Monthly Archives: January 2009

John Shirley, Black Glass (2008)

I read Black Glass, by John Shirley. It’s not for those that like their reading easy, or their music and beer lite. Follow the link to the review. Read my review of John Shirley’s Black Glass

Cold – Too Cold

Jim Shannon lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Lately he has been in the process of adopting a homeless cat that he and his wife have named Boots. In his last post he took a picture of the weather channel showing the temperature forecast. It was -31° Celsius, which is -23.8° Fahrenheit. That’s cold. I thought it […]

H-1B visa layoffs

A senator from Iowa has told Microsoft to layoff the foreign workers first and keep the red blooded Americans. As a programmer who has suffered layoffs and cuts in pay because of lower paid H-1B visa workers from India and China, I am watching this Issue, closely. I have seen first hand how difficult it […]

The Ring is Destroyed, finally

I’ve spent the last two weeks tramping through Middle Earth. (Listening to mp3s on Justine’s iPhone.) Gollum just fell into the crack of doom and I’ve had it with Hobbits for another year. I have read or listened to LOTR probably over 100 times. There was a time, 20 years ago, that I know I […]

Freecycle

Erica gets all of these alerts from FreeCycle.org. It is a network of Yahoo groups mailing lists that people use to give stuff away, or in my case, get free stuff. Once a day I get a forward from here with some tempting bit of free stuff. Mostly the good stuff is gone before she […]

Weekly Science Updates

I have a group of about 20 websites that I click “open in tabs” every morning in order to get my news fix. I just added the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Weekly Science Updates to the list. This is mostly an extract from news sources, but has some interesting articles and factoids. My other science morning […]

Star Finder 3C 273 PGC 41121 – Quasar

I’ve been getting hits on my star finder site for this object. It turns out that this is a Quasar. It is the most distance object that an amateur astronomer can view with an inexpensive telescope. That tail going down and to the right is 200,000 light years long. Star Finder 3C 273 PGC41121

NASA Jobs

Every once in a while I apply for a job at NASA. It is one of the few places that I would take a cut in pay to join. I’ve hear that they will be doing some hiring soon. NASA certainly will get some economic stimulus funds in the coming year. Unfortunately it seems all […]