Obama at the Bat...

Oh, it's going to be an interesting election season!

Hotel Astoria...

...in St. Petersburg, Russia.  About 10 years ago, I stayed here on two separate business trips, visiting a software development subsidiary of the U.S. company that I worked for.

The hotel was gorgeous, and ridiculously luxurious (though this was very adequately reflected in the room rate).  I greatly enjoyed walking around the nearby parts of the city, especially the almost adjacent large park and the naval museum.  In the latter, within minutes of my arrival staff had identified me as American, had someone out to interview me, and (most surprising to me) after getting my name they quickly identified me as a former U.S. Navy member – right down to my “rate” (my job), rank, and major duty stations.

But the most vivid memory I have of these two trips where I stayed at the Astoria was is this: the disjoint between the luxury of my lodgings and the shabbiness of our subsidiary's offices.  This was only exacerbated by my discovery (through conversations with our employees there) that our workers thought of our office building as rather grand and even a bit ostentatious.  For the couple of weeks (between the two trips) that I stayed there, I found this daily context switch between the hotel and the office very strange indeed...

89 Cliches...

Anyone who has worked with executives of the MBA variety has almost certainly run into at least a few of the cliche-spouting ignoramus variety.  These folks have risen to positions of power, sometimes as the executive in charge of hundreds or even thousands of employees.  Working with one of these people, if you're not one of them, can be highly entertaining.  It can also be awesomely frustrating, as you try to get something done but find the path to achievement blocked by an immovable boulder of ignorance.

The “cliche-spouting” seems to be more than a pattern – it's a practically infallible “tell”, a signal that raises the hackles of anyone experienced in the ways of the pointy-haired boss.  If that describes you, then you'll find this article very funny.  At least at first.  After that, you may (like me) find yourself reminded of unhappy and frustrating past experience.  For me, painful memories of a past boss (a CEO) came right to mind, in which I re-experienced things I'd rather not have re-experienced.  You were warned :-)

Ctrl – Alt – Delete!

Power Excitement...

We had a bit of an unusual occurrence here today: SDG&E needed to replace a utility pole, and they did it with a helicopter.  The pole in question was an old wooden pole carrying a “pole pig” (one of the big, cylindrical things you see on lots of poles out in the sticks; the things weigh about 250 pounds).  This particular one supplies the 120VAC to my neighbor's house, but it's actually located within our property line (on an SDG&E easement) – but nowhere near any roads.  It is a hard-to-access piece of dense chaparral.  The SDG&E workers could barely hike to the old pole; they weren't too excited at the thought of carting a new one up there, with a new pole pig, and then hauling the old pole pig out.

You can see them working on the first step above right: they're disconnecting the old pole pig.  After they did that, they lowered it to the ground.  But they didn't start on this until they'd disconnected power from my neighbor's house – and unfortunately for us, that meant our power went off as well.  Apparently they had already dug the hole for the new pole, because just after they finished this step, they started the fun part with the helicopter.  At left you can see the helicopter “parked” and being rigged up to the new steel pole.  This is about a quarter mile from my house.  The bottom of the new pole is toward the right side of the photo, with some men working on it.  In the background, between the helicopter and the pole, you can see the new pole pig all ready to be hauled up there.  A little to the left of that, you can see a red gadget of some kind.  I only figured out what that was after watching them work.  Once the helicopter had dropped the new pole into the hole, the pilot dipped it a few feet to put some slack in the cable holding the pole, then triggered something that caused that red gadget to disconnect from the pole.  It was very slick; just left a loop of cable attached to the pole, and the helicopter was free to depart.

Once the pole was all rigged to the helicopter, I walked back up to my yard to watch the action.  Shortly after I got back, the helicopter roared up from where it was parked, dangling the big steel pole beneath it (at right).  On the way to the new pole's location, they went right over my head, about 50 feet above me.  This was mildly disconcerting :-)

Then the pilot swooped over and down, and dropped it right in the hole with a minimum of fuss (at left).  A couple of men on the ground guided it in, but the pilot was darned close right from the start.  I clocked it: it was 2 minutes, 40 seconds from the time the pilot flew over my head until the time he disconnected from the pole and left.

