Travels and Thoughts

;
Travels and Images

WEEK 14 2005

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week

Picture of the Week

MAIN PAGE

Lancaster Weather NOAA

Lancaster WeatherUnderground

Three Years Ago, This Week, 2002

Two Years Ago, this week, 2003

A Year Ago, This Week, 2004

Weekly Picture Archive

Saturday 9 April 2005

Saturday - a friend of mine has a 'movie night' on Saturday, so I invited myself over and watched a couple of movies. The first was 'Crybaby', with Johnny Depp. It was an odd movie, but it had it's moments. The second was 'What Woman Want' with Mel Gibson. Again, it had it's moments, but was somewhat uneven. But it sure beat sitting home alone with a calculus text!

Friday 8 April 2005

Friday - another windy and overcast day. In the evening it started raining sideways, what with the wind gusting to 40mph+!

I was out tutoring in calculus so I didn't get the chance to watch and enjoy the weather as much as I might have. That's OK, I'm having fun with the math - it's been years since I used some of this stuff, but it is (slowly) coming back to me. Generally I remember what I am supposed to do, but a lot of the identities - trigonometric and algebraic - are missing in action. For example, what is the antiderivative of cosecant^2? Fortunately 'cheat sheets' are allowed, but in the late seventies I used to have these things memorized.

Phoebe thinks I should move to Wasco - that is about where his left foot is. Odd. Perhaps it is the thought of all the tasty field mice. His right paw is hidden, but it would be about on the Sierra foothills, someplace a bit more to my own taste.

Friday cat blogging: Photographing black cats is a challenge; generally
you just end up with a silhouette, sometimes a silhouette with eyes.

Thursday 7 April 2005

Thursday - feeling better, took a walk in the morning, my first since coming down with the crud a couple weeks ago. Also working on the code, running some testcases.

I've been watching the crowds on teevee, gathered for the viewing and funeral of Pope John Paul II. What an amazing thing. I was under the impression that Italy had become a rather secular state of communists. Perhaps not.

Here is a shot of the battleship IOWA, on the end of the raft, in the Suisun Bay mothball fleet, as seen from orbit, via Google Map:

Wednesday 6 April 2005

Wednesday - took a brief trip out to the poppy reserve in the west valley. Not a very impressive year.

The new Google Map is cool. There is an associated satellite image that you can switch to, once you've found your location, or you could browse by using the satellite image. Here, for example, is the Golden Gate Bridge from orbit:

golden gate bridge from orbit, via google maps

As you might tell from the text box, first I looked at the mothball fleet
near Benecia, Ca., then I panned west (by dragging) to the bridge. Very Cool Stuff.
It (the mapping) seems to just be the United States right now...

Tuesday 5 April 2005

Tuesday - the band was playing again today. Time to move - it's a battle I've fought way too many times. I say 'the band' but really it's just another band. They come, they go. It's a function of living in a family oriented suburb.

Eastern Oregon or Northwest Nevada seem like attractive places to move right now.

The PC antivirus wanted to download an update. I said OK, so it downloaded - and rebooted my computer. In the middle of a week long job. So much for trusting Symantec.

Monday 4 April 2005

Monday - in the early morning I woke to the sound of rain. How strange. Saturday I was sweating in proto-summer heat, two days later it's a cool spring storm.

I was speaking of Pompeii yesterday - which reminds me that there is apparently going to be a made-for-tv movie on next week about the Yellowstone caldera blowing up: SUPERVOLCANO. I have no plans to watch - disaster movies are always terrible...uh...disasters. Dante's Peak was on the other day, for example - I managed to watch about five minutes before finding something else to do and it's probably the best of the genre from a mainstream film maker. The made-for-tv are even worse - let's not even get into the moronic 10.5 that was on yesterday - 10.5 might be the number of seconds a sane human could watch such a thing.

Sunday 3 April 2005

Sunday - the weather sure changed overnight! Rather than calm and sunny it is breezy, overcast, and cool. A bit sore from the Saturday chores I cleaned inside the house, went to lunch with some friends, watched the finale of Battlestar Galactica (which I had taped Friday night) and read a bit.

I read Pompeii, which Glenn Reynolds had mentioned reading a while back on his webpage. It has an engineer as a protagonist, always a draw for me, but I didn't find it all that interesting. Not much engineering, and the characters were rather cardboardish. The most interesting thing, to me, was the death of Pliny the Elder. I can recall a National Geographic or History Channel show which uses his description of the eruption and pyroclastic flow as a historical antecedent to Mt. St. Helens, but I don't recall them mentioning that he died because of it. Though, actually, the book is a little unclear on the point - it may have been a heart attack.

Update: Well, maybe it was a different web page. Searching Reynold's for Pompeii only turns up an old link to a Lilek's page that has nothing to do with the book. Odd though, that the book would be associated in my mind with some unconnected person.

Picture of the Week

HL-10 on pedestal at gate of NASA DRYDEN

Photo Notes: The HL-10 lifting body aircraft, on a pedestal at the main gate of NASA Dryden.

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week