37° was the reading on the carmometer as we drove to Sleeping Giant just after noon. The jury is still out on how much longer we'll be able to walk the trail before winter wins.

As predicted by Helaine and poo-pooed by me, there was ice under some of the dead leaves. It was a tiny fraction of the trip but a slippery harbinger of why this can't be a year round activity. A few vertical rock faces even had small dripping icicles.

Fingerless gloves, earmuffs and shorts. Yeah--37° and I'm still dressing like the UPS man. I am a sight.

(this entry corrected for earlier typos)

I am in geek heaven. I'm typing this on my main computer. Immediately to its right an older, slower computer is doing some downloading. It's mainly used for storage nowadays. These two PCs share a common monitor through a KVM.

My current video card has two VGA ports and I'd like to go to two monitors if I could just figure out how to hold them on my desk. I got this when we moved in 18 years ago. It's a great desk. It still has a slot so paper can feed from below into a dot matrix printer.

Down the hall in what is still considered Stef's playroom I am formatting and reloading a friend's machine so it can be recycled through the family. There's another carcass on its side nearby. Running Windows 98, the owner would like her files but can find no way to retrieve them. Worst case I pull the hard drive and plug it in to a little USB hard drive reader I've got

This house has a small wired lan and wireless elsewhere. My router has 11 devices logged in since its last reboot. There are actually two routers and two small hubs. This was all bought when I saw things on sale--very cheaply. I have few brand names and consider these parts totally interchangeable.

With all these machines on at the same time I've had to temporarily unplug the MythTV DVR. It will be back tomorrow, I hope.

I enjoy these tech projects and am usually pretty good at them. I have built PCs from a table full of components without instructions. I often take on more than I can comfortably handle.

There was a time when shade tree mechanics could work on a car with a few tools. No more. Everything's locked down and part of a system. I suppose that will happen to PCs too. For guys like that will be sad.

A friend at work just applied for a Gmail account. When he got to the part where you select a secret question he said, "I don't know any of these." Instead he chose a question of his own.

Name of first goat.

Now that's security!

I have mentioned a few times I write for PC Magazine's blogs--specifically AppScout.com and Gearlog.com. I was hoping some day to get a chance to write for the print edition.

Too late.

At a meeting this afternoon the staff was told the print edition will stop with January's issue. It had been published since 1982.

I will still write for them as they maintain their profitable online presence. It's still a sad day.

I shot this as I was walking out of Dunkin' Donuts this afternoon. It's not unusual to see geese in Connecticut. It's unusual to see geese flying north in November! They were. What the hell are they thinking? Is Cheshire that attractive?

Do geese take a direct route to their winter homes? Do they stop and detour to visit their cousins on the way? I am confused... or they are confused. We'll see.

It's 27.1° as I sit down at the keyboard to type this entry. Too effin' cold! It's after midnight and the wind is still blowing. That's uncommon here in the land of steady habits.

We're still a month away from winter yet over the next week there is little, if any, relief.

I know some of you read this in warmer spots and you're chuckling. If you once suffered the winter you're probably glad you no longer have to put up with this garbage. I've got four months to go.

Don't feel alone. I don't understand what that error message is saying either. I'm just plagued with it!

It's a tech problem at work. It's an incompatibility between Firefox 3.0, Google's encrypted sites (like Gmail, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Google Docs, etc) and our Fortigate firewall. Intermittently my web requests to Google get rejected with error messages. It can take a half dozen retries before my Gmail is sent or other task completed.

It's a strange problem because it's both software related and intermittent. You expect problems like these to follow hard and fast rules. What am I doing differently the fifth time I press retry than the fourth or third or second?

There is very little about this online. I can find people with my problem. I find a smaller subset who've realized it's this specific firewall box that's the wild card. I can't find anyone with concrete tips to make the problem go away!

It wasn't this way until Firefox went from version 2 to 3. It only happens with Google's SSL encrypted sites.

It's driving me slightly nuts.

Intern Jacob put James Bond up against Jason Bourne in his blog earlier today. Which secret agent is cooler?

This started us on a conversation where he touted the newest Bond movie (which I'd had no desire to see until our conversation). Jacob says there's a an aerial dogfight scene in the Bond movie. He was impressed.

I wasn't having any of his late-to-the-party airplane talk so I opened Youtube and found the crop duster scene from Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." This is one of the finest action movies ever made... except this frenetic scene seems so tame by today's standards. Youtube posted a 9:00 clip. The first five minutes was a yawner. The actual swooping crop duster wasn't much better. I'm not sure it's even up to the standards of 21st Century episodic TV.

