Well, that snow that came last week only lasted a couple hours after the sun came up, but it was fun. This weekend was in the 60s and 70s most of the time, so it was perfect. But first, let's go back a bit further. (The next paragraph is geeky, so if you don't want to do that type of stuff, just skip it.)

Just after Easter I purchased a cheap, old computer from the University I live near. It's an old Dell OptiPlex that they sold new about 4-5 years ago and was nice and thin for putting under your monitor. I set it up on its side under my desk and hooked it up to my KVM switch. I installed the generic Debian distribution on the machine and, for the first time ever, have a working Linux desktop with Gnome. It can browse the Internet nicely and I'm working it into being a Linux development server. I have MySQL, Apache, PHP, and Subversion set up on there and I got Eclipse running on the desktop as well (although it seems like it might be a bit sluggish). I'm looking forward to really digging into a couple more personal projects on this machine. It's definitely an upgrade from the old IBM Aptiva that was originally purchased in 1999.

This past Friday we kept our household night plans mostly unscheduled, and that meant some spontaneity. We ended up hiking 6.7 miles from River Ridge all the way to Kevin's house. That, of course, included illegally going over the old Cedar bridge as well as getting the short tour of the Blackdog power plant. Fun times. Oh yeah, and you can't forget watching Chain Reaction after that. Keanu Reeves, as usual, was, welll.... his usual character. Rachel Weisz had a really bad haircut. Oh well, it was 1996, I guess.

This weekend there was also a wedding and a car on our street spontaneously combusted. (OK, not exactly.) Plus, there was Chipotle, lots of walking, and three hours at a bar to celebrate Joe's birthday. (I would mention the bar's name, but sadly even though it's the best bar in the state, it has a terrible website.) It was a very good weekend.