We got our first snow of the season. It made me miss my family (even more), as we have a tradition of warm drinks (Tom & Jerrys) on the first snow. We had powdered sugar and plenty of eggs in the house, and even some good booze, but it seemed too much work for just me and Josh.

What surprised me most about the snow was the wind. It howled--a Chicago howl, and they don't call it the Windy City for nothin'. We do live on the side of a hill, rather than a "holler", as they so unabashedly call it around here, so that may have made it worse, though I would have expected a little more protection from the trees that flank the house. It's supposed to get to 40^o today, so the snow probably won't be around that long.

Well, if you count a Friday night math-premised CBS program prime time. I just wanted to mention that this week's episode of Numbers , they mention my old experiment, Dzero. You can watch the program free at the show's website. Josh and I of course had to heckle what they said. The crazy physicist was "invited" to work at Dzero, which "searches for the Higgs boson". In truth, Dzero would let pretty much anybody from a respectable university with some grant money work on the experiment, and they've done/are doing much more than looking for the Higgs, though admittedly, that's the big prize.

A power outage last night shut down my work computer, so Windows took the opportunity, upon reboot, to add all kinds of crap to itself. I kept on getting fun (read: annoying) little balloon messages, including this one: "Update Java now... and get OpenOffice FREE". This "offer" struck me, since OpenOffice is already free. It always has been and hopefully always will be. It's a major cog in the world of open source software.

Open source, much as its name implies, means that the source code is available, so that (if you're clever enough) you can muck with the program, customizing it at code level. The wonderful thing is that many people do this, and all their tricks and customizations make it back into the distribution. So instead of a few programmers working in secret making the program do whatever they (or their bosses) want it to do, hundreds of programmers are working on the software, making it do what real people want it to do.

Trouble is, it tends to be hard to make money on open source--which is why Microsoft spends so much time and effort keeping its code secret. Which is fine, because I do believe that in an open market, the better product will prevail. Trouble is, Microsoft is doing everything it can to keep the market from opening.