is at the end of the driveway again, not midway up where it spent the past couple of days. I can't see it at the moment because there is so much snow blowing, even though this is a bright, sunny day.

Tomorrow, if the winds die down, I'll have to shovel a path all the way to the end of the driveway. Again. The part of the "path" closest to the house has drifts that are 4 feet deep already. Fortunately, the deep drifts, being generated by the house's wind shadow, are fairly narrow.

Looking out the window the other way (at 2:45pm), I can see that US 36, the main route between Boulder and Denver, is totally clogged with cars at a dead stop in the Denver-bound lanes. The wind and blowing snow must have caused one or more bad accidents. I can see wreckers stuck in the jam, and a couple that are crosswise to the traffic... the accident must be just beyond them, where the cut slope hides the highway from me. The Boulder-bound lanes are clear and empty: I saw an ambulance going down the hill toward town. But their emptiness suggests there are more problems on the other side of the mesa.

I should probably point out that Davidson Mesa is not a straight-sided butte like you see in Roadrunner cartoons. But the road is quite steep for a mile or two on the Boulder side, and there is a deceptively long slope on the Denver side. The little road that comes up into the mesa to the flat part where my neighborhood is can not be paved because it is too steep, and I suspect the long slope of 36 up from Boulder may near the boundaries of what is considered appropriate for highways. It is straight, not twisty, but that doesn't help much when blowing snow is killing visibility and making the roads slippery, and gusts of wind are tossing high-profile vehicles around.

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