I had planned to hit the Draper Lake loop today. I had some stuff to do before I left and it was pretty cold, anyway. Along about noon it was just warm enough not to be a struggle riding the bike. I knew there was virga (precipitation falling that doesn’t reach the ground) but the forecast indicated it wasn’t going to actually rain. It still felt pretty cold but I was suited up for it.
While it’s true of most places, I’ve noticed here in Oklahoma that the actual sense of whether it’s cold or not is highly dependent on multiple factors. The thermometer said it was about 40°F (4C) but it was overcast with a northerly breeze. Here the direction of the wind makes a lot of difference in how it feels. It was also kind of dampish in the air. So I remembered to wear the boots and some light sweat pants, and over my t-shirt was a heavy sweatshirt and light wind vest. It was about right, though I knew I would eventually sweat.
But as I rolled down the Post Road corridor, I hit a few sprinkles crossing over I-40. By the time I reached SE 44th, it was substantial light rain. So I ditched my plans and road back west toward Douglas Boulevard. Then I turned north and braved all the traffic until I got back to SE 15th and headed back through the neighborhoods toward home. It wasn’t a long ride, but it was enough.
I’m planning to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop. Before I do, I will be forced to restore Vista on the old hard drive. Somehow my Bluetooth adapter got turned off and it won’t come back to life without a proper Windows driver to switch it back on. I’ve done the research and there are no Linux drivers that can awaken it. Then I’ll keep that old drive in case stuff like that happens again.
Somehow I managed to bork my Linux Mint installation on the workstation. It has to do with how Mint handles some updates. Mint is derived from Ubuntu and has a different attitude about what constitutes a “security update,” which includes kernel updates. Though Mint recommended against it, I accepted the update that was supplied from Ubuntu upstream, but it broke everything. The system refused to boot and there is no simply way of recovery, no restoring it from backup. Most users would not have tried that update, but I did the research and disagreed with the Mint folks.
At any rate, I moved over to Xubuntu to avoid a repeat of that issue. I still recommend Mint for the average refugee from Windows, but when I’m there to help and train the user, it will be Xubuntu. As a side note, Ubuntu has a server edition (CLI only, but you can add a desktop environment later) that would make it much easier to help folks migrate over to Linux for that, as well. I found a nifty free book online for the current version of Ubuntu Server. Along with what I already know about typical desktop stuff, that book will help me be ready to assist just about everyone who decides it’s a good idea to migrate.
I had some goodies left over from what I gave to my neighbors’ kids, so I’ve been passing them out to random kids in the neighborhood whenever I see them outside.
We are supposed to see something above 60°F (16C) and rain on Christmas Day. Oklahoma’s weather meets the definition of “volatile.”
