unnecessary chill - Wednesday January 02 2002

setting: south of Staunton, Virginia

In the morning, I got up first and went to take Sally and Fred for a walk around Muellers' Mountain, but of course Fred had to go off and do things on his own, eventually ending up on Pileated Peak across the road. When I finally saw him coming down the road, oblivious to my calls, I went down to get him and Sally took the opportunity to escape across the street and visit with the neighbor's Husky.

I spent much of the day working on an installation of Windows XP on my mother's computer in the Shaque. It was all rather labor intensive, but it seemed to be going well. I'd originally wanted to install Windows NT 4.0, which is a remarkably stable operating system, but there was something about the disk partition that kept causing Windows NT to complain. Due to the transparently monopolistic aspirations of Microsoft, I was forced to download the Java virtual machine as a separate part of the installation.