Saturday, November 17, 02001
The Leonid Meteor Shower is tomorrow morning. I'm going to try and get up around 2:30AM and drive out to Sky Meadows State Park. I don't know if it'll be open or not, but I'm assuming its going to be mobbed, given the hype going on. The view there is just amazing on a clear day. I'm hoping it'll be equally good for night viewing.
Update: So I made it out to the park, and got more than my RDA of Loenids. I had set my alarm for 2:00, hoping to be out on the road by 2:30, and at the park sometime between 3:30 and 4:00. Well that didn't happen. Either my alarm didn't go off, or I slept through it, because I didn't wake up until 3:00. I got up, went out on the balcony, hoping the cold would wake me up a little, and wondering if I should even bother trying to go out all that way, and wondering if it would look just as good at somewhere closer, say the Manasas battlefield when I saw a shooting star over Washington. That cinched it for me. If I could see them from my apartment over the light of the city, they should be really great once I got out into the open. So I threw on some clothes, put some hot apple cider in my themos and headed out.
First thing I noticed is that Fairfax Avenue is full of people. The IHOP is jumping, and there were people walking the street like it's a weekday morning. I don't know if it's always like this on a Sunday morning, or if people were out specifically for the shower. It was the same thing with the roads - I thought I was going to be the only on on 66 at that time at night, but the traffic was just as bad as say 8:00PM, and not only leaving the city either. The traffic entering the city looked pretty heavy as well.
I hit a couple really bad foggy patches on the drive up. Not only could I not see the sky, I could hardly see the cars in front of me at times. A couple times I considered turning back, but it was around 4:00 by that time, and damned if I was just going to turn around and go back to bed. In between the foggy patches, I saw a couple more meteors, maybe four or five, so that was enough to keep my hopes up.
So around 4:30 I got to the park, and as expected, it is mobbed. The main gates to the park are closed, but people have parked on both sides of the access road. Of course, I didn't take the first spot I saw, so I had to drive all the way to the gate, turn around in a traffic circle and drive back and park on the opposite side of the road from the original spot. Ughh.
So I get out of the car and start walking towards the gate. By that time, there are meteors coming pretty regularly, every couple seconds. People are decked out in chairs and blankets right along the side of the access road. It sort of feels like people standing in line for concert tickets the night before they go on sale, except every five seconds or so everyone goes "Ohhhh" when a particularly big one goes by.
So I get past the gates and I'm walking towards the meadow. People have just camped out on the access road here, and there are no lights, so a couple times I almost stepped on people bundled up in sleeping bags. It was slow going, because every couple seconds there would be a particularly big meteor and I'd stop walking and watch from the spot for a couple minutes. At around 5:00AM, I figured I would neve reach the top of the meadow by the time the shower was over, so I plopped down by the side of the road for the rest of the show.
At one point I saw two meterors at the same time, but the best sighting was when I saw five at once, all moving in different directions. (I goes to show that I know nothing about astronomy, since I expected the meteors to all look like they were falling down to earth, you know, like it was raining. That's not how it was - they were flying in all directions with no apparent common origin.) I didn't see any incredible ones like the one's I'd heard about with tails visible for thirty seconds. The biggest ones I saw lasted maybe around two seconds, most were probably less than a second. It was a little overwhelming. In whatever direction I was looking in, I would see one within a few seconds, but I didn't know if a better one would happen somewhere I was't looking. People would "ohhh", and I wasn't sure if I'd seen an ohhhworthy one or not. Other times I'd see a good one, and the peanut gallery would be silent.
So eventually it slowed down at about 5:15, and I figured I'd head off the to the meadow to see the sunrise, but there was a ranger a little further down who was turning people around. The meteors had slowed to about one a minute maybe, and I saw a couple more walking back, and even plopped down in the side of the road again for a little bit, but then the ranger seemed to be doing a sweep, walking down the road, asking people to pack it up. The people sitting next to me decided that would be a good time to light up a joint, so I figured it was a good time to go back to the car and not look back, having seen enough excitement for one night.
Driving back was rather uneventful, though at one point it looked like a number of people had pulled to the side of 66 to see the shower. Either that or the fog was so bad people just pulled off to the side of the road. I hope people hadn't specifically planned to go to 66 to see the shower. That just seems so sad when there was that great park so close by. I also hope no one was taken off guard by it and thought it was some sort of attack.
I got back to Ballston around 6:30. By that time it was light, the IHOP was still full of people, and there was still a strange number of people walking around the street for the early hour. I went back up to the apartment, putzed around for a little bit. Finally I realized I'd only had four hours of sleep, and that I'd been up since 3:00, so I went back to bed and woke up around noon, and posted this before I forgot about it.
Posted at 08:49 PM EST [Link]
In an attempt to keep from being buried by the internet, at least one travel agency is suggesting they could open up their customer dossiers to the government.
