Here is a recent picture of the South pole of Enceladus as seen by the Cassini spaceprobe very close up. The picture shows many high speed geysers.

Unrelated: Happy Birthday scratch3000 !

I got up at 5:30 this morning on short sleep. Once Denise and the kids were gone, I went back to sleep, and woke up a little before ten when my boss called (with a friendly reminder of expense reports -- I have a great boss). I feel pretty good now. There is a chance that today rickthefightguy and his wonderful wife might visit. I don't know their detailed agenda. I'm guessing I didn't pass on my phone number.

I have a few projects I'm (planning on) working on. I need to get the gumption to ask to borrow a van or truck I can use to carry some 4x8 sheets of paneling, but so far I'm still in travel recovery mode. I also need to get out for a walk, but I have thus far this morning found a continuous stream of little things to postpone that. Now lunch time approaches. I think this week off a very good thing!

Here are a few pictures.

I'm home. I had some ambition for what I'd get done today, but all I've really accomplished is a bit of fighting off something I might be coming down with. ... Well, OK, I did do a little moving of things in the basement.

No pictures.

I overslept, and rushed to the airport. I made the flight, but not without a little stress.
On the plane, I was seated next to a French woman of Algerian descent (now living in the SF area). She was on her way to present a paper at a conference on American Foreign Policy in North Africa, which is a fairly complicated subject. How many of you are aware of a refugee producing conflict between Morocco and Algeria? If I was aware of it, it was just barely. She is also married to a guy who is the European head of the ITER project (giant fusion reactor in France). We had a nice conversation for about 45 minutes, and then she started reading, and I fell asleep.

I was on United Airlines for this trip. They are such a mirror image of their old advertising catch phrase "Fly the friendly Skies". One of the flight attendants was yelling at a couple of passengers for standing up to stretch because she thought they'd be blocking some other passenger's view of "Animal Planet" on the airplane's antique video monitors. "It's not all about you, you know!"

So, I got home. Everything seems fine.

Thanks to robomarkov for this link to an article about an odd futuristic product.

Here are some pictures. I went into San Francisco last night to catch Max McCal participating in Improv. They were in a theater at 965 Mission St, on the second floor. The thing they were trying was to have a connection to a similarly named improv troupe in LA, with a projection system through the internet, and do a series of improv games via the video link.

The actual improv performances were not very spectacular, but it was very cool that they were trying to get a new medium to work. It was also great seeing Max. I'll be visiting him again in two weeks.

In other news:
- happy belated birthday new_man . (Today's his birthday, but he won't read this until tomorrow if at all)
- the trip home is tomorrow.
- I had trouble sleeping last night and saw what I assume will be the last X-Files movie. I thought it was really cool that they allowed Dana Scully to look middle-aged.
- I've been chatting with a student (not the CFR guy) about politics. He's a righty who feels that the problem with the health-care proposal is that it is part of an increase in the importance of government in people's lives, and that while today's leftists mean well, another Dick Cheney-like guy (Stalin as he puts it) will eventually take power and use it badly.

I had tooled through 105 minutes of traffic to get to Zanni4's house (Jim Letchworth of the Tutti-Fruitti Commedia Company. Also present were several other members. We had a great time. We watched the Pennsic version of "Turkish Princess". They had great praise for Fritz and the Pantalone costume. They had praise for everything else. The food was great, and a good time was had by all.

The Spinal Tap reference above is a little off-target. Last night I had a gap in my social schedule, because Max postponed. I'll see him Thursday doing an interesting Improv-Game thing. I tried to take advantage by getting to sleep early to rest up for a 5:30AM con-call, and tonight's visit with Zanni4 & family from the Commedia list (Flank Steak and Comedy!). I tried to do some work prepping travel expenses, but hotel internet was not very forthcoming with packets, so I got sucked into TV, and saw some of NCIS and NCIS-LA, and most of a movie that was probably X-Men Origins.. It starred Huge Ackman, and Jean Luc Picard.

In the end, I think I got enough sleep, interrupted though it was.

Here is a recent shot from Cassini (orbiting Saturn). The rings are now starting to be exposed to the Sun again, and are getting lit up, but have long shadows. This shot shows the shadow of the moon Pan. This is a Moon that orbits in a gap between the rings.

First, Happy Birthday emerlion . I haven't seen a post by you in ages, but maybe you'll see this message.

We have, about a month ago, shifted to a new mechanism for handling expense reports. It is "paperless", but is taking a bit of time for me to work out all the details of what is needed. The changes aren't unworkable, they just make me shift my rhythm, and I haven't found the new beat yet. The stutter-steps while I try to get the new swing are kind of awkward and embarrassing. I have a con-call at 5:30am tomorrow to try and work some of these things out.

In other news, the hotel internet was non-trivial to get going, though eventually, I did, shortly before falling asleep.

We had dinner at the place near the hotel.

The food was excellent, the company was even better. I got sleepy way to early because of the three hour time shift.

