Sudden Backlog

.

I suddenly have a huge backlog of various things I’ve been doing, reading, watching, using, or following, which I haven’t been writing about; and suddenly I realize I’m behind on it all, with not much time to put out anything beyond linklog sound bites. That’s one of the problems with the interdisciplinary nature of a personal weblog: the buffet is so huge that it’s easy for the plate to fill up quickly. (Or maybe that’s just one of the problems with being a lazy writer.)

Here’s a quick dump of what’s been on my mind: Mars rover Opportunity, the Nokia 6600, Flickr photosets and post-to-weblog issues, Bruce Sterling’s Involution Ocean, Eric Scholler’s Fast Food Nation, American Beauty, Deep Throat, Teddy Benigno, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Imelda, and Apple going with Intel hardware. I’ll try to write about all of it this week sometime this year.

Saturday in Noo Yawk

.

Amy and I went to New York today. The following activities commenced:

  • Got off the bus and ate everything-bagels at Port Authority.
  • Went down to DFN Gallery to look at still life paintings by James Moore.
  • Wandered around NYAA, photographing casts.
  • Wandered the wrong way down Franklin Street looking for Avenue of the Americas.
  • Had bison burgers and milkshakes with Stynxno and Cyrus at Georgio’s Country Grill.
  • Watched Revenge of the Sith at Ziegfeld Theater.
  • Wandered into the Body Shop at Radio City Music Hall and put Bergamot lotion sampler on my face, then left without buying anything.
  • Pinpointed the fuzzy geographic location of Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Avenue of the Americas (following previous fruitless wandering) with just a Google SMS search and a subway map.
  • Bought nothing at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and instead got everything we needed at TJMaxx.
  • Got lost in the twisty maze of 14th Street Station.
  • Took NJ Transit home.

And so ends our Saturday in Noo Yawk. Photos from today here.

Moving from S/E T300 to N6600

.

For the past year and a half or so, my phone has been a Sony Ericsson T300. It came cheap when I upgraded my T-Mobile plan from “Prepaid” to “Get More,” such that the total rebate amount exceeded the amount I spent on buying the plan and phone off Amazon. I got what I paid for, however: a slow phone with poor signal reception, hard-to-press buttons, loose and wonky proprietary charge/headset ports, an extremely SMS-unfriendly interface, and a tendency to fly apart on impact (after multiple falls, admittedly). That, plus a Communicam attachment which snapped decent photos but took forever to upload them to anywhere, made the phone more curse than “communicator.”

When the T300’s charge port started consistently not working properly, I decided it was time for a change. I was torn between splurging on a Treo with PalmOS, or going back to my roots in a Nokia, but this AskMefi thread convinced me to go the Nokia way. The N6600 could perform most personal organizer functions I needed for half the price — but the most prominent disadvantage was that it had a keypad rather than a stylus or QWERTY keyboard. But hey, I’m Filipino; the numeric keypad is second nature.

T-Mobile had just phased out the Nokia 6600, and they were no longer in stock at the local retail store. The up side was that 6600s were going for much cheaper on eBay than ever before, so it wasn’t long before I had landed a decent secondhand unit and transferred my SIM to it.

Coming soon: thoughts on my first month with the Nokia 6600. In the meantime, I’m preparing my battered S/E T300 for a pity listing on eBay.

Update: Nokia 6600 review.

Deep Impact (Not the Movie)

.

Another space probe to keep an eye on: JPL’s Deep Impact will be making headlines in about a month. On July 4th, the probe will launch a heavy projectile — an impactor — at Comet Tempel 1. Study of the resulting explosion and crater will help scientists learn about the composition and structure of comets, which may reveal clues as to the nature of the primordial solar system.

The mission hasn’t been problem-free, however: Deep Impact has a blurry high-res camera, though NASA says it’ll still produce the best comet closeups ever taken. (Update: Those images will be enhanced via a process called deconvolution.)

More stuff from the official site:

Space.com has a Deep Impact section with news and multimedia, along with a reminder of the last NASA mission to visit and land on a small celestial body: NEAR, which touched down on the asteroid Eros in Feb 2001. And I was posting about it back then. This weblog is starting to show its age.

Hanging out at Hains Point

.

I took my newly repaired skates (replaced broken brake harness and rotated wheels) out for a spin today, going up Pennsylvania Ave to the White House, around the Ellipse and down the Mall to Lincoln Memorial, then around West and East Potomac Parks to Hains Point, where I plopped down in the grass, shot photos of The Awakening and National Airport, and generally enjoyed the day off.

More on Flickr.

The DC Weather Bubble

.

I was so sure it was going to rain. The radar showed angry red patches of precipitation moving east-northeast from Virginia towards the District. As I walked around the Capitol Reflecting Pool, a brisk south wind rustled the trees, and gray cumulonimbus clouds loomed in the west*.

But it didn’t rain. It got dark and gray and windy for about half an hour — then the sun came out, the wind died, and the clouds continued to the east. Radar showed the rain starting just north and east of the District. A few hours later, the same system brought showers to New Jersey.

IMG_0145.jpg

It’s not the first time that I’ve predicted inclement weather “in the next few hours” based on similar observations, only to be greeted a little later with a clear sky and nary a sprinkle. There’s something about DC, some kind of weather bubble, that repels precipitation from weaker storms. Maybe it’s a higher dew point caused by the urban environment? Is there something about the topography of the area, or the convergence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers? Any meteorologists out there have clues?

(Or is it the Illuminati’s secret weather control devices being used to give us a pleasant Memorial Day Weekend?!?! SHOCK! HORROR! **)

* The general rule for approaching storms in the Northern Hemisphere is that with the wind at your back, low pressure is to your left.
** It is not.

Pandora Hogs the Sheets

.

Pandora hogs the sheets

Behind Pandora you can see a webcam, a Norfolk Island Pine, and my pinning wall. More of her on Flickr: here and here. The peach comforter, by the way, was bought secondhand from a Dupont Circle couple for $10 via Craigslist.

Voyager in the Heliosheath

.

It’s the scientific consensus that, out at the edge of the solar system, Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock — possibly again — and is now sailing through the heliosheath, the outer layer of our sun’s bubble of influence. That far from the sun, the solar wind “bunches up” as it slows down against the pressure of the interstellar wind, causing an increase in temperature, and in the density of the magnetic field around Voyager.

It’s hoped that the Voyagers will continue operating long enough to reach the heliopause, that point at which the solar wind starts streaming backward into the sun’s wake, and punch through into true interstellar space. More from the Voyager home page about those outer layers.

The earlier probe Pioneer 10, by the way, is flying in the opposite direction, into the heliosphere, the sun’s wake trailing behind it as it moves through the interstellar medium. Sadly, we lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003.

More from Cassini

.

The science and imagery coming out of Cassini at Saturn is simply staggering and beautiful.

Wow. Now that almost* makes the NASA-allocated tax dollars worth it, doesn’t it? More imagery from the Saturn Family on the Planetary Photojournal.

* “Almost,” because we haven’t gone back to the moon or landed on Mars yet. But we’ll get there.