As you may or may not know, Central Texas is at the bottom of the region known as "Tornado Alley" -- that area of the Midwest where strong thunderstorms form a breeding ground for severe weather; to include tornadoes and hail.

Such a hail-producing storm made its way through Northwest Austin on Friday evening producing up-to golf-ball-sized hail and it beat the tar out of the west-facing front of the house (not to mention the hood of the Jeep Wrangler).

It started with high winds, rain and thunder. Then the pitter-patter of hail started, so I opened the front door to see what was up and, despite the fact the door is under a considerable overhang, got pelted with hail. The wind, 50 mph gusts, was driving the hail almost horizontally from the west, directly into the front of the house.

A few seconds exposure practically covered the foyer floor with hail -- at that point about nickel-sized.

The assault only lasted for about 10 minutes, but as the size of the hail increased -- and you would not believe how loud it sounded beating against the house and windows -- I was sure that every west-facing window (including a large 6' x 6' window above the foyer) was going to get smashed.

Amazingly, only one garage window was broken. But the siding, and the Jeep took a beating.

Here are some photos I took Friday evening and over the weekend:

Opening the front door after the storm had passed:

A handful of hail. And yes, I was in my jammies:

Measuring the stones at the front door. Bear in mind this was taken after they had quite a bit of time to melt. Stones up to 2" were reported in the area.

The ground was almost completely covered. The dark, uncovered area is a stream of water running off the hill.

Here's one of the holes punched compeltely through the siding. There are about a dozen of these on the front (west-facing) side of the house. The rest of the siding is cracked and chipped in hundreds of places. Notice the "dinging" of the aluminum sheeting (darker color) around the windows.

The trees had just put out their leaves. Now they are prcatically bare again. The entire yard looked like it had been strewn with salad.

The rest of the plants got pretty beat up, including the poor plam tree. Luckily, none of the plants look like they got damaged to the point of not surviving.

There may also be roof damage as some wet-spots have appeared on the ceilings.

Sigh, now to deal with the insurance company.

Well, I finally retired Big Red (photo circa 1995).

My new ride:

It's a 2005 Yamaha V-Star 1100 Silverado. Completely stock (at least as of yet).

"What?!?!" I hear some say. "You've always been a Harley guy!"

Not necessarily true. My first two bikes, way back in the Ice Ages, were Hondas. But true, for the time that most people have known me, I've been a Harley owner.

Now I know that Harley owners have this rep for being "Harley snobs", and I know I'm supposed to turn my nose up at anything that's not emblazoned with the bar and shield. And most certainly I know that I'm supposed to disdain anything Japanese!

Tripe. I never ascribed to that particular Kool-Aid.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not bad-mouthing Harleys or anything like that. I loved my Harleys, and may again own a Harley someday. But to pretend that Harleys are the only decent bikes out there is just nonsense.

Let's face it. Harleys are over-priced -- no two ways around it. And despite major advances in engine design, they still need some TLC to keep them operating smoothly.

At this particular point in my life I just could not condone purchasing a bike that is so over-priced when other, just as decent, and better-valued bikes are available.

I don't have the time or inclination to fiddle with engines, so I need to rely on the local dealership for that. And when it comes to servicing bikes, let's just say that I've found that the local delalership doesn't exactly have its act together.

So this time I went Yamaha. The bike has the "classic cruiser" styling that I so adore, was very reasonably priced, has a great reliability reputation, and even though it's roughly the same size as Big Red (a 1995 Harley FXDSC), fits me a bit better.

The best part is that, since even older Harleys maintain their value pretty well, after trade-in I was able to get this for a little bit of nothing.

The only aspects of the bike that I have found lacking are:

• No gas guage. I'll jave to go back to using the trip odometer to know when to visit the gas station. (Btw, the bike gets 35 to 40 miles per gallon. Woo hoo!)
• If the bike stalls -- and yes, I still stall it now and again as I get used to it -- it must be put into neutral in order to restart. You can't just pull in on the clutch and hit the starter. A pain in the butt when you stall with traffic behind you.

Otherwise, I really like the new bike. I'll keep y'all posted as I ride it more and more.

The wget utility recently came up in a JavaRanch topic and I recalled that this very useful utility doesn't come natively installed on Mac OS X, even if you install the Developer Tools.

I also recalled that it took me less than 10 minutes to download the sources and build it.

Figuring that I should probably rebuild the latest and greatest, here are the steps I took to build wget 1.9 on Mac OS X 10.3.8 with the Developer Tools installed:

1. Get the source from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.9.tar.gz
2. Unpack the tarball: tar xzf wget-1.9.tar.gz
3. This creates a folder named wget-1.9. Change the working folder to it: cd wget-1.9/
4. Configure the build: ./configure
5. Build: make
6. Install: sudo make install
7. The wget binary should now be in your /usr/local/bin folder.