When I first spotted this in traffic on I-405 near LAX, I wondered “What’s a red soccer ball doing on the freeway?” It turned out to be one of Google’s fleet of spy cameras gathering way more information about you and your property than you might want other people to have. And they don’t seem very timid about letting you know what they’re doing. Click on the image to enlarge.
We’re in Arizona this week doing chores for the new house, so blogging will be light. We did not post yesterday because someone (maybe it was me) forgot to pack up the AC power converter/charger for the laptop. Damsel had hers with her but it isn’t compatible with my laptop. Since the battery only lasts about two hours (even with the low power settings), I budgeted the time for downloading Damsel’s photos and updating the money program.
Today, we drove to Surprise, AZ to a Radio Shack store to pick up a universal AC supply manufactured by iGo (seen at right). While we were in the store, I made them open up the package and demonstrate that it was equivalent to the charger I inadvertently left in California. Bottom line is that we’re good to go.
We observed good progress on our new Arizona house. You can see it on the other blog.
About thirty years ago, I worked in the Preliminary Design Department for a major toy manufacturer. Part of the daily routine on the development team was to play with contemporary games and toys to foster a sense of what kids might like. I remember one of the popular video games at the time was Space Invaders, where alien ships entered the atmosphere and it was the game player’s job to shoot ’em down.
Since I am interested in development of on-line applications, I subscribe to a blog where Flash™ animation development is discussed. Last week there was a post about a game submitted to the developer’s forum called SWiSH Invaders. It is strongly reminiscent of the game I played (and was never very good at) 30 years ago. I post the game here for your amusement and, if you happen to remember that game, nostalgia.
Link to the on-line game is here.
From National Review Online – Charles Krauthammer’s take on the Postal Service:
I’m kind of old-school. I like the delivery. I like the snow and sleet and time of day and all of that.
Look, it’s very obvious that you can’t privatize this. Three studies have looked at the postal service. Because of the new technology there is no entrepreneur in his right mind who would purchase it. So it’s going to be on the government dole forever.
The question is, is it completely obsolete? Look, it has one mandate which other private services don’t have. It has to reach every tiny hamlet everywhere in the country no matter what. It’s got to be universal. So that’s a slight handicap that the private companies don’t have.
Its main handicap, of course, is the crushing labor union contracts and the new technology, especially e-mail, which makes most of what it does obsolete. So that’s why it runs a huge deficit.
But, look, anything that is in Article 1 Section 8 of our constitution, anything that Madison had waxed enthusiastic about it in Federalist 42 — the postal roads that have kept us together — as an old-school guy, I don’t want to see it die.
As a conservative who believes in the market, it ought to die, but as a conservative that believes in tradition and stuff that really holds us together, I would subsidize until it dies a natural death in the next generation. But for old guys like me, keep it going for a while. …
[As for] the hard-hearted younger generation — well, if you ever got a sweet-smelling love letter at 17, you’d feel otherwise. Of course, I never did, but somebody did.
You can’t smell your e-mail.
I have programmed several favorite websites (other than the blogs) that I like to visit daily. One of those is the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) website.
A favorite feature of mine, is the Very Latest SOHO Images page. On this page, I can see the solar disc in four different Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) wavelengths of light, two images (Continuum and Magnetogram) from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), and two fields of view from the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO).
The Latest Images page is where I can see what’s happening on and around the Sun in near real time. Today’s EIT images tell me that there are active regions on both the left and right sides of the disc. The active region on the right will be rotating out of view soon, while the one on the left will move toward the center of the disc. The MDI images reveal no large sunspots – the remnants of sunspot 1035 are just coming into view in the upper left. The LASCOs reveal a couple of interesting things – there are Coronal Mass Ejections associated with both active regions seen in the EIT images and the planet Mercury passed in front of and below the Sun a few days ago.
On the way to the range today, we heard the train coming down the track, so we decided to stop for the photo op. Damsel took some stills and I made a movie.
I have always been fascinated by trains, especially old steamers, but I like ’em all. In the summer of 2005, Damsel and I rode the Alaskan RR from Anchorage through Denali and on to Fairbanks. Seeing any trains always brings out a little wanderlust in me.
Pardon the crappy bandwidth compression. One of these days I’m going to upgrade the website for streaming video. I kept telling myself that I would do it when I get the time – well now that I’m retired, I no longer have much of an excuse. I’ll get on it real soon now, just as soon as I do a few chores and we make an out of towner or two . . .
