They got up to a foot of snow in New York City from a winter storm Tuesday and Wednesday…

I do like snow, but I gotta be honest… I’m not terribly broken up about having moved out of the city and missed the chance to trudge to work in that stuff.

In Connecticut, where they got 6 to 12 inches from what the local CBS affiliate is calling “Winter Storm Connor,” Mrs. Stone — my former newspaper adviser, computer teacher at the high school, and mother of my “honorary sister” Kim — says Newington was practically the only school district in the state to stay open Wednesday. Typical.

Meanwhile, here in Phoenix, it’s crystal-clear and 50 degrees at 9:30 PM, with a forecast high of 67 for tomorrow. :)

Heads are rolling all over the world today, from the Howard Dean campaign to the BBC. Alas, none have yet rolled in the intelligence community, nor in the bribe-taking, Saddam-protecting “moral high ground” known as France. But, patience is a virtue, I suppose.

If this, especially, is true…

Documents from Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

…then heads, clearly, must roll. Many heads. Many big, powerful heads. But hey, the French did invent the guillotine, after all. Uneasy lies the head, eh, President Chirac?

UPDATE: “Oh, my God. That’s huge,” says Becky, talking about the France-Iraq allegation (and NOT anything else, you sick, sick people — anyway we’ve been dating for almost four years, it doesn’t cause that kind of a reaction anymore — but I digress :).

InstaPundit also seems to think it — the scandal — is huge, but Glenn asks cautiously, “Can this be true? We’ll have to wait and see.” There are certainly plenty of people denying it. Of course, I’d deny it too, if I were them.

Editor’s note: Sorry about the family-website violation above… but I couldn’t resist. :)

If you were planning on travelling between Chicago and Seattle on Amtrak’s Empire Builder train over the next few days, you’re out of luck.

This evening, as I was playing around with the preferences in Apple’s Mail program, I stumbled upon a really cool feature whereby you can set different notification options for different types of mail messages (based on sender, subject, and a whole bunch of other criteria). Since Mail checks my e-mail automatically once a minute, this is actually significant — I am often working in another program when I get new mail, so if there are certain types of mail that I want to be immediately aware of, a special notification scheme is a good idea.

Needless to say, techno-nerd that I am, I immediately decided to take this feature for a spin. So now, whenever I receive a message where the subject is “CNN Breaking News,” the Mail icon on my Dock bounces incessantly until I view the message, the message itself is highlighted in red, and — this is the good part — in addition to the regular you’ve-got-mail “ding” sound, my computer plays the Howard Dean scream!

Heh. Hehe. Hehehe. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

In other news, I’ve been surfing around and pricing various things that I want to buy. Alas for the limited resources of a debt-ridden young professional… :)

UPDATE: Let it be known that, a few minutes ago, Dane sent me an e-mail entitled “CNN Breaking News,” just for fun, to test my system. It worked — I was busily surfing the web when suddenly, my Mail icon started flashing and Howard Dean started screaming. “Holy hollerin’ hell,” I thought, “what happened? A news alert, this late at night? Must be an attack or something!” But no… it was just Dane. Heh.

For the record, I have now changed the criteria for the breaking-news notification scheme. Previously, it was set to go off whenever I got a message from the CNN breaking-news e-mail address, and/or whenever I received any e-mail with the subject line “CNN Breaking News.” I included the subject-line criterion mostly so I could test it myself, and also because I thought, hey, CNN might someday change their breaking-news address, and this way, I’ll be prepared. But, seeing the vulnerability of that strategy, I have now changed it to only scream at me if the e-mail actually comes from the correct CNN address. Sorry, Dane. :)

“You know all those dangerous mutants you hear about in the news? I’m the worst one.”