(no subject)

Andrea woke me up out of bed futon to see if I wanted to see the eclipse with her. Well of course! I didn't know there was one coming, but I'm not going to miss seeing it!

She and I went outside together to look and it struck me how different this scene was than it would have been some thousands of years ago when everyone would be out looking at the incredible, unbelievable change in this unchanging sphere. How different things are. How much we've gained, and how much we've lost.

Oddly enough, that reminds me of a gift I bought for Andrea at the thrift store yesterday. But she still hasn't gotten it (I need to write her a card) so it will remain shrouded in lunar mystery for a little while, but the coincidence is a striking one.

I am so lucky indeed to be mated to someone who appreciates the magic and timeless mystery in the music of the spheres.

As Andrea and I stood near the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, a vantage point that gave us a tree and power-line free view, Kuma was barking in the backyard, so Andrea briefly ran over to put him in the house. While she was gone, this long haired cat with a huge bushy tail ran up to me and brushed his or her head against my leg. I bent down to pet it, and it dashed a few yards up the driveway and began to frolic around, rolling over and around and stretching its legs out. When I got up to meet Andrea and looked again, it was gone. Were I a greater believer in the mysticism of synchronicity, I would be convinced that it means something. I'm not entirely sure that I'm not.

As Andrea got in the car to leave for work, I ran upstairs to get my camera, and then to my truck to get my tripod. It was very difficult to get a good picture. It was too dark to auto-focus on, and the viewfinder is not always conducive to doing it manually. I may have to get online and read about how to do photography of heavenly bodies better. I think the lens may have had condensate from the temperature change of going outside too. But here's the best of the results.



You can tell there's a lot of light in the city, even down our little dead-end road. I wanted to try to get more detail by letting in more light, but at 800 speed with an aperture of 5.3 and an exposure time of 20 seconds, things were starting to get overdriven. This is a 13 second exposure with ISO 800 and f-stop 6.3 with an 80mm focus length (the long end of the lens that I have). I need to get a longer zoom for stuff like this.

So tell me: how many of you were out watching the eclipse here tonight?

(no subject)

How weird is that? I was just reading a chunk of GEB that talks about the similarity of recursive structures within language, mathematics, and computer code, and the paradigm of 'popping' and 'pushing' through deeper and shallower levels of structure. As an example, there is a story about two characters who find themselves reading a book about the same two characters, who see a painting of the same two characters...

And now I just got off the phone with another help desk tech who I was talking to about using remote desktop to connect from one machine (A) to machine B, and then, because connectivity is bad from machine A to machine C, going from B to C via another remote desktop session. Now you're down two levels from where you started. But what if you then open a remote desktop session from machine C to machine A? You then have a heterarchical structure (a hierarchy with multiple levels, none of which are above or below the other levels). Would an infinite number of windows appear on your screen, shrinking down to infinity toward a central vanishing point as you wathch machine A watching machine B watching machine C watching A watching B watching C..... Another example of this is the Escher painting of two hands, each one creating the other with strokes of the brush. When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by holding a hand mirror in front of a wall mirror and watching the infinite reflections of reflections of reflections dance around as I angled it this way and that. (Ok, who am I kidding? I'm still fascinated by that.) What if those characters in the third level of the story above, found that they were watching a movie of the original characters who were reading that book?

I used to say that the process behind cascade failure was my favorite mathematically related concept. Recursive and heterarchical structures are up there with it (though I suspect there's a significant relation at some level). God/dess, I wish I was independantly wealthy and could afford to spend more time reading about these things. I was never that great at the grind of sitting and working out mathematics in school, but I could read about theory for days at a time. Maybe if the theory grabbed me enough, I could even sit down and learn the practice. Oh, for an extra eight hours a day....

(no subject)

Someone was here to ask about set up of a computer for a new contractor. I told her that I'd just left a message for (we'll call her) Alice Fakename about that. Guess what? I was actually talking to Alice Fakename; she's the one who was asking about it.

"That's me" She said. Though I still had no inkling of recognition, I realized that this was someone I've been working with, to at least a small extent, for two years now.

"Oh yeah! I knew that!" I said and made up a stupid excuse about getting names confused or something. I don't really remember it.

I wonder how I look when that happens. I wonder if I ought to get over my people phobia and explain why this happens. I don't even know how to do that though. How do you tell a company of nearly a thousand people that so-and-so may not recognize you when he sees you? Nine-tenths of them won't care.

At least this doesn't happen too terribly often. I've had a pretty good track record of avoiding situations where I don't have the right context clues up to a couple of instances this week.