I'm not able to send or receive gmail from my client location.
For some reason they haven't nailed down the social media sites.

Here are a bunch more images.

I didn't really chronicle my journey last time. I probably can't do it justice now, but here's the thumbnail sketch of what I've been up to:

I flew home from DC, sitting next to a couple very nice and chatty women who were down for some BATF meeting. I got home did some laundry, and watched an interesting Stargate Universe episode, and after a while went to sleep.

I got up at 5 and drove back to Logan, where there was plenty of parking. On the plane, I got about three hours sleep (yay, I needed that), and eventually landed in SF, and then drove to La Honda CA to visit Ann & Ruth. After lunch we went to walk through the Redwoods, and then went on to Neil & Cara's for dinner and some Baroque music. We returned to La Honda, slept, and then went out for some short hikes. Ruth has some heart problem that is putting fluid in her lungs, so we didn't do anything really strenuous.

After that, we had lunch, did some gardening, and otherwise had a good time.

Shortly after I got to the hotel tonight, I got some great news from munchor .

No time to write, I'm heading out for a walk.
Here are a bunch of pictures.

Here is an article about NASA's news conference today about the LCROSS results.

You may recall the disappointing plume when we observed the crash on the moon. There was lots of ice in the plume.

Also, here's a great new crescent Earth picture, showing one of the poles.

This evening I will fly home to Camelot. I had some trouble sleeping last night, so I am tired today.

As a consequence of this sleep trouble, I saw:
- a sad football game between two teams with weak offensive lines and good rushers
- parts of an oddly colorful movie called "Sukiyaki Western Django"
- other junk on TV

Sadly the Sheraton (which charged me $13/day for internet connection) was unable to keep my connection going all night, and the outage last night started about 7PM, was restored briefly around 8PM, and then lost for the rest of the night around 8:30. So, in my near-zombie like state, it was TV or not TV. TV would have been a better option if they'd had Comedy Central or MSNBC, but no, it was Showtime, and a suite of Fox and ESPN channels.

Five years ago, the ESA launched a space probe that will, five years from now, rendezvous with a Comet, and fly with it as it approaches the Sun. It will also put a little lander on the comet. This is a very cool mission.

Tomorrow, the probe will be zipping by the Earth so as to change its trajectory around the solar system a bit. On the right is a recent snapshot of our planet as seen by an interloper.

As far as I know, the name of the probe "Rosetta" has nothing to do with the Beatles song "Get Back". And yet, here it is, back where it once belonged.

qwrrty is a picture-posting neighbor to my South, who will hopefully have a great birthday today.

I have continued to do very boring things this week. I've been feeling mentally pretty exhausted by this weeks batch of students, so I haven't been getting around to seeing the sights and sounds of DC's western suburbs. Maybe I'm saving it all for next week, when I have plenty of evening stuff lined up in the Bay Area.

Last night I:
- discovered that you shouldn't order cake at a fancy hotel restaurant (it will be stale and taste like everything else in their fridge).
- watched an episode of NCIS-LA, and thought the whole franchise has jumped the shark. Is the Linda Hunt character supposed to be magical?
- read more Ockham.
- watched the first five minutes of a Californication episode. Hated seeing David Duchovny as a smoker. Turned it off.
- I've taken almost no pictures of this place. I'm not inspired.

In other news,
- the plumber came and installed our new basement heater! Hopefully all inspections will be done by next week, and I can get back to work on my video studio project.
- I wish the media would stop calling the Higgs Boson "The God Particle". It makes science sound so unfriendly to religious fundamentalists.

You know something that is insanely out of my price range, and I really have no practical use for that I want? It's a Red One video camera, and a monitor I can view/edit these videos on at full resolution. Somehow, in the back of my mind I can't shake the idea that it would be cool and somehow useful to do video in the 4K video format. It's not something I'm going to own anytime soon, that's for sure. As long as I'm out of the price range, some large telescopic lenses for it would be nice too.

For now, I should just focus on getting some good number of hours into building the parts of my video studio in the Basement when I get home from San Francisco at the end of next week (Saturday evening). I'll have a lot of the parts I need. I'll still need to pick up some paneling and some 1x3, and some paint. Anyone going to have a vehicle big enough to transport 8 sheets of 4x8 foot paneling?

In other news:
- I had hoped to meet up with Sophia de l'Orange this week, but she never responded to my emails. Sometimes she gets into these uncommunicative funks.
- Lots of people are down with the flu. Hopefully I can hold out getting exposed until the vaccine is available to me.
- I weighed myself. It was what I expected, but not what I wanted
- I meant to write some NaNoWriMo last night, but got sucked in to re-reading William of Ockham's "Theory of Terms". It felt great to be reading this again somehow.
- A couple of friends from Texas (Andy and Nadine) are engaged to be married. I think this is a good thing.
- Rupert Murdoch is anti-American, and should be treated as such. If he were an American, he'd be a traitor.