We’ve been seeing these caterpillars at work near the Pine Bush. They look much like Luna Moth caterpillars but nit quite.
I got to see my favorite band, Rush, at Saratoga Performing Arts Center! Weeee! And I brought a friend who wanted to see them for herself as opposed to my beloved wife who wanted to see them for me.
They seemed to stumble here and there but it’s early in their Time Machine tour. Actually, stumbles are sort of uncharacteristic for this band, as I understand it, they’re perfectionists. Some of their pieces had additional parts or were played in a different genre. I think it was “Closer to the Heart” that started as a raggae song for a minute or two.
The view was generally better than this but phone cameras aren’t going to get a decent picture of a performance unless you’re in the front row (which the lawn is not.)
Work has been painful lately. I get the impression that performance is not important to management and that’s more than a little depressing. It’s been affecting my work and my mental state. Friday, on a lonely walk in the rain, I figured out that doing shoddy, non-directed work harmed my mood. I rediscovered that my work rewards me directly independent of my employer’s action or inaction.
super slow lightning on video. very cool
Making Friends in Warcraft talks about how people use virtual worlds to meet and connect with people. For the author, it turned into a marriage. Yes, computer use does change where we park our butts but it does not change out need for social interaction. I’ve made some very good friends online.
This is Jim, the guy I generally follow around the woods, and I believe the dog is Tonx. Tonight was a lot of work and we still didn’t find the ‘victim’. But Trish’s air scent dog brought him back. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen until about 3 minutes after the drenching downpour arrived. Thanks for being our victim tonight Dave!
I toured the USS Slater over the weekend and now I want to volunteer there but I have to admit that I’m just too busy. The Slater is a Destroyer Escort and was purchased as a museum and memorial of the World War II veterans who served on the 600 odd Destroyer Escorts the US fielded. The website is pretty good and their online newsletter, Slater Signals, does a great job detailing the huge amount of work they put into that ship.
In semi-related news, here’s a manga (Japanese comic book) about the active Nimitz class carrier, USS George Washington, called (I think) Manga CVN73
stupid tom error. Sorry about the unexpected downtime.
I took a too short course on LabView in an RPI computer lab. The lab is in a converted church, stained glass windows still present. Labview is this neat (expensive) programming suite which allows graphical programming. Data types are denoted by the color of “wires” and function blocks. I was even more impressed than when I uses their 30-day trial.
I’m just back from watching a documentary film, Restrepo, named after a fallen soldier and the outpost named after him on a mountainside in Afghanistan.
It was well made.
It let me know a little bit about life in that very steep valley for both our soldiers and the local residents.
They did gruelling work. Moved a lot of equipment and earth by hand. Some days, they were swapping back and forth between shovels and guns all day.
The cost they paid was communicated well by the movie. I’m in shock a little bit still.