Live from Austin!

The temperature has suddenly dropped over the last couple of days. Yesterday evening it was 23 celsius as we sat on the restaurant patio.

A woman walked by, wearing a scarf.

It’s snowing. There are icicles on our roof. There’s ice on the outside of my office window (I love having a well insulated house). I remember this…it’s “winter”, isn’t it?

I imagine Texans are going into a state of blind panic. The roads are probably full of accidents. Fortunately we stocked up on food a couple of days ago, and can just sit in the warm and enjoy the show.

It’s raining. It has been raining all afternoon. I’m not complaining that it’s raining, we need it.

I only started driving about 2½ years ago. As a result, I still find it genuinely pleasurable to be in a car when it’s raining, even if I’m sitting in traffic.

Slow moving traffic? Luxury. Try not moving, spending 45 minutes standing in the wind and rain waiting for a bus that’s supposed to run every 20 minutes. Poor visibility? Try cycling in a downpour, blinking from the rain in your eyes and squinting through the droplets on your glasses.

Driving in the rain leads to much the same pleasure I get from sitting looking out the window at the rain. It’s the pleasure of knowing that I’m not out there in it. A simple pleasure, but a good one.

The gas company sent us a required notice explaining the law regarding disconnection of service. It says that Texas law does not allow disconnection of service during an Extreme Weather Emergency Day, and goes on to explain:

An extreme weather emergency means a day when the previous day’s highest temperature did not exceed 32 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature is predicted to remain at or below that level for the next 24 hours according to the nearest weather station for the county where the customer takes service.

Wow. That means I’ve experienced Extreme Weather Emergency Months.

After some controversy over just how bad the weather gets in Austin, I decided to go pick up some actual historical data from the NOAA web site.

First, the monthly averages, in turn averaged for 1931-2000:

Of course, averages don’t tell the whole story—so I took the last ten years of monthly maximum temperatures, and found the maximum of the maxima for each of three locations…

Now we’re watching “Insomniac” with Dave Atell. By some strange quirk of fate Dave’s in Austin in this episode. I must say, sara seems to approve of the all-female roller derby…

It’s -18 celsius. I think that’s the coldest it has been since I moved here in January 1997. Yes, I’ve experienced the joys of -40 in Minnesota, but I never considered living there.

The temperature finally leapt up to normal levels, a comfortable 14 degrees rather than the freezing temperatures we’ve had for the year so far. We went out to get food, and the square was full of people, and the sounds and smells of the city were back… I suddenly remembered warm, summer evenings. It’s only weather, yet it seems to have transformed my surroundings. At last I remember why I live here. Yes, it’s been a long, long winter—too long.

Earlier today I spent five or six hours struggling with OpenGL. I’m almost at first beta stage for the new screensaver, I think a little more work tomorrow and it’ll be ready for some more widespread testing. OpenGL is a lot like X, in that when something’s wrong with the code you really don’t get anything in the way of useful error messages.

It’s too damn hot. It was 36 celcius in the shade at 18:30. It’s nearly midnight and it’s still 30.

Still, I prefer this to winter.

Well, it was 36 celcius in the shade at 18:00. Apparently we’ve gone straight from winter to summer and skipped spring; a week ago it was regularly sub-zero.

I got a really good deal on Corel Graphics Suite, via Big Blue. It’s buggy, but it’s OS X native, so occasional crashes aren’t a huge deal. It has full alpha channel support, transparency, and the preview engine of CorelDraw seems to use Quartz! Given that Adobe want $500 for an OS X version of PhotoShop, I think I’ll pass on that for now.

It is a painfully wonderful day outside. I’d say about 25 degrees, with a brisk warm breeze. I’m very tempted to unplug the ThinkPad and go work in the park. It’s almost sinful to be inside. Plus my eyes are dry and tired.

Every time I post via the web interface, the “local time” seems to be +/- a different number of hours. Yesterday it was off by an hour, today three. Perhaps the days really are getting shorter.