Seen the other day while waiting for the T in Boston. Note that the (admittedly blurry) "MGH" that appears in between the two signs stands for Massachusetts General Hospital.

Surely this was no accident....

Apparently moose are a dime a dozen up here, and yet somehow I've managed to go ten years without seeing a single moose. Seeing a moose has therefore become one of my life's obsessions goals. I convinced my friend to go moose spotting yesterday. We set off at 3:30 AM and looked all day. No luck. It would seem that, much like the never-boiling watched pot, the searched-for moose is never found. I learned a few other things in the process:

• How to discourage others from frequenting your favorite swimming hole
  
• Where not to forget spare change
  (Any place where there are coin-operated duck food dispensers. The mere act of parking your car is sufficient to cause a hoard of incessantly quacking water fowl to descend upon you rapidly and pursue you relentlessly until you do their bidding. The dispensers don't take debit cards.)
  
• Your daily commute could be far worse
  
• Your daily commute could be far better
  
• Where not to look down - 2nd runner up
  The Aerial Tramway at Cannon Mountain. 4,180 feet is a long way up.
  
• Where not to look down
  The Nansen Ski Jump. Saw it from the road. Apparently you can get closer to it. We didn't try.
  
• Where to take photos of heron
  Fraconia Notch, near the Old Man of the Mountain viewing area. We spotted this fellow from the other side of a bridge. He let us get closer and closer. This shot was taken from about 12 feet away.
  

Moose-spotting tips welcome.

Last night I was in my local CompUSA and saw the cutest little HP. While I really don't need yet another computer (2 PC desktops, 2 PC laptops -- although one *is* for work -- and 1 iMac), I had been thinking it might be nice to have a dedicated OpenSolaris box both for development and testing of Orca and just to get myself more familiar with Solaris.

I know what you're thinking. Yes, I do have multi-boot systems; yes, I do know about virtualization. I just find that if I have a dedicated system, I'm more likely to interact with the OS in question than I am if I have to reboot or launch a VM. Plus, when all of your OSes live on one box, a single "bleeding edge" install gone sufficiently awry can take out the whole pack.

Anyhoo... This tiny box might be perfect -- if it's compatible with OpenSolaris. The store associates were perfectly fine with my downloading and installing the Sun Device Detection Tool, but it turns out the tool is not compatible with Windows Vista. Given that any PC you find in the store now has Vista installed, it would be very cool to have a Vista-compatible version. Please Sun?

I might still get that HP anyway. It is awful cute, and I could put Ubuntu Gutsy on it and make my office desktop the dedicated OpenSolaris box...