Denial of service

If you’ve ever been to DEF CON, or rather, if you know what DEF CON is, you probably also know what a distributed denial of service attack* is. We had one of those this morning, except it was snow rather than robot computers that had us hemmed in.

*Weren’t on chess club or debate team in high school and therefore didn’t feel like looking it up? It’s when viruses infect a bunch of computers, turning them into drones or robots that in turn are all pointed simultaneously to a particular website or server, overwhelming its bandwidth/processing ability, and forcing it to shut down. Aaron makes his money filing patents intended to keep those pesky viruses off your machine. Ricky M sells that patented code to your company or PC maker. The Ukrainians employ the best and brightest software engineers they can find to try and circumvent Aaron’s and Ricky’s hard work so they can steal your credit card number and sell your children into slavery**.

**Just kidding about the selling your children into slavery part. Kind of.

If it’s possible to get too much snow, then this is too much snow. At 7:00 p.m. last night, Little Cottonwood Canyon closed due to weather. As of noon today, it still isn’t open. Big Cottonwood Canyon was open in name only. They had plowed one strip down the road in most places, and none of the parking lots were cleared. Because once the tourists are done importing their money on ski vacations, the state is done spending money keeping the roads and parking lots cleared out so that the visitors will have a good time. It’s like the snowplows are the fatted calf and the out-of-state tourists the prodigal son.

We meant to go park at Spruces and hike up in Mill D. I drove past the entrance to Spruces and couldn’t tell where it was. There was a three-foot-high snow bank where the entrance was supposed to be and two feet of snow covering the entire parking lot. We probably couldn’t get in; we definitely couldn’t get out.

Jordan Pines seemed like a place we could park, but the snowplows would undoubtedly have no mercy, and digging out the debris they would pile on would have taken longer than walking to the trailhead from the mouth of the canyon.

After about 47 U-turns looking for a place to park, I realized my window was closed since even if we found somewhere, I wouldn’t make it to my 8:00 conference call in time. Hopefully the roads will be clear by this afternoon. Thank goodness for daylight savings time.