In the four and a half years since we got the house in Lake Riverside Estates, we have always wanted to be up for a real snow. We’ve had flurries before (back in December 2006 for example), but never a real snow. We know it happens because the prior owners spoke of some good snow storms and I’ve seen snow several times on the Anza Valley Web Cam.

Well, we finally got what we were waiting for. Not only a good snow, but on the Saturday night of a long weekend. Thank you Lord!

I feel a little bit silly making a big deal out of this, particularly since I grew up in Marquette, Michigan which is no stranger to snow. But it is a special treat for us in Southern California. After all, we are only at 3,400 feet above sea level. Hardly high in the mountains.

The fun started when my older daughter came into the room and said “It’s snowing! It’s Snowing!” We quickly went outside into a very nice heavy snow shower. We felt that the cats had to enjoy it, so Sam came out with my daughter.

At this point, we didn’t know how long it would keep coming down. But it did keep coming. So with dinner in the oven, we suited up to enjoy the snow. Both girls enjoy the falling snow.

The younger girl (three and a half years old) is well bundled up for the cold.

This was a heavy snow with big flakes. It seemed to me to be like a lake effect snow, but clearly no lake was involved here. The big flakes were coming down and our back yard pine tree was being weighed down by the snow. Lots of snow falling.

The next day dawned crisp and snow covered.

The observatory got through the night just fine.

Of course we had to go sledding. We made snowmen and snow angels as well.

Here is a panorama, looking east toward Anza. You can see the girls working on a snowman in the foreground. Note that they are really the only spot of color in the picture.

Altogether a lot of fun. About half of the snow melted that day, with the grass and roofs staying snow-covered until today.

Selections from the last several months of Magnificat.

James 1:25
But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessed in what he does.

1 John 3:18
Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.

Hebrews 12:11
At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.

Sirach 33:10-11, 13
So too, all men are of clay, for from earth man was formed;
Yet with his great knowledge the LORD makes men unlike; in different paths he has them walk.
Like clay in the hands of a potter, to be molded according to his pleasure, So are men in the hands of their Creator, to be assigned by him their function.

Hebrews 13:14
Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.

Jeremiah 17:14
Heal me, LORD, that I may be healed; save me, that I may be saved, for it is you whom I praise.

Mathew 6:26
Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?

Romans 12:12
Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer.

Mathew 7:7
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

Psalm 34:20-21
Many are the trials of the just man
but from them all the LORD will rescue him.
He will keep guard over all his bones,
not one of his bones shall be broken.

Isaiah 45:8
Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above,
like gentle rain let the skies drop it down.
Let the earth open and salvation bud forth;
let justice also spring up!
I, the LORD, have created this.

Jeremiah 289:11
For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-11
Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!
What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun?
One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.
The sun rises and the sun goes down; then it presses on to the place where it rises.
Blowing now toward the south, then toward the north, the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds.
All rivers go to the sea, yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going.
All speech is labored; there is nothing man can say. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear filled with hearing.
What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.
Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us.
There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.

What a day. Started to replace the broken spray hose on the kitchen sink. Stepping out to get some tools, the wind pulled the back door out of my hand and it swung around and broke a window. Then it turns out that the replacement sprayer won’t fit. So off to Temecula to drop off the window to be repaired and to buy a new kitchen faucet with a working sprayer. Unpacking the faucet and it’s missing a screw. Off to Anza True Value for the screw (they had it) and back to complete the install. Then I find that the cold water connection is 1/2 inch while the hot is 3/8 and the faucet is 3/8. Too late for the hardware store, but I found the parts to make it work. Then I notice that the water line for the ice maker is connected to the hot water line. Whisky, tango, foxtrot! That I’ll colic tomorrow. This house has always been full of surprises. Time for a drink.

I recently obtained an iPhone. Yes it is the iPhone 4 with notorious reception problems. I’ve had none so far.

I wanted to get a custom ringtone, so I purchased a couple of songs labeled as ringtones from the iTunes store. Beware. Not all tracks found with a search on “ringtone” are actually ringtones. I tried just renaming the file, changing the extension from .m4a to .m4r, but that didn’t work. I asked Apple, but their first response was inaccurate (told me to look for a check box that isn’t there in the current version) and I haven’t yet heard back.

Using the magic of Google, I found a page from a site that has MP3 software that tells how to do it in iTunes 10. It really works!

