A completely random thought: is there a name for the motion of a carousel horse? One of those would be informative and impish:

1. Donusoidal
2. Torusoidal

[For you overly serious types - Yes, I know that both of those answers are incorrect because 'donut' and 'torus' refer to 3-dimensional surfaces. My question and answers are not meant to be geometrically correct. However, if there really is a term describing the combination of sinusoidal and circular motions of a carousel horse, I would like to know what it is.]

On December 12, the northeast USA had a severe ice storm, which left 0.5" - 1" (1-2.5 cm) of ice on everything. Trees, heavy with ice, bent and broke, snapping wires and cutting electricity to over 200,000 homes and businesses. My house was one of the unfortunate ones.

However, with every challenge there are opportunities - in this case, photographic ones. So I fired up the DSLR and started snapping - pictures, not wires.

One pine tree in my backyard was so laden with ice that its tip - normally 25 feet in the air - was dangling in the pond. It looks like the pine tree was thirsty and is taking a drink. (Click on the image to see a larger image.)

Later, the surface of the pond froze, trapping the tip in the pond. Fortunately - for the tree - the surface melted two days later, allowing it to shake itself free.

A birch tree in the front yard performed a similar feat, but it looked more like it was bowing. I doubt it was trying lick the snow - it knows better.

I like the loss of background clutter that night - and flash! - brings to shots like that one.

Another birch was bent, and its upper half reached, like fingers, through the branches of a Shadblow tree, itself coated in ice.

Another night shot, a large pine seems to loom gloomily over a 6-foot blue spruce. Normally its arms jut out parallel to the ground, but the ice pinned its arms to its sides.

But by far the worst damage nearby was a 40-to-45-foot pine tree in the backyard. For years, it has been leaning out over the pond. No more - the weight of the ice snapped it in two, about eight feet up the trunk. In the first image, only the remaining trunk is obvious...

...but in the next picture, it's clear that the tree decided to "take a dip" in the pond. To give you some scale, the pond is 40 feet wide. The tree reached all the way across and stripped some branches off of a tree on the far side of the pond.

As someone mentioned to me - the ice storm was "just Mother Nature doing some pruning."

P.S. Nighttime brought another interesting view: moonlight refracting through the ice on tree branches.

Availability of the newest update to Solaris 10 was officially announced today. It includes these improvements, among others:

• adds significant new functionality to Solaris Containers
• improves network performance with Large Send Offload
• several ZFS improvements (including "zpool history" to review recent commands)
• fault management support for AMD64 Rev F and G systems (including detection and recovery from correctable CPU and memory problems)
• Quagga routing software
• an iSCSI target, including for ZFS file systems
• Thunderbird 2.0
• XVideo support on RealPlayer
• X11R7.2
• Compact Flash card support
• NVIDIA accelerated graphics drivers

Details are available at docs.sun.com. You can download the software at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp.

It's been a while since my last blog entry. I've been busy assisting a few customers, and taking some personal time for events like a family wedding in Bar Harbor. My daughter was very excited to see two whales wave at her: