I want to wish my (three or four) readers a happy new year. Thank you for your continued support.

In response to my earlier post about traveling home, I am happy to report that I made it this year. The trip was not without setbacks, though.

The plan is to go home to Iowa tomorrow to spend Christmas plus a little more time with my family. Of course, as always, the weather is playing a factor, and I may get to experience a less extraordinary repeat of last year’s attempt to get home.

This is a follow-up to my earlier post “The Austin Bat Bridge”.

I just happened to run across a group of bighorn sheep when I was up in the foothills conducting some business. They were actually standing on the opposite side of the highway from the destination in my mission.

Well, the past few weeks have been filled with a variety of activities. First, I was gone to a conference in Austin, as discussed in earlier posts. Then I came back to Colorado for half a week before traveling to Seattle for a few days over Thanksgiving weekend. After returning, my brother came to visit for five days and we spent a couple of those days skiing.

I have known for years about the existence of a bridge (the “bat bridge”, or more formally the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge) in Austin that is home to around a million bats (it turns out that it is approximately 750,000 bats in the spring — mostly females — who nearly double the population before the end of summer through reproduction).

On Sunday, I am traveling to Austin, Texas, site of this year’s Supercomputing (SC08) meeting. Compared to last year, this year’s technical program looks more interesting to me.

Last night, I reinstalled Windows XP. It had not been working for a little more than a month, and I tried a few repair approaches that did not work out. There was no urgency to do this, which is why I waited so long. Ultimately, I reinstalled Windows (but I “punished” it first by giving it a much smaller partition; I have better things I can do with that space). Of course, this means the MBR was wiped out and I needed to reinstall Grub in order to get easy access to Linux again.

A couple weeks ago, I was in my garage and heard a group of birds that sounded completely foreign to me. I eventually located the source: it was what appeared to be several dozen migrating geese. I thought they were geese because they were in the usual ‘V’ formation (three or four ‘V’s, in fact). At the time, I had no idea what species they were, but because of their call, I knew they were not Canada Geese, which is pretty much all I see around here.