Travels and Thoughts

Thursday - keeping busy at work.

Book #27 was Killers Wake, a Bernard Cornwell mystery. This is one of his sailing stories. It's OK, but the villain of the piece is obvious early on, and the characterizations are not very good.

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Wednesday - I'm trying to get the water in the fish tank clean. The smaller of the two goldfish is acting a bit lackadaisical. I've replaced at least half the twenty gallon water tank, added the special sauce, but it is still rather cloudy. My brother says I need to "vacuum" the gravel at the bottom. I think he may be right, there seems to be a lot of crud down there that the standard filter isn't picking up. I think that as the weather warms up there is more algae growth as well.

The Peeps dioramas from a Washington Post competition. [via Villainous Company] About the winners "Gentlemen prefer Blondes" entry:

" When Johnston saw in our March 4 issue that we said the diorama must be comparable in dimension to a shoebox, he called a clown-shoe company to inquire how big such a box might be. The guy was just trying to play by the rules."

Oddly enough T.H. White's The Once and Future King is not out in audio. There is available a rock opera with that title. Ugh.

A book author creates a web page about her book. Amusing. And, by the way, the first "last" page, isn't. [via kottke.org]

WikiSky, an online sky atlas program. Pretty neat.

Tuesday 10 April 2007

Tuesday - more work, setting up a GVT, instrumenting an aircraft. This entails crawling around on hands and knees under an airplane, so my knees and elbows are sore and there is hydraulic fluid on my jeans.

I'm enjoying myself, actually. It's a nice change from the analysis I usually face.

It has been windy - right now it's averaging 32MPH and gusting to 39MPH. Yesterday was worse: sand was pelting my window as I drove home. I believe this is called saltation - though it's been a while since geology class

We were talking a lunch today and somehow it turned to engineers experiences when visiting Russia back in the 1990's. It was hard to get anything done people told me - you arrived at work about 9:00, broke for tea and coffee at 10:30 (at which point the liquor cabinet officially opened). At lunch the Russians started drinking and work was basically done for the day. It was a brutal life back there, even at "high tech" centers most buildings had no running water (or bathrooms) and many didn't even have electricity. Engineers stole power from the grid to run their wind tunnel experiments.

At the Marginal Revolution blog I saw a quote, this evening, which brought the lunchtime remarks back to mind:

Russia's average annual alcohol consumption has reached 15 litres (26 pints) per person, nearly tripling the 1990 average of 5.4 litres, the country's consumer protection agency said Monday.

Monday 9 April 2007

Monday - back to work. Worked late.

Sunday 8 April 2006

Sunday - lazed about, watched tv, and then went over for dinner at my brothers place.

Book #26 was Earthquake Weather, by Tim Powers. This I found recently by accident, at a used book sale. It is a sequel to this years #14 Expiration Date. I really liked ED, but this was just sort of ...eh.... Not bad, but nothing new. It concerned the Fisher King, about whom, coincidentally, there was a movie on TV this weekend. It was creatively entitled The Fisher King. I didn't get a chance to watch that movie this weekend but I seem to recall seeing it years ago, and that it was a pretty good movie.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Seagull at entrance to Glen Cove.

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