Playing with light

Played around with fill flash in bright sunlight at tonight's soccer game. Pics are in the gallery. Generally, I'm very pleased with the color saturation I got, except when shooting into the sun, which didn't work out too well.

Bear's Mix number 1

Switch - Will Smith
Collide - Howie Day
Lonely No More - Rob Thomas
Beverly Hills - Weezer
American Baby - Dave Matthews Band
Don't - Shania Twain
La Tortura - Shakira f. Alexandro Sanz
Spoiled - Joss Stone
Best of You - Foo Fighters
Broken Wings - Alter Bridge (when released)
Speed of Sound - Coldplay
American Idiot - Green Day
Let Me Go - 3 Doors Down
Lonely - Akon (most annoying)
You and Me - Lifehouse
Because of You - Kelly Clarkson
Incomplete - Backstreet Boys
Girl - Destiny's Child

Kirkwood Soccer Tournament

The galleries from the past two days of soccer at the Kirkwood tournament are up.

PCCS Sports Banquet

Portraits from the PCCS sports banquet are up....

Encryption is criminal intent?

A Minnesota appeals court has unanimously found that the presence of an encryption program on a defendant's computer is evidence of criminal intent. Bruce Schnier says, "I am speechless." I'm almost speechless, but I'd like to push my stunned disbelief aside for a moment to point out the Apple's Mac OS X ships with encryption (the crypto is called file vault). So does Microsoft's Windows XP (the crypto is called EFS, or encrypting file system). My PDA phone has an encryption program on it. So, if you run Windows, or Mac OS X, the courts think you're a criminal, because obviously you have something to hide. Absolutely stunning. What's the Russian for, "yes, comrade officer, I have my papers that allow me to be out after curfew?"

Greed endangers the London Eye

The London Eye is a large part of London's 2012 Olympic bid. Unfortunately, SBC, which owns the land on which one of the Eye's legs sits, is increasing the rent from 65,000 pounds per year to 2.5 million pounds per year. That's one hell of a cost of living increase. Shame on you, SBC! Endangering London's Olympic bid to further line your pockets!

Read the full story in the Guardian.

Striking the JCS set

Added a gallery from the strike and cleanup from Jesus Christ Superstar. Oh, and Mouse got hurt at soccer today. We thought he had a broken leg, but apparently it's just a bad bruise.

PCCS Choir Presentation

Added the gallery for the PCCS choir presentation from last night.

More Sat Images

An Aircraft Carrier moored at North Island Naval Air Station, Coronado, CA.

The Naval Amphibious Base (NAB), Coronado. Where the SEALs train.

The nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington, which produced most of the weapons-grade material in use in the US, and, as a side effect, created a huge ecological disaster.

Yucca Flats, Nevada, inside the Nevada Test Range, site of more than 800 nuclear weapons tests.

The Sedan crater, an underground 104kt burst to test the use of nuclear weapons for civil engineering purposes.

The Santa Fe Institute (sat image), home of some of the most advanced research on Complexity.

The Very Large Array deep space radiotelescope. More info

The Laser Interferometer Gravitywave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington. I recommend that you check out the project home page, too.

Pantex

Oh, ok, what the heck. Here's the Pantex Nuclear weapon assembly and storage facility.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

While I'm busy posting links to satellite images of cool places, here's LLNL. If you don't know what they do there, visit them on the web at www.llnl.gov (hint: bright light followed by loud noises).

Fermilab

The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, also known as Fermilab, has a 3 Tevatron accelerator for performing various high-enery physics experiments. It was Fermilab that found the first evidence of the Top quark, and they are a key collaborator (along with CERN) in the search for the Higgs boson.

See the Satellite Image.

Trinity Site - first nuclear explosion

On July 16, 1945, man first exploded an atomic weapon. For the Geocachers amongst you, the site is at N 33.6730 W 106.47150.

Check out the Satellite Image of the site.

Terraserver and Google maps are great for looking at sites like this, since you can hack the latitude, longitude, and scale.

What fun! Nuclear weapons and satellite imaging.

Star Wars blah blah blah

You know, I like the Star Wars movies. They're fun. I was even looking forward to the release of this one. Unfortunately, the incesant barrage of advertising lamely disguised as "buzz" or related products has me thinking I'll just save my eight and a quarter for something else. I mean, for goodness sake, do we really need a Star Wars themed cell phone from Nextel? Or the stupid wookie ad for ringtones? At some point, advertisers cross the line between advertising and bullying. The Star Wars machine crossed that line about two weeks ago....

PCCS Soccer vs. Independence (new Gallery)

The PCCS vs. Independence gallery is up.

Geocaching

Geocaching is a "sport" (maybe more a game) played with a GPS and a compass. People make small containers of things, then hide the containers out in the world. These containers are called caches. Then the owner posts the GPS coordinates of the cache on the geocaching web site, and other people with GPS units can go find them. Vastly entertaining.

Learn more: geocaching.com

Jesus Christ Superstar wrap-up

For those of you who have been following the new gallery additions in the "galleries" page, you'll notice a huge number of pictures from the Salesianum production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." This performance closed last weekend, and now they're striking the set. I'll probably have another gallery up on Friday, showing the crew tearing down the set. IMO, this was a fabulous performance, and kudos to the directors, crew, orchestra, and cast.

More info here: Sallies Theater