Blog of a bald geek.

These little guys hang out on the work carpark. Every day after work I go out and I always smile at them scurrying away from my size 12 clobbers.
They are so fast that I have never even bothered to even try and take a photo. For two years I have been wanting to share this with you all, but with out a photo it would have been a little dull.
Today was different, this guy just sat there when I walked out the door and to the bike.
I had plenty of time to whip out my new phone camera and get this shot. Amazing!!

[Edit: I should add that these guys are about 4-6 inches from nose to tail, so they are a pretty good size].

Have a look at this photo…….

View to a launch

Take a good look………. I will still be here when you get back…….

Notice anything? Down there, to the right……. Yeah….. Now there seems to be some debate on the internets as to exactly what that is. Some say its the Space Shuttle, some say its a Delta2 rocket launch.
My blog is not about exactly what it is, its about how it just stuck me of what technology came together to make this photo possible.

Just look and think…. We have at least two guys jumping out of a plane.
Simply doing that and not dieing a horrible death takes some high tech gear. They are at some altitude ( most in the know put them at between 12 and 14 thousand feet). That in self is not to be discounted. Then you have one guy with a digital camera (Ok, Robert, yeah, it might be a large format film camera, but probably not). Think about the quality and size transformation that has taken place just in that field over the past few years.
Then you have the fact that by all accounts show that they were not there by accident. They planed this jump around the launch time. Having access to any sort of rocket launch times some years ago was purely on a ‘need to know’ basis. Now it becomes a public event.
The technology of the rocket itself is also amazing. How things have progressed on that front is just astounding (I also cant help to think about the International Space Station and all the launches and tech that has gone into that).
Lastly of course, you have the internet itself. Without which I never would have seen this photo and perhaps, neither would have you.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through that, perhaps in my old age I look back and think about where we have come from a little more often.

These days  its all too easy to look at a picture without really looking at it and thinking about what took place for that picture to be in front of your eyes.

Had a pretty good fathers day.
By far the highlight was taking the Nate Harrison Grade road down from the summit of Palomar (where Freddy and I were giving tours of the 2oo inch Hale Telescope as we always do on the third Sunday of each month).
I have been wanting to take the road because its such an important part of the history of Palomar Mountain. A lot of the dome and 18 inch telescope parts were taken up that road.
The road is a little rough at the top, but the bulk of it is really good.
The views, wild flowers and twisty nature of the road is just a joy to be there.
I think Freddy enjoyed it just as much, if not more than I did.

Nate Harrison Grade

Click on it to make it bigger.

Came home to a nice bottle of red wine and Freddys cooking.

Freddy’s friend Hope is away for a few weeks, so we have been baby sitting her pool, house, yard and rats. Terry loves to swim and generally muck about. I still have an issue with water in my ears so only sometimes join him. I think if we ever get a place of our own we might look at putting in a small pool……first we need a place…..

Freddy and I bought 2 mattress’s off Craigslist of late. Freddy wanted a bedroom suite (a matching one for the first time in our lives), it came with a bed.
We gave our current mattress to Amy, she has been after a double bed for yonks.
After a few sleeps it was clear that it was not good enough for the both of us. (It was anti-stuffed and sagged in the middle big time).
So, we gave it to Terry. (Who is too tall for his single bed (I blame my mum, all her side of the family is tall)).
We bought another double mattress off Craigslist, this time, we got a good one.

So, we were left with 2 single mattress’s in the garage…. I don’t spend a lot of time in there, but they were really cramping my style (wait, I have style? Never mind).

What to do…?? I asked around work a bit about where you take your rubbish in Temecula. Got plenty of blank looks and no answers.
There are no tips / rubbish dumps here. No transfer stations or anything like that.
Best idea was to hire a skip, put them in that and do it that way. Seemed to be over kill to me, so we started ringing around.
One person said just put them out the front of your house, they will go over night (Phhff, yeah, right).

Turns out that mattress’s are considered bio-hazards. With all the body fluids that can end up on them, you cant just get rid of them any old how…….
For example, the Salvos and the like do not collect them because they can not resell them. In a nut shell, they will not collect them because then they have to pay a bunch of money to get rid of them.
So, a few more phone calls showed that the council will do 2 collections of 4 bits of ‘hard rubbish’ per house per year. This worked out Ok as we had the two mattress’s and a base for one of them, so that was 3 bits of junk. And we hope to be at our current address only for a few more months (no, we have not heard anything about the house, trust me, when we hear, you will hear about it).

We rang the council, and booked the truck to come first thing Monday morning.
To save Freddy dragging them out on her own, we put them out front of the house last night.

5:20am this morning when I set out on my morning walk, I noticed they were gone.
Go figure.
Wish we had done that weeks ago.

Took the new amazing phone on my morning walk today. The sunrise over the mountains really does not show up all that well in this shot, but I like the fact that at least now you have something of what I see, which is more than you had before……thank-you Android Evo.

OK. How about a smaller photo this time?