We’re stuck in the stone age. CenturyLink lied, and my hopes for a neolithic Internet revolution in the Price household died. They cannot provide us with 12 Mb/s Internet, as promised — 3 Mb/s, maybe. The caveman simple, positive way to look at it is that if they can give us 3 Mb/s, that’s double what we have  now for a slightly lower cost. We cavemen have to make do with whatever we can scavenge, since I have failed at hunting down a faster connection.

While I was looking through photos tonight, I found this panorama I took a couple of weeks ago after one of our first storms. I thought it made a good photo for today, since CL is leaving us out in the cold, and the temperatures are dropping.

 

Movember is officially underway, and I start off with a photo of my first day of mo-grow. Next Tuesday I’ll post another photo to see how it’s doing in the first week.

The cranes were playing in the freshly turned cornfield this morning while the geese foraged under feet.

The sunset to the north was quite something as I was leaving Coscto tonight.

The spirit of Zia visited us on this fine Halloween, giving us a bright spot in this otherwise gloomy night that marks the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

You know you are a redneck when your daughter shows up at 10:30 pm to see if you have a part for her water heater, and you go out in the dark yard to face the raccoons, skunks, porcupine, and La Llorona, search through some junk and come back with the right part.

Halloween closes out October, ushering in Movember. That’s right, it’s not a typo. Movember is a foundation started by some cleaver blokes in Australia to raise money for prostate cancer research. Instead of doing a walk, run, bike or other feat of athleticism, Mo Bros, as Movember participants are known, get sponsorship and donations to grow mustaches. I think it’s brilliant — growing a mustache is about the only thing a man can show off in public these days without getting into some kind of trouble.

Prostrates, unlike breasts, are not esthetically appealing to the vast majority of people. While thousands of people sport pink and show up for various events to raise money for breast cancer, I heard the Prostate Power walk in June was a bust. Prostate cancer is as deadly and devastating for men as breast cancer is for women, yet most people and the press are mum on the subject of prostate issues, but rah, rah for the breasts — beauty gets all the attention while the beast is left to suffer and die in obscurity.

Anyone interested in supporting Movember can go to http://us.movember.com/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did a photo shoot with Annie today. Annie is a singer/song writer who was part of a tech team I had working on a large computer inventory and software installation project in 2009/10.  She is a lovely model, we had a great time, and got lots of beautiful photos.

 

 

We got a hard frost this morning, making the roses look like they were sugar coated. It was 26 degrees F on the deck this morning, which means it might have gotten down to 20 in the garden. I don’t have a working thermometer in the garden right now, so I can only guess at the temperatures — in the past, it’s been 5 to 10 degrees colder in the garden than on the deck.

 

 

We were up until 2:00 am working on the preliminary draft on Laurie’s paper, then we got up early and finished all the changes so she could send it to her committee this morning so they can comment on it. Getting all the little details, corrections and formatting on a math paper is really a lot of work.

I woke up to a yellow-orange glow in the bedroom, grabbed my camera and went out into the wet twilight and watched dawn pushing up the sun. Behind me in the western skies hung a whisper of a rainbow arcing over the trees.

Guildenstern posed nicely on the stump tonight. There is something about the stump that make the cats want to pose. I’m sure they think of it more as giving kitty speeches than posing. They would probably do the same if we had a soapbox in the middle of the garden.

It’s midnight. Do you know where your monoids are? Ours are all over the counter, crawling on book holders and hiding under coffee cups. Finishing Laurie’s paper turned into a real math party — Laurie and Tristan bumped and ground along lattices testing cases, while I  had fun with LaTeX entering compositions and functions, then cleaning up headings and subheadings. David provided general support and entertainment.

We are finally evolving from stone age Internet service of 1.5 Mb/s to neolithic Internet service of 12 Mb/s. We might be getting on par with places like the Congo, but we remain far behind places like Singapore, Japan and Thailand. It took almost 10 years and Qwest getting bought out by CenturyLink before we could upgrade our Internet service — that’s about 10,000 years in computer time.

I had a photo session with a very cute praying mantis this afternoon. She really liked posing for the camera.