Winter break

MIT was nice enough to give us extra paid vacation between Christmas and IAP, so I've been home. The laptop has been getting a lot of love; I played through a few more Railroad Tycoon 3 scenarios, and played some Loco-Commotion, which is a cute puzzle game that comes bundled with RT3. I've also spent too much time figuring out Troubles of Middle Earth, yet another Angband variant. (I think I don't like it as much as vanilla Angband: there's too many things floating around, and the multiple town/dungeon pairs are confusing and you have to remember where you left things. It also seems like powerful weapon artifacts are coming up far too shallow.)

Since Boston has been stupidly warm, I also got around to replacing the tires on my bike with something more road-worthy. I rode 15 miles today. (The Minuteman trail is much less crowded on December 31 than June 31, somehow.) The bike was fine; the rear derailleur needs adjustment again, but I can do that myself. I did manage to find the Fitchburg Cutoff trail near Alewife and rode out along that, discovering that new tires aren't so friendly with mud as the old knobbies were.

Otherwise, productivity has been down. I've had to battle the forces of entropy in the kitchen to be able to cook for myself (yes, I do do that sometimes). But I haven't updated my Debian packages, or my firewall rules. Or done work, though that's a little more expected. Maybe I'll order some things online and claim productivity that way.