Recently in Various & Sundry Category

As Houstonians, we have to put up with extended heat and humidity for months and months each year. Therefore, during the short period in March and/or April when the weather is beautiful and clear and gorgeous and perfect -- in short, on days like today -- I think there should be a law that no one has to go to work. It's just mean to make me sit here when the view out the window is so tempting.

This kind of lovely, cloudless day happens with welcome frequency in the spring. Last month, one of the crewmembers on the International Space Station took this photo from orbit. Just to the lower left of center is a neighborhood with a golf course running through the middle. (It's easier to see if you view large on Flickr.) That's my neighborhood!

While I was looking for that picture, I also came across this picture of Dubai. I knew they had a palm shaped island. Islands in the shape of continents? That's a new one!

While I don't know if he took these photos specifically, one of the current crewmember, Soichi Noguchi from Japan, has been taking tons of photos from orbit and posting them via Twitter. (He's @Astro_Soichi.) Since I'm on the topic, here are a couple of my favorites that he's posted lately:

"Himalaya in sunset. Lake Manasarovar is still frozen."

He's also been taking photos of the glaciers in Patagonia. They are spectacular. I'm pretty sure we saw both of these when we went to Patagonia in 2006. (I need to repost those photos. Dang I was skinny then.)

"South Patagonia. One of the most beautiful glaciers of the world. 800mm lens will take you there :-)"

"Glacier lake in Southern Patagonia. See the color difference between the two lakes."

I am definitely getting more and more girly in my old age. In the past few years I've found myself admiring various purses. Purses! It wasn't that long ago that I didn't even carry a purse, and now I love them. I just got a new one, and it's a funny/cool story so I thought I'd share, even though talk of purses has probably already driven away any male readers.

A while ago, I came across Sarah's blog. I can't even remember how I found it -- maybe from Dallas, who I found through Becca? Anyway, I had randomly clicked on Sarah's site, and as I scrolled through her crafty posts, I suddenly realized that I knew her! She lives here in Houston, works for a NASA contractor, and we used to play soccer together. Small world, right? So I added her blog to my RSS reader and have been thoroughly admiring all of her projects. She really makes me want to learn how to sew something fierce.

So when I saw her post that she was selling this cute bag that she made, I jumped on it. It's a great bag, and doubly cool because I know who made it. Hooray for handmade!

The software that runs this blog, Movable Type, has been giving me fits for the past month or so. And ever since I upgraded and lost my old template, I've been thinking of switching to Wordpress. The latest version of Movable Type is very slow to load and publish, and to be honest, it just has too many features than I need. I'm not taking advantage of all the bells and whistles, nor do I even really understand them all, and it might actually be too much of a good thing. Especially since it's acting up. I know some people are getting errors when they try to leave comments. Probably the same errors I'm getting half the time I try to publish.

My host makes it really easy to install Wordpress, so last night I tried to switch. I logged into Movable Type to export my current blog so that I can pull all my entries into a new content management system, but the export didn't work. I thought it was something to do with the software installation itself, so I figured I'd upgrade to their latest version and export again. But before upgrading they recommend that you backup the database, and even that was giving me errors. So maybe it's a blog software issue, and maybe it's a database issue. Either way, I can't upgrade just yet. I've got a ticket in to my host's support people, so I expect to figure things out soon.

All that is a long-winded way of saying that if you see funny things going on around here in the next few days, I'm working on some changes and hope to get everything straightened out soon.

It's official: Jose is a licensed private pilot! He passed his checkride on Friday! I couldn't be happier for him. He didn't finish his checkride until sunset, but fortunately the good weather held out long enough for him to take me up as his first passenger yesterday around lunchtime. We flew around Clear Lake for a half hour before heading back for a nice landing.

Congratulations Jose!

The annual pumpkin carving took place at Jason's this year, and I have to say -- they turned out really well!

Here's a photo of me and Carina that Gavin took last week when we went to visit her. She is moving out of the NICU (appears to have been a big false alarm) and might go home with Gavin and Jen tomorrow! Hooray!

Two questions for the masses:

First, I need an effective and simple and easy piece of software that will automate the process of backing up my hard drive onto an external drive. I've been doing it manually for more than a year, and I'm tired of it. I know there are a zillion different backup software packages, so I'm hoping someone can recommend a good, basic one.

Second, the pair of earrings that Jose gave me for Christmas broke. As in, the wire (10k white gold) that formed half of the clasp broke in half. I can't wear the earrings anymore, which sucks. Now, they weren't super expensive, but I also know that he spent enough money that they shouldn't break within two months. What do I do?

I didn't like having to manually moderate all comments, so I've installed a new little plugin that should fix it for me. Below the comment text box, but above the 'post' button, you should all now see a text box. Above it, it says to enter the word 'hello' in the box below.

Voila -- all you have to do is type hello and your comment will go through and be published immediately.

Let me know if you have any issues...

I just enabled authentication for comments on this blog. Hopefully this means I'll be able to avoid most comment spam (the spammers seem to be re-finding this blog after a brief respite when I upgraded my installation). What this means as far as I can tell is that if you register (see link in the comments section), your comment will be published immediately. Otherwise, it'll be held until I approve it and/or put you on my list of trusted commenters.

If you have any difficulties commenting, let me know.

I finally did a long-overdue update to the latest version of Movable Type, so some things may appear funny on the ol' blog. Most notably, it has somehow entered the first few words of each entry as the title. Odd. Ah well, I'll fix it later.

I also finally incorporated all my old Diaryland entries from 2001-2003 (covering my final co-op tour in Houston, my M.S. grad school experience at Stanford, and my first year of working full-time in Houston). They're available under the monthly archives headings, though the entries do come with a warning: read them at your own risk. Let's just say I was much more angst-ridden as a grad student!! :)