Posts filed under “journal”
Twitter Archive
My Twitter archive How to download your Twitter archive About a year after I complained about Twitter’s lack of archiving, they implemented a kind of backup solution involving a zipped tweet archive. The Twitter archive is a bit of a headscratcher. It’s a searchable offline snapshot of tweets stored in JSON files organized into a [...]
Leaving US News
Today was my last day at US News & World Report, just a month shy of my sixth year.
Google Reader Shutting Down
Google Reader is shutting down effective July, 2013. I use Google Reader everyday multiple times per day to keep up with webcomics, news, technology, lolcats, and the internet in general, and shifting to an online life without it will be a difficult transition. (I barely use Google Plus at all.) There are many alternatives, and [...]
Sunday Recap
Sunday was bright and warm. At church in the morning we heard a message from Reverend Paula Dempsey of the Alliance of Baptists and sang an Emma Lou Diemer gradual. After a Thai lunch we walked down through DC to the National Gallery, stopping by the White House and the Renwick Gallery en route.
Asteroid 2012 DA14
A small asteroid named 2012 DA14 flew close by Earth on Friday 13 Feb 2013, flying south to north, 17,200 miles from the surface at closest approach: much closer than the moon and even within the orbits of farther-out geostationary satellites. This was going to be the live space event of the month — until [...]
Chelyabinsk Meteor
A meteor (or bolide, the term for a bright, exploding fireball) exploded in the sky over Russia, with a bright flash of light and multiple loud bangs seen and heard in Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. The shockwave injured people and caused light damage to structures in the city. Since dashboard cameras are so prevalent [...]
#RocketsRedGlare
NASA Wallops launched two sounding rockets last night, each releasing a cloud of red lithium vapor into the upper atmosphere to test ground-based observation techniques for space phenomena.
NASA HQ Open House
Courtesy yatesc, I now have a photo on the cover of a NASA publication — specifically this shot of Discovery, used for “Toward a History of the Space Shuttle: An Annotated Bibliography Part 2, 1992–2011.” On the Friday before the 2013 Inauguration, NASA HQ had an Open House event in DC, and I was on [...]
Companion Kittens: Update
A week after adoption, Martha and Amelia are pretty well settled in. At the end of the first day, we introduced them to the rest of the place, along with various cat toys and scratching/biting implements we had purchased for them. They had a noisy and playful first night of running and jumping about, but [...]
Companion Kittens
It’s been over two months (but it feels like a lifetime) since Pandora’s death, and after a mourning period, we’ve been feeling ready to adopt since the first day of 2013. (New Year, New Beginning, and all that, I suppose.) Checking the list at local rescue shelter Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation (LDCRF) we [...]