The second magic of Google came when I went to send an e-mail. I wrote in the e-mail that I was attaching a file. I went to send it without attaching the file, but Gmail interrupted me to ask if I was sure I wanted to send it, since I had mentioned an attachment but not attached anything. Great feature!

Now I just hope they aren’t parsing and storing everything we write….

A while back (two years, so quite a while) I wrote about our experience at a LA Philharmonic concert. The concert that time was a avant-garde, modern, and interesting in the not so complimentary sense. Today we saw another fine concert at Disney Hall, and I was worried it might be interesting in the same sense.

The piece today was La Pasión según San Marcos, composed by Osvaldo Golijov. This is St. Mark’s Passion of Christ set to music. I was worried that a piece composed in 2005 by an Argentine Jew who had an atheist father might fall into the unpleasant side of avant-garde. I could not have been more wrong.

This piece, with strings, percussion, horns, a chorus, and soloists, was beautiful. The use of Latin rhythms fit well in places that were surprising. The music fit this important subject. The aria of St. Peter, his lament after realizing he had denied Jesus three times was very moving. It needed the screens that provided a translation to follow it, but with that it was a great musical experience.

This would make an excellent Good Friday concert. P.S., iTunes has it too.

Dennis Prager has recorded an excellent short lecture on the basic issue current political discourse is facing. And he hits on the crucial issue: More government means less for the individual. Watch.

So we’ve all had days where we think things have gone poorly. I think the owner of this boat feels that he has had a fairly bad day today.

This is on Dockeiler Beach, just south of the Marina del Rey harbor entrance (you can see the breakwall behind the boat. This shot was taken about 2pm.

Aground

I’ve been under the weather the last several days and have been trying to take it easy. So I have taken the opportunity to do a little web searching.

I have been looking for a good open source HTML / PHP editor that runs on Windows for a while. I like Bluefish, but it does not run on Windows without Cygwin. I know that I should just set up a Linux partition and work from there, but I have found it too hard to go back and forth. And almost all the key software tools I use (The Sky, NexRemote, MaximDL, FocusMax, etc.) run only on the Windows platform. So I want a Windows or, ideally, a multi-platform tool. I believe I have found it in Eclipse.

I heard about Eclipse at work, where our Java developers would like to move to it as the preferred IDE platform. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs (integrated development environments) and has been primarily focused on Java®. They do have an IDE for PHP and the tool also understands HTML. I downloaded and installed it and it has been very easy to use. The HTTP context help isn’t great, but it is good enough so far. Finding the tool got me inspired to clean up the site.

All of the main pages (not the blog, gallery, or wiki) of the site have been updated to load the sidebar from an external file. The top bar is still static, as I would have to write some PHP to get that to load more flexibly, but that is on the table. Each page now also shows when it was last updated. I also have, with the help of the validator in Eclipse, made sure all the pages are XHTML compliant. I made major updates to the Equipment page, adding links to the products and putting software into categories.

I also updated the banner in the Astrophoto Gallery. The default color for the title text was too dark, so that is lighter. I also replaced the delivered background image from the theme with a bit of Mare Nectaris. It’s a bit more personalized now.

Perhaps now I’ll personalize the wiki. Or perhaps clean up Schlei.com

We went to the final regular season concert for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Disney Hall today. There were three more modern (1900+) pieces that were nice, if a little more avant garde then our preference, but still enjoyable.

One of the pieces was Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto. This is a new piece, composed in 2007, at its first performance by the Philharmonic. It being the last performance of the season, they introduced three retiring performers, each of whom had been with the orchestra since the early 1960s. The retiring french horn player commented that we needed to be tolerant of new music, such as the Piano Concerto to be performed that day. He said “Remember your favorite keys: C, F sharp, G. You’ll be hearing all of them. At the same time.” Very amusing.

Even more funny is the paragraph from Esa-Pekka’s own description of his piece:

Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds I (my working title)

I imagined a post-biological culture, where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore. Composing intelligence creates music that somehow relates to an area that long time ago [sic] was called the Balkans. All this is accompanied by bird-robots.

I take it he was being funny and it was a light hearted piece, but that description made my jaw drop.

It dawned quite cold this morning (at least cold for us Southern Californians): 23° F. Frost was everywhere. It was quite pretty.

The grass was all covered in frost.

The grill got chilled

The house was dusted with frost

But the view down to the lake was very pretty

One benefit of having an eight-month old child is that you tend to always get up early in the morning, even on the weekends.