Saturday, October 27, 2007

I really like Jimmy Buffett. Well I’ve never really met the man, but I sure like his music. He never seems to play concerts in the Northwest so yesterday I flew to Las Vegas and tonight attended one of his concerts with my brother, my sister-in-law, and 9,998 of our closet friends. What a hoot!!! As the date approached, my brother said to me, “So what will you be wearing for a costume?” Costume!?! Well it is almost Halloween. “No,” he said, “everybody will be wearing pirate costumes, or wearing flowered shirts, or parrot heads or shark fins or flashy things!” And he was right. We arrived early to appreciate them and I wandered around with my iPhone asking folks if I could take their pictures.

This is unlike me. I am more the shy-shoot-candids-with-a-long-telephoto-lens-from-behind-a-duck-blind kind of guy. But people were nice and seemed in a festive mood. Maybe the Landshark Lager and the Margaritaville Tequila for sale in the lobbies mellowed them. The couple below on the right gave me a little flashy star to wear. I guess my “costume” wasn’t complete without one.

The house was packed. Music was loud (I love sound you can feel) and everybody was singing and swaying and performing little rituals at various points in his songs. One of the lines in a crowd pleasing favorite goes, “fin to the left, fin to the right, and you’re the only bait in town.” At which point people make a fin above their head with their arms and sway first to the left and then to the right. The second photo below is “fin to the left” I think, as you face the stage.

On the way down, clear skies and Alaska Airlines gave us nice views of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood.

I’ve got some more costume pics if you’re interested.

Click here for the rest of the story ...

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Out and About
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Saturday, October 20, 2007

I took my camera this morning to three of my favorite Seattle vantage points. The weather was troubled with deep foreboding skies. But we had some broken sun to light things up. Maybe I could grab a few nice shots. The first was taken from the hill where 12th Ave intersects Interstate 90 at about 9:30 AM. The second was from Bell Harbor Marina at about 10:00 AM. And the third was from Kerry Park in Queen Anne at about 10:30 AM. These are all classic postcard vantage points but you won’t see postcard photos shot in this weather. In many ways I like these better than the ones with cinematically perfect cloudless blue skies.

You can enlarge this one too ...

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Out and About
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Sunday, October 14, 2007

This is an unusual photo which my daughter-in-law sent me recently (thanks Sarah!). It was taken from the International Space Station in September 2007 and shows the shuttle launch which will resupply the station. To have the ISS just above the Cape at the time of the launch is very very rare. There are maybe 6 people who have seen this sight out of the 9 or so Billion people who have lived on the planet since people as we know them arrived (genetically) on our little ball.

[UPDATE: I have recently learned this photo was NOT taken from the ISS but rather from a high altitude NASA jet. Here’s a link to Snopes for the details: http://www.snopes.com/photos/space/shuttlelaunch.asp#photo. This doesn’t change my main message ... just a clarification.]

I am a self-confessed geek when it comes to rockets and space. Sputnik was first orbited on my 7th birthday in 1957. I remember building model rockets as a kid and at age of 11 and sitting on the floor of my parents living room watching the Mercury missions. What was I doing while I watched? I was using a slide rule to calculate how high my rockets would fly ... no personal computers or pocket calculators then, you see.

I believe in space. I believe we need to aggressively explore space. We’ve learned a lot there, but there’s much much more to learn.

I believe we need to use remotes and robots to do it, but that seems too stale to me. There is no romance in bots. There is no adventure in bots. But there is data, and analysis, and real science in bots. So do it!!!

But I also believe we need to put people back in space. Not the brain-dead ISS. But a real mission with real risk, tremendous emotional payloads, and real people in harm’s way. This is the best alternative to war I can think of, to advance the technology of the human species. It will be frightfully expensive ... but worth twice the price. Back to the moon? Yes, and more or less permanently. To Mars? We will pay for this with money and dead souls, but in my view it will be worth it! Not only twice, but a million times over.

So join me! Call or write your congressmen and senators. Encourage them to sieze the momentum of adventure. Demand we return to space!

And yes, we must pay for it. If it costs $100 per person per year in the US ... collect it and spend it. End pork barrel spending which accomplishes nothing. End ear marks to legislation because it is only political favoritism to contributors. Send all these wasted dollars to NASA.

Let’s go exploring!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Technology
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