Rhonabwy

Amusing quote of the night:

“Our lasers use sharpened photons”.

Or maybe ya had to be there.

The past several nights have been pretty foggy in Seattle, at least around the top of Queen Anne and in the “higher” neighborhoods like Wallingford and Phinney Ridge. Its been sort of neat - the air has a vibrant chill and the light does really cool things.

Wormwood (our cat with the recent surgery - and yes, I named him) is doing quite a bit better, but we’d always wish for better still. He’s not yet given in to opening his mouth to eat, so tomorrow is the telling day. If he’s not eating or at least drinking by tomorrow by himself, then we’ll need to get back to the vets to make sure he’ll get enough fluids - one way or the other. I’m sure he won’t care for that at all, so we’re hoping he starts drinking a little tomorrow. In the meantime, he’s being pretty cuddly and we’re keeping a close eye on him.

For the record, giving a cat oral antibiotics that’s just had mouth surgery is a pain in the butt.

And it smells bad when it’s spewed back on you.

There’s a neat article about the upcoming use of Sterling Engines to create some highly effecient solar energy conversion in the California desert. I first read about this some time back, and have since been quietly obsessed with the idea of using the external combustion engine (yes, that’s correct and NOT a typo) in a huge variety of places. It only requires a thermal gradient - the really small ones will run off your palm (and do correspondingly little), but just THINK of the places where this could be really effective!

I don’t know how much gradient is really needed to be effective, but if you could get some micro-power generation just from the difference between the ground temp and the air temp, that would be pretty darn cool!

With the pics from Crater Lake up there now, I’m reminded of something that I felt I needed to share for my own future embarrasment and reference.

When the snow you are standing is holding you, that doesn’t mean that it’s only a few inches deep, or that you don’t need snowshoes. The snow, in fact, at the rim of Crater Lake was something like 4′ deep. And my socks were wet for a good long while (but they were wool, so it was at least mitigated).

PB110032.JPG

Originally uploaded by Joseph Heck.

That blue… that amazing blue…

More pics to be found at my Crater Lake photo set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_heck/sets/1370688/

Karen and I just got back from a three-day weekend in southern Oregon, the highlight of which has to be proclaimed as seeing Crater Lake. Oh my lord, what a spectacular place that is. It was snowed in at the rim, so we got only a limited view, but it was truly incredible.

We drove down Friday to Pat and Bill’s (Karen’s aunt and uncle), who live near the town of Merlin, OR. That alone is pretty darn nice, but then we took saturday and spent it road tripping around to Crater Lake and a couple of really beautiful falls.

The pics are still in the camera, so some of those will just have to wait. And the drive home was (at you might expect) exhausting, so I’m hitting the sack.

We have an XCoders meeting tomorrow, where we’re “dragging” Brent into the local spotlight again after his (relatively) recent transition back to a full time developer with the dudes from Newsgator. That ought to make for a good evening of chatting!

I’ve started playing again with a tablet PC - this time a Thinkpad X41, which I’ve got to say is a pretty nice piece of equipment. It has a good, compact design and it’s not a lead brick to carry around everywhere. I’ve been interested to try out One Note, since I’ve been reading Chris Pratley’s blog on and off for the past year or so.

And yes, of course I’ve been keeping track of the latest buzz from the folks in Redmond - the leaked internal memo from Gates, and the corresponding bits from Ray Ozzie are interesting reading. It is, to me, almost amusing that we’re reading Microsoft say “Oh shit, let’s make money from ADS!!!!”. I mean - wasn’t that the dream of all these dot-com crazies back in 1999?. Heh - and Google has just completely kicked their ass in that particular game too. Not that I’m writing them off, or that the game is even over - just that they succeeded where a LOT of other folks failed.

The most interesting piece in Ozzie’s bit is his statement : The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that ìjust workî. Services are a whole new game here, and while they’re reasonably decent at their services, I wouldn’t claim MS is the leader. I’d love to say something really smarmy like “MS can’t get it right”, but I think the truth is they’ll do a pretty darn good job at stabbing at it. If they can break out of this “lock in the MS technologies only” thing they have beating through their lifeblood, they might even get back to being amazing.

Sitting on the doorstep when I made it home tonight was A Feast for Crows - a book I’ve been waiting for and not very patiently. I’ve had it on order for months through Amazon, so when the package arrived I was very confused as to what had come from Amazon.

But its here now!

See ya, gotta go read.

One of the neat experiments at Mindcamp has been talked about a bit - the Seattle Wireless Network put up (or attempted to put up) a rather large ad-hoc wireless network using OLSR. It’s been commented on by others, so I’ll just summarize by saying: “Neat experiment, didn’t work for us”.

I was very skeptical right off the bat, mostly because I saw a field of laptops that they were asking to all be tuned onto 1 ad-hoc mode channel. It’s like asking 50 people to all start singing different songs in a small enclosed room. There’s only so much bandwidth, and that sort of setup will just flood it. Its the biggest (IMO) problem with the mesh network thing - the technology isn’t (yet) well set up to swing around and take advantage of side channels, so when you get enough devices into a smallish area, you just flood the area with noise and nobody can talk.

Now that I’ve proven how ooh-so-savvy I am about wireless tech (NOT!), this technology is really cool. I hadn’t been aware of OLSR previously, and I’m really glad I am now - even though I’m not spending as much time with wireless technology as I used to. Open source, and it clearly works (albeit with problems like what we saw) - that is cool!