Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

It's cooled down, it's now below freezing and we have a few flakes drifting down from the sky.  No accumulation yet.  It was too warm to make snow last night.

Arming Teachers

Well, any of the formidable grownups who taught in my grade school,  Miss Shirley, Miss Gaudette, Miss Percy, Mr. Convery, Mrs Falby, would have no trouble handling firearms, and preventing a massacre of students. 
    Teachers might be more willing to carry if the school provided good student proof gun safes in each classroom.   And didn't make a fuss about firearms locked up in privately owned automobiles on the  school parking lot.  And some state laws protecting them from  lawsuits by the shooter's lawyers. 

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather, It's Bad.

It's warmed up to 40, it's raining, and the snow is vanishing.  Not good. 

CCleaner

CCleaner is a marvelous freeware program that deletes the numerous unnecessary disk files cluttering your system disk.  The typical CCleaner run will free up a half a gigabyte of disk space.  It's safe, I run it every few weeks and never a hiccup. 
  In this day and age of 200 Gigabyte hard drives, why do we care?  Zapping clutter off the hard drive makes file searches go faster, makes anti virus runs go faster, makes Windows Explorer load faster and paint new screen faster.  It makes browsers go faster.  Viruses (Virii) malware has to hide on your hard drive somewhere.  It's easier to hid in a few gigabytes of clutter. 
   Google will find you a download site for CCleaner.  The site will attempt to sell you a fancier version that costs money, but the free one is all I need.

Running out of hard disk space?

Try WinDirStat.  It can be down loaded, Google for a download site.  Windirstat looks at every file on your hard drive and draws a cute graph showing how much space each file is sucking up.  Rolling the mouse over the file symbol in the graph calls up its name in the bottom text window.  Gives you a a good feel for where to look for fat to cut.
 First place to go is Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add & Remove Programs.  That pops up this window.


It lists every program on your machine.  Now is the time to zap all those craplets and games your machine came with and you never use.  Be careful, this window lets you zap darn near everything on the disc, including parts of Windows itself, your browser , MS Office.  It's like a chainsaw, cuts fast and cuts anything. Useful to be sure, but you gotta be careful.  The Programs with the MS icon of a Computer Monitor, CD and CD  Box you mostly want to keep. 
When you click on anything to remove it, it will tell you how often you used it and when it was used last.  Things that haven't been used since the bought the machine can probably be spared.  

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

We got a measly inch and a half of new snow last night.  It's cooled down to right around freezing.  That's marginal for snow making.  I'm told the guns will snow at temps up to freezing due to the chilling effect of the compressed air expanding, but you get better snow when its solidly below freezing, in the twenties, which it ain't right now. 

The Hobbit

We saw it last night.  To give some perspective, I am a long time Tolkien fan, I read Tolkien as a child, I read Tolkien aloud to my children when they were young, I saw all three Lord of the Rings movies in theaters, and I have DVD's of them as well.  So I was going to see this movie no matter what.
   Criticism of movies based upon widely read books is tricky.  Many will trash a flick for the smallest departure from the words of the book, no matter how much sense the change makes from the standpoint of a movie.  Movies are different from books.  It's much harder for a movie to show a character's thoughts than it is for a book where the author can go on for pages expounding upon inner most thinking.   Whereas a single movie shot of landscape or interior or street scene can replace pages of descriptive text. 
   This movie has the sets, the costumes, the scenery, and many of the actors  that made the LOTR movies such wonderful viewing, and so true to the original.  It's long, three hours.  It only takes the story up thru chapter 6, out of 19 total, so there is plenty of room  for more movies before Bilbo returns to Bag End.  It moves slowly, scenes are longer than need be, too many scenes are flashbacks or side issues that don't move the plot forward. The movie bungles a couple of beloved scenes from the book.   Gollum mumbles his lines so badly that I couldn't understand the riddles he was posing to Bilbo.   My children have better table manners than the dwarves in the movie. 
   The widely hyped 48 frame per second filming made no perceptible difference to my eye.  We chose to see it in 2D over in Lincoln rather than 3D in Littleton.   Focus was softer than it ought to be for a movie.  I don't know whether this was the fault of the Lincoln projectionist or  the 48 frame per second process, or the 3D filming.
   Anyhow, it's enjoyable.  Take the kids.