Brrr... A Cold Morning in the Chaparral...

We slept in this morning, so I didn't walk the dogs until about 6:30.  At that hour, the eastern sky was just starting to lighten, and I could dimly see the yard.  It was 44°F (7°C) outside, and 100% relative humidity, making it feel quite cold for these parts.  The dogs seemed to enjoy this very much; they were all quite frisky.

The best part for me, though, was that our yard looked almost like it was covered in snow.  It obviously wasn't snow, at these temperatures – it was, instead, a very heavy dew backlit by the dawn.  Just beautiful.

The best part for Mo'i was completely different.  Ever since he caught a gopher yesterday, each time we take him outside he makes a beeline for the gopher hole from which he pulled the doomed gopher.  That's the first time in perhaps five years that he's caught anything at all.  Each time he revisits that gopher hole, he goes into his “waiting” stance, wherein he stands stock still, with his jaws just a few inches from the top of the hole, waiting for an unsuspecting gopher to stick his head out.  When he was younger, he'd do this for hours on end, never giving up.  I have to drag the poor guy off his gopher watch so we can walk.  I wonder how long this will keep up? 

Service-now.com in the Financial Times!

Ok, it's only a side-bar.  Ok, it's only mentioned in passing.  Still, our little (but fast-growing!) company got a nice, positive mention in the Financial Times (the U.K.'s rough equivalent of the Wall Street Journal).  The article itself requires (free) registration, but here's the relevant clip:

Perhaps the most striking example is the Trust’s use of software-as-a-service (SaaS). One area where SaaS has made a real difference is in IT service management: Mr Bramwell and his team now use Service-now.com’s hosted applications to respond to user computing problems.

That service has replaced in-house applications running on the Trust’s servers and costs the charity about one-fifth of what it did.

“We are looking at more SaaS models, not just with total cost of ownership savings in mind, but also because of the business continuity and disaster recovery guarantees that these offer,” says Mr Bramwell.

Mr. Bramwell is an employee of the Wellcome Trust in the U.K.