When you get tired of TV (can't every show just be called "Crime Scene Law and Orderly, Miami style"?), you can turn to a new source of video fun and education at MIT World. A friend turned me on to this site this week, and I've been enjoying several very different sessions.

Oh, and they have an RSS feed.   ¶ 8:14 PM

OK... it was cold enough to snow here, at least over night. But we haven't had a decent (sleddable) snow in the valley for several years. Will this be the year we get to spend the day with the neighborhood closed, everyone on their sleds and other contraptions gliding downhill then trudging back up for someone else's turn?

*Nothing* would make this winter better. We can drive the hour to the mountains anytime, but snow in the valley is what makes a winter successful.   ¶ 8:07 PM

Fall and spring are my favorite seasons because of the activity in the weather the change brings. My birthday is in March, but Halloween marks the beginning of the transition to a new year for me. Halloween, Thanksgiving (in the U.S., end of November), and then the winter solstice mark an active stretch of weather for the Pacific Northwest in North America.

January and February are relatively steady in their own ways. January can be steadily wet, and if we're lucky, February can steadily dry. Then the bulbs and buds emerge in the warmth of the February sun. (As opposed to the northeast coast of North America, where winter lasts well into March and April, even May! Been there, done that.)

Then around my birthday the winds pick up again, but more often drier than in the wet fall. More change on the way toward the mostly sunny yet mild summers of the northwest that we don't like to advertise to outsiders. (Yet you come anyway.)   ¶ 7:49 PM

My cable Internet was out for a couple of days, and my cable TV was out on several channels as well as poor picture quality on many more.

Squirrels ate through the cable up on the pole.  ¶ 7:40 PM

I am sensing some drool in the corner of my mouth for Linux tablets. Although a friend recently bought a Zaurus and the drool per buck is very enticing.  ¶ 7:35 PM

If I had to pick just one system as a candidate for a modern, rich, smart client, service-oriented GUI, then Joel Bartlett's would be the one, from 1991, that runs on X/Unix in his wonderful Scheme->C system.

Some updating of the programming model would be necessary. The current model is much like NeWS but uses Scheme and X, where there is a single application somewhere using EZDraw as a GUI server.

XUL, SVG, and XAML are kind of in this space today, but like an updated EZDraw, they also need a more "conglomerate" approach to being an integration-oriented GUI device.

EZDraw, like SVG, offers a 2+ dimensional interactive drawing environment and so offer the graphical freedom of a web page or PDF with the interactivity of a traditional GUI. I'm hoping that XAML will be just as interactive, since it may become the de facto standard.  ¶ 9:44 PM