as much as a foot of snow was supposed to fall in the boston area. in light of what was happening to much of the east coast over the past few days, new england was bracing itself for our turn at the winter whiteout. but something happened today: the snowstorm never arrived. something about a warm front causing much of the precipitation to come down as rain instead of snow. with the storm system almost completely passing by us, there's just a dusting of snow at best. on the one hand i'm relieved, but on the other hand i'm sort of disappointed after all that anticipation.

when did gallons of milk change their caps? didn't milk used to have those snap caps that you opened by tearing off a plastic thread? but the milks i've bought recently all came with new screw-on caps. what brought about the change? i sort of like the new caps, more secure if i ever want to violently shake a gallon of milk.

i'm sort of a connoisseur of wildlife field guides. yesterday at the library i took out a copy of new england wildflowers: a guide to common planets (frank kaczmarek, a falcon guide, 2009). after a thorough browsing, i can recommend it as one of the better wildflower field guides for new england. i was able to find the 3 new flowers i discovered last year (2009): fringed polygala ("gaywings"), helleborines, and pinesap ("pink indian pipes"). how i normally identify wildflowers is by consulting the audubon field guide to new england, followed by the more comprehensive audubon field guide to eastern region wildflowers (2000 edition). i don't like the audubon wildflower guide because the photos are separate from the text descriptions. looking up anything is a tedious process of flipping back and forth between the pages. the falcon field guide is organized by colors (like the audubon), but photo and text lie on the same page, which makes for easier browsing. it also has a durable stain-resistant binding suitable for actual field use. one thing i like about the falcon is it includes some new invasive species, like the black swallow-wort (missing from the audubon, but may be included in more recent editions). the falcon covers over 300 wildflowers, while the audubon touts almost 700 species; but if you're confined to just the new england region, i'd pick the falcon over the audubon (however, the audubon new england guide is a book everyone should own - that one covers about 240 wildflowers).

flash actionscript is not as forgiving as director lingo. with lingo, variables don't have to be declared and cases doesn't matter. the good thing about flash (CS3+) is so many more things can be tweaked through actionscript, but the bad thing is a lot of code has to be written in order to do any little thing. at least the scripting interface prompts you with color coding to let you know you're on the right path. i also get the sense that actionscript is a multi-disciplinary language, combining also regular expressions and cascading stylesheets. it definitely feels like more a robust coding system, despite the complications (compared to lingo).