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With the Corcoran Gallery transitioning to NGA and GWU owernship, admission is now free till the museum closes indefinitely in October, so we dropped by last weekend. This would probably be our final visit to the Corcoran as a private institution.
Farewell, Corcoran Gallery. More photos here.
We went to Kings Dominion for a Saturday day trip. No roller coaster Glass videos this time as I forgot my head strap, but here’s the view from the Ferris wheel:
They call it Sin City, but we weren’t in Las Vegas for gambling or sex: my primary mission was to get the nerdiest possible photo I could with William Shatner at the Star Trek Convention.
Mission accomplished.
Amy and I met up with her dad in Hersheypark on Saturday for roller coasters and animals, and I brought along the Google Glass to see if I could get some good POV coaster videos. I was not disappointed.*
Been a year since our last trip to Chincoteague, so we drove to the shore over the weekend to bask on the sand, kayak around a bit, eat some oysters, and see the Orb-2 rocket launch from Wallops. Also brought along the Google Glass to get some POV video of our adventures.
Fourth of July in New Jersey presented an opportunity to test out how well Google Glass captures fireworks. It was pretty fun to be able to record video while also looking at the explosions rather than checking a screen constantly. (With thanks to brother-in-law Bob for driving us to Nomahegan Park to see the show.)
Over the weekend we took a Circle Line boat ride around Manhattan to see the updated skyline with the almost-finished World Trade Center tower.
It’s a tour I haven’t taken since I was a kid, and it was nice to be on the water and see the Statue of Liberty and the undersides of the East River bridges again.
Full Fourth of July Weekend 2014 photo album here, and a Google+ story auto-generated from my Google Glass photos and videos here.
This year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival had just two rather than the usual three cultural themes: China and Kenya. The Festival ran into some trouble with NPS over new park landscaping concerns, but everything seems to have been ironed out for at least the next five years.
Google Glass is large, conspicuous, and expensive. It’s a bulky two-piece computer prominently clinging to the side of your face on a frame that is unfoldable and unpocketable. Unless you have a bag* with you, Glass pretty much forces you to wear it on your face — and this might be by design. It’s possible Google wants Glass to be a real-life viral marketing tool for itself, just by being an extremely visible head-mounted conversation starter: conversations that will probably start with mention of the $1,500 price tag (after the standard “are you recording me now?”)
I’ve been a fan of journalist Miles O’Brien since his early days as a space reporter at CNN (following the untimely death of previous space reporter John Holliman). O’Brien recently lost his left arm to amputation, due to complications from acute compartment syndrome after a freak bag accident. He’s written a frank and moving piece in NYMag about his experiences post-amputation.
O’Brien was going to be the first journalist in space, but the fatal Columbia disaster cancelled that plan. He was later laid off from CNN. I can’t help but feel bad for the guy: he was a great journalist destined for awesome things, but fell prey over the years to a combination of factors outside his control. Despite all adversity I hope he gets to go into space eventually.
(Not to be confused with Starfleet officer Miles O’Brien — although the “O’Brien Must Suffer!” trend of Star Trek script tragedies might well apply here.)
We spent Saturday morning hiking around the 4.7 mile Burke Lake Park Trail, an easy fitness trail around Burke Lake in Fairfax.