Oh yeh, they also want a "government traveller identification card". What a joke.
Go read Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Posted at 08:09 PM EST [Link]
What's this ? The Taliban nuclear bomb plans might actually be a joke article from the Journal of Ireproducible Results. Ughhh. Time to demand your rights for Freedom from Sensationalism.
Posted at 07:20 PM EST [Link]
Friday, November 16, 02001
Hey wasn't ricin a big part of a CSI episode a couple weeks ago ?
Posted at 12:18 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, November 15, 02001
For below then, in the City of New York, something
like a pandemonium was breaking out. A great
round ball as big as a house had been sighted hovering
high up in the sky over the very center of
Manhattan, and the cry had gone up that it was an
enormous bomb sent over by another country to
blow up the entire city to smithereens. Air-raid sirens
began wailing in every section. All radio and television
programs were interrupted with announcements
that the population must go down into their
cellars immediately. One million people walking in
the streets on their way to work looked up into the
sky and saw the monster hovering above them, and
started running for the nearest subway entrance to
take cover. Generals grabbed hold of telephones
and shouted orders to everyone they could think of.
The Mayor of New York called up the President of
the United States down in Washington D.C. to ask
him for help, and the President, who at the moment
was having breakfast in his pajamas, quickly
pushed away his half-finished plate of Sugar Crisps
and started pressing buttons right and left to summon
his Admirals and his Generals. And all the
way across the vast stretch of America, in all the
fifty States from Alaska to Florida, from Pennslyvania
to Hawaii, the alarm was sounded and the word
went out that the biggest bomb in the history of the
world was hovering over New York City, and that
at any moment it might go off.
- Roald Dahl, James and Giant Peach, Chapter 33, 01961.
Posted at 12:03 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, November 14, 02001
Art of the Mix ate my evening yesterday.
I'm in the process of putting together a New York City Grief mix now. It started out just a collection of songs/spoken word pieces about NYC that I had in my collection, but strangely enough a lot of the material I had on hand is especially poignant now. Let me know if you want a copy. It's not meant to be uplifting, so be forewarned. Eventually the playlist will be available here. That first tape is also available if anyone wants it.
Posted at 11:58 AM EST [Link]
Poem of the day: All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan
BTW, there's lots of other interesting stuff at the Diggers Archive.. For instance::
How many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution?
How many weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift the image of the Viet Cong?
Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere.
Consumer circuses are held in the ward daily.
Critics are tolerated like exploding novelties.
We will be told which burning Asians to take seriously.
Slowly. Later.
But beware, there's also a lot of stuff that
hasn't aged well.
Posted at 08:38 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, November 13, 02001
Today's my first year anniversary at Cisco. What better to blog but a huge story about my prior employer in todays Post.
For reference, Cisco's stock is at $19.86 as I write this, down from around $48.00 from last year. I think CACI was at about $20.00 the entire two and a half years I was there. Oh well, I don't miss CACI at all. I definitely made the right choice. I can't imagine going back to a defense contractor.
Posted at 03:04 PM EST [Link]
The Bin Laden family has hired a PR firm so that reporters know it "signed a statement officially disowning Osmama bin Laden in 1994". Big woop-de-do. Did they do anything to stop him from becoming a terrorst. Freeze his funds ? Perhaps, take away his allowance maybe ? Really, how crappy a parent do you have to be before your kid starts advocating nuclear and biological war ?
Oh yeh, you may have heard of that Citizens for a Free Kuwait account mentioned in the above article.
Posted at 01:32 PM EST [Link]
After a long, almost three year dormant period, it appears that the pwan OCL project may be waking up. I'm planning a survery of the existing syntax tree structure is starting, followed by an update to the OCL 2.0 syntax, and beefed up typechecking and error handling.
Posted at 08:30 AM EST [Link]
Monday, November 12, 02001
As if I need to tell anyone, there's been another plane crash in New York.
For my family: I called Matt, and he's OK. He was out on one of his all-night jaunts in Manhattan yesterday and was still there when it happened. He's stuck in the city until the bridges reopen. He says people in Manhattan are reacting calmly.
Posted at 11:31 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, November 11, 02001
Amerithrax !! Who's responsible for these names ? This sounds like it should be the name of a defense contractor, not an FBI case. Isn't the branding of terrorist attacks just a weeee, weee bit tacky ? Of course, this is to be expected, given the background of our new propaganda czar.
I hope my home state doesn't get hit with small pox - the case would probably end up being named "Poxsylvania".
Posted at 07:44 PM EST [Link]
The Red Cross is going to end up burning a lot of the blood it collected after the terrorist attacks. Notice that article makes no mention of any attempts to ship the "product" abroad. I wonder what the organization's international partners are thinking right now.
Posted at 09:18 AM EST [Link]