Once the pole was in the ground, there was still more work for the helicopter.  The next step was to haul that nice, shiny new pole pig up to the new pole to install it.  After that, the helicopter hauled the old pole pig back down to the SDG&E trucks.  Then the helicopter's work was done, and the pilot flew off into the sunset.  Well, not really, but you know what I mean.  Speaking of the pilot, in the photo below (taken as he was lowering the pole) you can see him leaning quite a long way out of his window.  This is all so he could see directly below him.  If you know anything about flying a helicopter, you'll know that it takes two hands to fly one: on your left is the collective, and between your legs is the cyclic.  To hover generally takes constant manipulation of both.  It's a mystery to me how that pilot was able to fly while hanging halfway out the cockpit window!

But the rest of the SDG&E crew wasn't nearly finished yet.  They had to move all the wires (both power and telephone) from the old pole to the new one.  Then they had to connect the new pole pig.  Finally, last step: they had to go back to a different pole (this one was reachable by truck) and reconnect power to my neighbor and us.  Total time for the job: 5 hours, 34 minutes. 

One more mystery remains for me.  The crew was up on the new pole working away within a few minutes of the helicopter dropping it off.  Normally for a pole like that you'd need some concrete poured around it – and you'd have to wait for it to cure.  No waiting here!  I'm wondering what magic they used to make that pole safe and secure in such a hurry...

Awesome Glasses...

Lamestream Media Hypocrisy...

This time from the lamestream leader (the New York Times), nicely caught and laid out by Mollie Hemingway...

The Radiation Problem...

A strange twist on a subject I've blogged about before: the problem of hard radiation exposure on any manned space mission beyond the near-Earth environment.  This involves reality TV shows, Mars, and Snooki...

Asteroid Caught on Video...

Astronomers at the InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawai'i captured this video of a small asteroid that passed quite close to the Earth just a couple of days ago:

Do You Know...

...where the word “hello” came from?

The Most Arrogant Man in the World...

The interesting, hardball campaign commercials have already started, long before the election...

Democratic Party: a New Symbol...

Via my mom:

The Democratic Party today announced that it is changing its symbol from the donkey to a condom because it more accurately reflects the Party's political stance.

A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of dicks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually being screwed!

Damn, it just doesn't get more accurate than that!

A Little Too Close for Comfort...

Years ago, my friend Jim B. and I climbed up the side of an active vent (Pu'u O'o) of the Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawai'i.  It was a cinder cone about 800' high, with a bubbling lake of lava in the crater at its peak.  Standing on the edge of that cinder cone, looking down at the lake perhaps 300' below us was a very memorable – and crazy scary – experience.  I'm glad to have done it, but I don't think I'd do it again.

The scientist in this video is in a whole 'nother category of crazy:

Listen Up, Obama!

Awesome Morning Sky...

I took the dogs out for their morning walk about about 3:30 am.  The sky was very dark and clear, and moonless.  Even before my eyes accommodated to the darkness I could see bright stars on black sky, so I knew it was going to be good.

We walked slowly down the driveway, the dogs all behaving normally.  Got down to the gate and I looked up for the first time – what an eyeful!  The Milky Way was spectacular, a nearly due-north to due-south band across the celestial “bowl” – bright and full of texture.  There were even a few places where I thought I saw some color.  The stars were so numerous and so steady that some of the constellations I know well were difficult to pick out of the “clutter”.  The relative humidity is sitting at around 40%, so it's not dryness that's making the sky so clear – I'm assuming its the absence of pollution, probably because the wind is from the east (where our desert is) this morning.

The dogs, as usual, couldn't care less about this morning's awesome skies.  Race gamboled after his precious pine cones (lots of green ones on the trees for later this year!), and the three brown dogs were fully engaged in slurping up every trace of smell that might lie on the ground.  All four looked very happy; tails wagging, energetic bounding from one adventure to the next.  They love their morning walks...

Japanese Maple...

National Geographic's Photo of the Month:

Speechless...

...that's me, after viewing this:

Satire in Music, Presidential Leaks Edition...

Unusually well done:

Two More Race Runs...

...from this weekend's competition, here and here (sorry, not embeddable).

She Nailed It...

...quite literally.  The art below is made with nails...