I believe that Mark Twain said that a man with two watches never knows what time it is. Segal's Law: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." Like that man, I have no idea what the CPU operating temperature of my MacBook Pro is, as I have three monitors now: CoreDuoTemp, Fan Control and iStat Pro. In °C, here are five readings from those three monitors, in the order listed, over a 15 minute span.

50,57,48
48,52,48
48,54,51
50,56,52
51,57,52

Some of this may be due to different sampling rates and display changes, as the three change at different times, wtih iStat Pro seeming to have the longest interval between changes, and Fan Control having the shortest. You many also notice that there isn't any consistency in the difference from one monitor to another, or in which monitor reports the lowest CPU temperature, though Fan Control is consistently the highest.

Based on this, I changed my set points in Fan Control so that the lower threshold is now 53°C and the higher being 79°C, so as the fans don't come on too often, which they seemed to be doing when Fan Control's lower threshold was set to 50°C, but they stay on a bit longer if things really heat up. Fan Control has been a big help in optimizing the performance of my MacBook Pro.

April 24th, and it's raining. Not drizzling, not a spring shower, no, no, no. A cold, driving rain... In California, in April.

I haven't written about the rains, the slides, the 12 minute commute to pick up my partner that is now over an hour, the two-hours it takes to get over the hill at commute times, or even the joys of living just south of the new cul-de-sac. I lived through it in '95 when I worked at Oracle. Why complain? Others are having a much harder time of it than I.

But on Saturday night, a slide on CA Rte. 92 played havoc with the telephone lines for the Coast. No DSL, minimal if any cell service, wonky landlines. And to top it off, both of my old routers [inside and outside to form a DMZ] died. I did buy a new MIMO router. Any excuse is a good excuse. But I'm still investigating why both routers [one is less than a month old] should die because of mud pulling out the fiber optics 12 miles away.

And now it's raining again. Time to build the ark and gather the animals.

Oh well, at least the frog that has taken up residence in our pond is happy about the rain. And the owls are back. Last night as I was setting up the new router was the first I had heard the owls since the cypress fell over - also because of the rains. I'm not sure if the owls are in the new holy cypress, or across the street in the Monterey Pines.

Ah well, better that than for it to have fallen into the house, or to have the house go sliding down the hill into my neighbor Joe's place.

Tim is working on the electricity today, so I'm typing this while on Back-UPS battery power. He came down with the flu right after his initial inspection, poor guy. Twnety-six minutes to go, and then I must shut down.

I attended today's Citizen Journalists' Lunch at Bayosphere, the new media site "of, by and for the Bay Area". The diversity of the backgrounds of those attending pleasantly struck me. Some with journalism backgrounds, PR, indy filmaking, some entrepreneurial, some technical, some scientific, some corporate, some non-profit and all in one room. Most of the time was spent with introductions and discussion around the vision of Dan Gillmor [founder] and Michael Goff [CEO], followed by breaking off into three groups to brainstorm ideas [metadata, direction, topics, and technology] for going forward. It was a fascinating time, too short, as such gatherings always are. My thanks to Dan, Micahael and Nealeigh for hosting the events.

BTW, lunch was great.

Joe Anderson left a comment on Clarise's post about our first podcast. When visiting Joe's site, she discovered the Nerd Test, and challenged me to a contest. Let's just say "I won", but not by much.

1% scored higher (more nerdy), and 99% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

Some of the questions were difficult to answer, and don't seem to reflect blogging usage, especially how often I read a blog on my blogroll - when their feed tells me they updated, I read it. So, please help these guys out, and take the survey...