MFF?

The weather this time of year can be a crap shoot, and it looks like the weather dice are poised to come up snake-eyes on the eve of our departure.  This has been the warmest and driest autumn in recent memory, but that comes to an end starting this afternoon.  It is supposed to start snowing sometime around noon, and keep coming down right through until sometime tomorrow afternoon (at least that's what the guy from Environment Canada said on the radio this morning - they still haven't updated their website to reflect that).

Obviously the two factors that are going to affect us are 1) how much it snows, and 2) how long it keeps falling.  The guy this morning suggested that we could get up to 20cm (8") of snow over the next day and a half.  That will definitely make things interesting.  If the snow stops tomorrow afternoon then that will give them 12-15 hours to clear the highways ahead of us.  We may have to deal with blowing snow, but the roads should be fairly passable otherwise.  On the other hand, this storm is tracking eastward, so we could end up chasing it all the way to Chicago if it dips that far south.

It's not a question of if we will make it to the con (assuming we can stay out of the ditch), but when we will get there.  Our goal is to arrive mid-day on Thursday.  Reality may be a very late arrival, or possibly Friday if we have to hunker down somewhere along the way to wait out some bad weather.  Bleah.

(no subject)

I solved a vexing mystery this morning, but they're not happy with my answer.  Cars with apparently identical records were not yielding identical results when it came to suppressing reclaimable mileage.  They have been looking into it from a system standpoint, trying to find a programming error somewhere in the works.  As soon as I heard about the problem this morning (why don't they bring me these things sooner?) I had a different thought.

"If two cars with identical records generate different results, Occam's Razor suggests that the records are not - appearances aside - identical."

It took about twenty minutes, but I managed to find the problem in the records (very subtle - it's no wonder they missed it earlier), and traced the root cause to human error.

I suspect that they were hoping that the problem was systemic.  Finding out that it was a clerical error makes them all *frumple*.

Now back to working on my year-end review.  I managed to get it postponed until Tuesday (yay me!) so that I could track down some vital figures.