New Logo

The Graduate Center of CUNY's webpage has gotten a "facelift". So now it is nearly impossible to find anything, and the crazy mouseover action makes the site seem like it's had a bit too much coffee (see xkcd/773). On the other hand, they've updated the official GC logo:

This is the old one:

And this is the new:

I'm not sure which is worse. Any opinions?

Trip To Atlantis part III

What is a trip without the people you go with.

We met up with Paul just over the Florida border, the first thing we did was pop the hood of his new car to take a look.

After the launch Paul took us to see the C1 Dragon which was built by SpaceX the company that Paul started working at the Monday after the launch.

On Saturday the guys visited Kennedy Space Center.

On the way back we stopped at the New River Gorge Bridge which is the second highest in the country.

Trip to Atlantis part II

Here is a link to the blog I wish I could make LINK. An amazing set of photos. Including this one  ... that's right its a plane floating along over a hundred miles in the air ...

This picture shows the other side of the bridge that we watch the launch from. The telephoto lens makes it look much more packed than it really was.

I do have my own album from the event ... which you can see here:

Safety First

Alternate title: Future blackmail

The Challenging Enterprise In Which We Endeavoured to Discover Atlantis (We Drove Past The District of Columbia)

Last week I spoke about the trip down to Florida and promised that this week I would tell about the launch.  Well they say a picture is worth a thousand word (which I suppose can be true sometimes) and I don't want to write a thousand words for each picture, so I will only write a few.

 Before we could see the flames we saw the exhaust.

 Clears the pad.

  Roll program.

 Mr. Cloud meet Mr. Space Shuttle.

 For 38 seconds I watched one of the most incredible things man has built ride a pillar of flame over 500 feet tall into space.  There is really nothing I can say that will let you understand what it was like to stand there and watch this.  If you where lucky enough to have seen a launch you know what I mean, if you haven't I am sorry.

(Photos taken by Sergey Galkin)

My personal internet brand

After about 5 years, I have finally updated my profile picture ... in my various internet places.

This style of picture has a number of qualities I want:

1) Random people who see the picture won't recognize me from it. 2) Less-random people may be able to recognize me, especially if I tell them "its an eye."

3) I can update it as I get older, showing more wrinkles ... it can be like a time-lapse video.

4) I can update it when I do cool stuff - just like everyone else - only that the cool stuff will be only be seen in the reflection in my eye. 5) After these updates, people will still recognize my posts by the image they will grow to love.

6) It is professional enough to go on linkedin (I think?) but not too lame to go on Google+

7) I can take it myself in a second (without the camera in the picture).

I do not recommend that anybody copy me in this ... because if you do then important points 2 and 5 will no longer be valid points.

And now for something somewhat different: check out this link, if I tasked you to find 1,000 photos of a human eye 10 years ago, how long would it it have taken? Perhaps more than the 15 seconds it took me.

New floors

This is going to be a short post, since our computer is currently in storage. The good news is that we now have shiny, renewed floors.

Trip To Atlantis

As Yoni informed you we took a trip down to Florida to see the final launch of a Space Shuttle, Space Shuttle Atlantis.  Yoni, my friends Sergey and Andrew and I left New Jersey on Wednesday.

 Then we did a lot of driving and saw some things.

 M1 Abrams.

 Humvees and a heat exchanger off of the USNS Lewis and Clark.

B-47 Stratojet.

And this was all on Interstate 95.  Then we got to Florida where we met up with another friend Paul who was only a couple of miles from us (having also left from New Jersey on Wednesday).

We went to Titusville and pitched tents in Parish Park for the night.

 Then it was time to head up to the bridge we where going to watch the launch from.

 View of the bridge in the morning*.

Looking back at where we camped.

While camping and on the bridge we saw some dolphins and manatee and some other things as well (I also saw a wild pig on the side of the road somewhere in South Carolina).

 A NASA UH-1 Huey buzzed the bridge a couple of times (I didn't get pictures of the F-15s flying perimeter around the pad).

 There was some bomb scare by the porto-potties.

 A random hovercraft

A little island in front of where we where, you can see it on the Google Maps link above.

Our view, the big building in the middle is the Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pad 39A is between the VAB and the side of the photo*.

I will talk about the actual launch next week, but until then here is a teaser*.

*photo credit to Daniel Fortier (one of our bridge standing neighbors).

Trip to Atlantis part 0

The Lump and I went to Florida for the weekend... have a look. Sorry for the short post, there will be more to come!

Grand Canyon from a Plane

A few weeks ago Jonathan/Yoni blogged about seeing Turks Head from a plane. While this isn't as cool as his pictures, and I don't have an old photo to compare it to, I saw the Grand Canyon from the air on the way to California:

More Mail

Last November I took a chain mail class.  After that class I began to joke about making a kippah out of chain mail.  People seemed to think that this was a cool idea.  So I decided to do it.

It contains just over 700 rings and weighs in at a quarter pound.  At some point I will buy more of the blue rings and extend the blue section a little more which will bring the total to either about 800 or 900 based upon if I do one or two more layers.

I Honk at Texters

About two weeks ago I became frustrated with people swerving around the highway - because they were texting while driving. As a preventative measure, I have taken it upon myself to drive alongside these offenders and repeatedly honk until they put their phones away. This doesn't usually take very long because most texters know they are doing something dangerous and quickly snap into a hyper-alert state when they hear a car horn.

A quick Google search reveals that I am not the only one who has had this idea.

There is another blog post that is pretty extensive here, which says a lot of things I would have said if it wasn't already online.

Here is an awesome comic on this topic by Mike Luckovich.

I once honked at this guy talking on the phone too - his first reaction was ... nothing, of course, because he was too engrossed in the conversation to notice a honk from a car by his side. A few honks later he kind of looked at me with a "what?.....!" expression. To avoid this awkwardness and save my effort, I decided to focus only on people texting and driving (and excuse people texting at red lights).

So the bottom line is - actively honk at dangerous texters and you will make the world's roads and sidewalks safer.