This is so frustrating. Another "good old days" favorite knocked off by modern cinematic technique. Crap--it's true. This seminal scene from "North by Northwest" is only astounding if you judge it by 1959 standards.

I remember hearing my parents talk about radio theater when I was growing up. I smiled and let them have their say knowing radio was never as good as what we then had. When they were listening in the 30s and 40s they couldn't compare it to things that didn't yet exist. By the time TV had come along they'd forgotten the specifics of the radio shows and only remembered how good they were in the abstract.

I had a similar conversation with my secretive friend in the San Fernando Valley this weekend. A new "Little Rascals" retrospective has been issued. Every movie Spankie and Alfalfa ever made on DVD in their original gritty black and white.

"Boring," he said. "We watched it because that's all that was on."

Between my friend's read on the Rascals and this crushing viewing of "North by Northwest," I have become my parents. I hate when that happens.

I know I'm a little late with this, but I'm just now getting to watch last night's Saturday Night Live. This might be the funniest episode of the last decade!

Paul Rudd was the host. I enjoy his work, but I wouldn't have gone out of my way to watch just because he was hosting. He was great--excellent timing and willing to give it up for the show. Justin Timberlake did an unexpected piece during Weekend Update. Everything I said about Paul Rudd applies.

The real star was the writing. Without writing there is no performance.

It will be repeated--catch it.

There are too many tools available to webmasters--too many. It is possible to slice and dice website traffic until you drive yourself nuts. That's personal experience speaking.

Google Analytics has just added the ability to compare website traffic year-to-year. Not a good comparison for me and it looks like my troubles all stem from the hack this website took in January.

Hits to my home page are up by 4%. Yahoo and MSN send significantly more traffic than ever before. My problem is with Google--the big dog of search. My traffic from Google has been cut in half!

Search engine traffic usually ends up on the inside pages... the older pages of the blog. There are thousands of those.

What makes me sad (because as Helaine notes I primarily write for myself and view this blog as a journal or diary) is that I've done everything I could think of to optimize the site for search. It's done nothing. There's little I can do to change things.

I'm not sure how to tell this story. I got a call Thursday from my friend Mike. Mike and his wife Patty were coming to Connecticut from Nashville. Would we like to have lunch Saturday? Uh... yeah.

There are lots of reasons to like Mike. Yes, he's my former boss and the guy who brought me to Connecticut, but that's not enough. America is littered with guys (and women) who used to be my boss. He's a really good guy and, in my presence, has always done the right thing.

Mike is gregarious. He laughs spontaneously more than any person I know. I can still close my eyes and hear him cackling after I said something moderately funny on the news. He was also into computers early. I remember his (and my) mid-80s obsession with "Seven Cities of Gold" for the Commodore 64.

Finding a restaurant for Saturday lunch isn't as easy as it sounds. I called Assaggio in Branford where I'd gone for my birthday. Nope--dinner only on Saturdays. I continued down my list.

As I was finishing my next call the phone rang back. Assaggio. "The chef will be there preparing for the evening. He insists you come," said the voice on the other end.

OK--let's hit pause for a second. In this life the lowest form of low is the person who says, "Don't you know who I am?" I won't do that. But I understand why this offer was made and that it might not be available to everyone. I get it. So, I was uncomfortable, sure... but this restaurant is so good and they were being so nice.

Our lunch was great. Unfortunately for Mike and Patty they also had dinner plans. I have no idea how they'll do that without waddling back to Tennessee.

Rest assured--Ryan, our waiter (excellent) got somewhere between a 40 and 50 percent tip.

This has been running in the lead position on Consumerist for the last few days:

Wow. That's one of my favorite sites. It's tough to believe a site like this with a tiny staff and reasonably high traffic can't be a financial success. The economy really does suck at the moment.

It's tough to go to a news website today and not see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's names linked together. Here's a sentence from the Times:

I might live to regret saying this, but it's not going to happen. That prediction has nothing to do with the relationship between Clinton and Obama and everything to do with what amounts to a demotion for her.

As New York's Junior Senator Hillary Clinton can speak her mind. If she disagrees with President Obama she can step in front of the cameras or onto the Senate floor and let it all out. As secretary of state she becomes his surrogate. It's his policies, not hers, that she'll be selling.

This is not to say secretary of state isn't a pivotally important position. You can have a hand in world peace... or tumult. But you are not your own man woman. I sense that's important to her.

Hillary Clinton will find a place of prominence in the Democratically controlled US Senate. I can't image her not taking advantage of that.