Colorado is not known as a rainy place, but in the spring and summer months we do get our fair share of downpours -- especially in the mountains. This past spring my good friend Libby and her man Reid took off to Central America. But before they went, they were kind enough to hook me up with a great a-line rain skirt!

The Rain Skirt Story - at least as I know it

A while ago Libby made herself a rain skirt. The idea was simple - skirts are so useful and keep cool even on hot days. When you're wearing a cute skirt, how do you make sure that it stays dry? Why not combine her favorite piece of clothing with some protective goodness and a lot of time at a sewing machine trying out different designs to come up with the ultimate wet weather wearable? So, she did. Libby's rain skirt made her extremely happy and led to lots of envious looks from friends who had uncomfrotable rain pants or drenched legs when their long jacket failed to protect them fully. So, Libby started thinking about making them for other folks.

The Rain Skirt Evolution

Libby has thought a lot about the best way to bring Rain Skirts to the masses. She knows that she needs them to be professional, that's for certain. So, she started exploring vendors that make outdoor apparel and found a great company that creates lots of items for some of the big brands. They went back and forth with ideas for designs - both to make them more functional and more fashionable.

Rain Skitrs are Born

Let's say that you are running a command on a linux shell and it's taking a long time. Further, you need to disconnect your session to get on the bus or your session gets disconnected because your net connection is flakey.

Screen to the rescue

Imagine if you could just disconnect from your shell session and then reconnect. Well, you can :)

So, not many people understand programming. Here's a funny/interesting way to describe programming in terms of cooking. I like it.

Similarly, I once heard an analogy about asking a software engineer to build a bridge from San Francisco to Hawaii. A software engineer would say "no problem" and then do:


while (notInHawaii) {
buildbridge();
}


My post about angies list kicked off such a storm of comments I figured I'd try it out again:

What is the best Denver Tea Shop?

Looking at the Fun Denver wiki there's not a whole lot of great entries under "Tea Houses" aside from the one on capital tea. So...what is the best place?

Please - add a comment and let me know your favorite Tea Shop in Denver.

I'm working from Capital Tea this afternoon and they have two new teas:

Black Jasmine Creme Tea
Black tea with jasmine flowers and vanilla

Immortalitea (get it, immortality tea)
Grean tee with lemon, rosemary and sage.

Of course I just had a chai which I love, but these new teas seemed like interesting flavor combinations.

My friend Michael Hawley started doing Real Estate in Salida, Colorado a little while ago. If you don't know, Salida is located at the exit (Salida means exit in Spanish) of a high mountain plain in Colorado that includes Buena Vista, Poncha Springs, and several other cities. It's the "banana belt" of Colorado meaning that temperatures in Salida remain pretty moderate all winter long.

I just tabulated (and published) our history of bills from Xcel Energy for the last 12 months. I used google spreadsheets just to try it out and it's pretty neat. The "publish" feature makes it easy to share the thing, the I wish it would also give a "download in ODS, XLS, RTF, CSV format" link.

A couple interesting things to note: