I thought last summer was wet. I don’t think we’ve gone more than 3 days without rain all this summer. When the sun came out today I almost felt British, I was squinting my eyes so much. I like rain, and really enjoy a good thunderstorm, but this summer has been ridiculous.

Janel, Eric, Vidette and I went to see AVP last night. What an awesome movie! It’s badness made it entertaining. My favorite scene is at the very beginning (one could say this is the scene that hooked me). We see the infrared take from a satellite shown floating above Earth in the previous scene. All of a sudden, the screen starts blinking red and there’s a beeping noise. The camera pans back, and we see this screen is one of about 10 on a wall all showing the same blinking red picture. One guy sitting at a desk looks up from his personal TV and walks over to a screen pointing at it saying, “Look at this” to a huddled group of about 5 more people who must have missed the blinking red wall of TV screens and the beeping alarm going off in the background. Classic B-movie stuff! Check it out. It sucks really bad, but it’s funny because it sucks.

The other day, Janel brought home a Mac G4 a friend had sitting around. He knew I was interested in trying out OS X and sent the system back for me. After some haggling, I managed to get Panther installed on the machine. This thing already had Quark, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, ImageReady and Office X on it! After installing Panther, I played around a little bit, checked out some mac sites (versiontracker, macosxhints and some others). Aside from a few annoyances, I’m really getting into the OS.

The main reason I;m trying this out is I want a laptop. I found a really sweet Acer or a 15″ Powerbook that costs twice as much. I really like the Acer, but the Powerbook is a sweet laptop, and I am becomming fond of OS X. I run Linux at work on my desktop and have a FreeBSD machine at home. My only complaint with *NIX-based desktops is their lack of multimedia support (especially web-based). OS X seems to be a nice balance between the two.

Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across). The enormous crater at the top of this image, named Herschel, is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) wide and 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on July 3, 2004, from a distance of 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase angle of about 102 degrees. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Messing around at work today, I found a tape with almost all the data on it compressed. Mosf of our data cannot be compressed, so this i s a rareity. Anyway, the media we use can hold about 200GB natively and 3 times that compressed. This tape is holding 563GB!

It’s geek, I know. It’s still cool, though.

Today, Tom Ridge reported that there was the potential for a terrorist attack. It could happen during the upcoming elections. Before that, it could have happened during the Fourth of July weekend. Before that…

Is anyone else getting tired of this?
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Saw this the other night, and it’s great. Somehow, it manages to avoid making fun of Christianity. It shows people who try the best they can to follow The Word, but find that they’re human and make human mistakes. Great performances by Jena Malone, Macaulay Culkin, Mandy Moore and Mary-Louise Parker. Also, I have found a new Indy-goddess to admire: Eva Amurri. Not only a great character in Cassandra, but she was so fun to watch in the role. Check this out if it’s playing near you. The best time I could find was 9:50 at the crappy old-school mall theater whose only saving grace is it’s across the mall-hall from my regular watering hole.

I can’t stand it when I submit documentation for approval and it’s not approved for gramatical disagreements. It’s not that I had gramatical errors in the documentation, it’s simply that my particular writing style is not the same as that of the person approving the document. The really frustrating thing is I had to wait over a month to get this document back! I have a bunch of work I need to get done and this document’s approval is all that’s keeping me from starting, so gramatical disagreements are effectively keeping me from finishing a project. Believe me, this is the last time I volunteer for something outside the scope of my job description.

This morning while driving to work, I changed lanes in front of a car. What the hell was I thinking!? As we came to the stop light, I realized the guy I got in front of was riding my bumper to the point that I couldn’t see his hood in the rear-view! So I applied the brakes a little more enthusiastically than normal in an effot to get him off my rear. Instead, he pulls up and bumps my bumper! To this point, all I have done is change lanes in front of him and stop quickly in reaction to his tailgating. As we pulled away from the light, I sped up and changed lanes, he followed. As I pulled into my lane to get on the highway, he pulls ahead and swerves into my lane as if to scare me.
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On the way back from Snowshoe, my car turned 100,000 miles. The happy event happened at mile marker 155 on I-64 East between Lexington and Charlottesville. Janel didn’t much care. I said a discreet ‘woo-hoo’ and patted the dash. My car didn’t seem to notice the event at all.