shinyPlasticBag

Ah, snow. Everyones favourite white powder (well, not everyone’s favourite — I hear that cocaine addicts are quite fond of that stuff) has once again enveloped Halifax, taking everyone a bit by surprise. Generally speaking, winter here starts out with a few weeks of occasional flurries, which are fairly dry and more like flaky ice than real snow. Not so this year — I love how the environment has gotten random and unpredictable.

The drive to work was less than fun, even though I love snow. I think it’s the same for everyone, and I blame it on three factors:

1. Lack of winter tires being on cars. Most people wait until the snow actually starts to fall before taking this precaution, if they do it at all. We haven’t done it yet.
2. Lack of snow plowing. I would imagine that, like the snow tire issue, the city hasn’t bothered to get all of the plows ready to go yet. I only saw one on my way here, and it was parked.
3. Lack of practice. Basically, the first time the weather is bad, it’s been at least six months since we’ve had to drive in snow, and it takes a while to get used to it. Winter driving isn’t always a joy, but it’s not so bad once you’ve gotten into the swing of it. Which I haven’t yet.

Anyway, it’s just about time for me to head back to work, so barring the urge to write on my longer break, that’s it for now. Incidentally, I just discovered a very annoying bug in Windows. I urge you to recreate it so you can see how stupid it is.

In some program — it doesn’t matter which, but I found it using Microsoft Paint when I was saving that webcam image — save a file. In the Save As dialog that pops up, select a file that already exists. Press F2 to rename the file to something different, and then hit enter to actually rename it. Notice that the “File name” field at the bottom of the window will still have the old filename in it. However, if you hit the Save button, it will say that the file already exists and ask if you want to overwrite it. This fact just isn’t true: the filename entered at the bottom of the window doesn’t exist. Hit yes to “overwrite” the file that doesn’t exist, and mysteriously, the newly renamed file will indeed be overwritten, even though a different filename was specified. How obscure is that bug?

I still hate it.