Lost dog...

Lost dog...  Reader and fellow Jamulian Steve K. reports seeing a lost dog near the intersection of Lyons Valley Road and Jamul Highlands Road.  Steve reports that he has a collar and tag, but won't let him get close enough to snag him.

If this might be your dog, please get down there and get this poor fellow to a safe place!

Rosetta animation...

Rosetta animation...  The Rosetta team at ESA has put up a gorgeous animation of the entire Rosetta mission.  It's a huge web application that takes a while to download, so be patient.  It's worth it!  You can manipulate a slider to show the incredibly complex orbit they used to reach the comet in a fuel-efficient way, boomeranging around several planets.  Be sure to use the little i icon to get directions, and just below that there's a speaker icon you can click to mute the music...

Pater: Excitement with Jello...

Pater: Excitement with Jello...  My brother Scott wrote today's story about my dad.  This is the first of several such stories he has sent to me.

Excitement with Jello

While I was a teenager, Mother Dear was cooking a special dinner. She pulled a large bowl of red jello out of the fridge and set it on the kitchen table. Pater watched with obvious delight as the stuff wiggled all around in the bowl. He commented out loud to everyone in the kitchen about how it was moving around as if it were alive.

“I wonder what it would look like if I dropped something in it ?” he asked excitedly.

Then he ran to the refrigerator and rummaged around looking for that something.  He found a hard boiled egg and when back at the table pulled out a chair, leaped up on to it and then with an insane grin on his face he hovered over top of the bowl of jello.   With his tongue playing over his lips and showing intent concentration he held the egg up high and then let it go ... splat – right on target into the middle of the jello.  It wobbled like mad.

“Neat!” he shouted. “Let's do it again!”

Not realizing or not caring that some visitors showed up at the door he once more let the egg go with precision aim and once more he shouted with glee as the egg created waves of jiggling shiny color which for some reason was high quality entertainment.  The adults that were just let in stared at Pater with worry, disbelief and shock.  They had a look on their faces that read something like...

“Should we call the men in the white coats ?”
“Are we at the right place?”
“Maybe we better get out of here – this guy might be dangerous!”

I don't remember this specific incident myself, but I remember many others like it.  Dropping an egg onto Jello to watch the interesting visual result was entirely consistent with my dad's character and behavior.  And he certainly wouldn't give a hoot if there was a disapproving or worried observer :)

Notes: “Mother Dear” is a family nickname for my mom.  “Pater” is a nickname the family gave my dad.

Nemophila maculata...

Nemophila maculata...  Via BPOD, of course...

On that Google outage...

On that Google outage...  The interwebs are filled with the rantings of people either raging at Google or poking fun at Google for their 30 to 60 minute outage last night.  Google has explained it in a blog post, and apologized to its users.

Me?  I continue to be astounded at the reliability that Google (and a few others, notably Amazon) have been able to achieve for applications at that scale.  I've worked in that world a bit – my last job was with ServiceNow, a company with a moderate scale cloud application, but certainly not nearly the scale of, say, GMail.  Add to that reliability the fact that Google supplies GMail to personal users for free (that is, no direct charge), and you've got something really quite remarkable.

Could they do better on reliability?  Certainly, though not by much – Google's uptime record isn't all that far from perfect.  Do they deserve rage or mocking?  I don't think so...