Electric Josh

Super cool 3-D NASA satellite tracker. Click on any satellite to see its name and orbit. Low Earth orbit and the geosynchronous orbit are pretty easy to spot, but some of the crazy science instruments are off in completely nutty elliptical orbits. The Hubble Space Telescope is just barely outside the atmosphere. The GPS satellites are surprisingly (to me) far out. Hours of fun.
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I'm about to leave work and it's almost completely dark. This massively arbitrary time change irritates me once a year—I will probably remain super annoyed, as usual, until the arbitrary time change ends in the spring. Should have shifted an hour in the other direction instead, so the sun didn't go down until almost 7:00 again. Ugh.
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Perhaps it's only because I spent a good chunk of my adolescence playing Scrabble, or perhaps it's because my former colleague actually has a flippin Ph. D. in Scrabble (!), but I just think it's the coolest thing ever that a guy scored 365 points in a single turn in a real game of Scrabble. And right in my own backyard, too.
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Desperate Mousewives, the lovely wife's two favorite bits of pop culture mashed together.
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So I finally got to fix my iPod by dropping it three feet onto a carpeted office floor. Wasn't working, dropped it, works great. Satisfying on several levels.
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My commute home is marred by having to go through this amazingly annoying rotary. Massachusetts traffic engineers seem to love rotaries for some reason, despite the fact that they cause traffic patterns indistinguishable from figure-eight racing, which is a motor sport designed to cause aggressive racers to T-bone one another as spectacularly as possible. This particular rotary tends to be crowded three-wide with cars and SUV's, moving at either zero or twenty miles per hour, vascillating between the two moment to moment. Everyone uses their turn signals to different purposes—does the right blinker mean that I'm in the left lane coming in from the north and that I'm planning on getting immediately into the left lane heading west? (Yes.) Does the left blinker mean that I'm in the right lane coming in from the east and that I'm informing you that I'm about to cut in front of you momentarily so that I can continue south, or that I'm about to cut in front of you and sit, blocking your exit to the north, so that I can get in line to go east? (Neither, in my case.) Once I go east, do you think I'll bother to turn off my signal before turning north (right) or south (left)? (Yes, in my case, but I'm in the minority, so it probably confuses people.) The Onion reveals that this is probably an intentional design feature, and would explain a lot about road layout in eastern Mass.
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Japanese public works engineers seem to have known what they were doing when they blocked off this road.
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The Ambien Cookbook.
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My normal approach is useless here.
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Today's exceptionally large ship: the HMS Queen Mary 2, which is docked about fifteen feet from where I usually park my car. (You can imagine how messed up the parking situation is at work today). It's twice as tall as my office building, and there is a far larger than normal population of senior citizens milling about. Did I mention that the ship is unreasonably large?
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Quick baby update: he has gained almost two pounds in the two weeks since we left the hospital. That and he's very cute. Pictures at some point, here...
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When I heard that an MIT grad named Smoot had won the Nobel Prize for Physics (for the 4K background radiation) I was all excited about the possibility that it's the same Smoot whose height is the unit of length used to measure the Mass Ave. bridge. Smoot the Prize-winner is apparently the cousin of Smoot the unit.
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Lincoln Weeps.
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Lemmings, the excellent early-90's video game that some of us spent decent fractions of college playing, has been rewritten in Javascript for your modern gaming pleasure. Mmmm, web browser as game platform.
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