Alive? Yes!

OK, this blog has been neglected. Poor little withered thing!

I've been busy arguing with climate change denialists, and boy does that drain a fellow...

Here's a martian image to appease, this is an overhead view (naturally) of a landslide caught in mid-flow by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Amazing.

I found it on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog. Click on it to see Phil's post and see another link to the hi-rez version.

Listening to: A Little Bit of Love by Joy Williams from More Than I Asked For. (This was a song I heard a fragment of on, of all things, a Walmart TV commercial.)

Mars!

OK, it's been "forever" since I posted. I've been wasting my energy again arguing with climate change denialists. This weekend I'll be running on the Toronto Marathon, so that means that I'll owe myself THREE race reports. Ugh.

But today I saw a photo of Mars on the Bad Astronomy website captured by the HiRISE orbiter... Wow. The black tracks are the product of dust devils. It's a wonderful world we live in. Click on the image to read more about it.

Nov. 6th update: The Big Picture, another internet fav over at The Boston Globe, has posted a series of juicy Martian images. Check them out here.

Took an eight year-old to see a preview of Where The Wild Things Are yesterday. Who knew you could make a film about a ten sentence book? Interesting, but personally I preferred District 9...

Listening to: Hell Yes by Beck from Guero.

Seven Hours of Weightlifting!

Yes, I've just finished spending seven hours lifting weights. So I'm a bit stiff. I spent all day Sunday, except for one brief excursion back into town, at The Shopping Channel demonstrating the Bowflex Extreme. Over the course of 24 hours we did seven live one hour shows. Guess what? We kept the resistance pretty damn low...

Our broadcasts started at midnight Saturday, but I had previously planned to spend the weekend at a training camp with my triathlon club up in Collingwood. So I drove up to Collingwood Friday afternoon, had a nice 60K ride that evening and followed up Saturday with a 100K ride and 9K run. There are plenty of challenging hills in the Collingwood area, I even tackled Scenic Caves Road with a team mate at the end of the day. After a serious three hour nap followed by dinner out with the gang I drove straight to the studio. I've posted some photos from the day on my Flickr page.

Nice to see some good news from Mars: the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down safely on Sunday night in the Martian Arctic, which looks more like our Arctic than I expected. Nice for Spirit and Opportunity to have some robotic company. Although Spirit and Opportunity have been operating for an undreamed of four years the Phoenix Lander faces "death" in a few short months. It's Arctic location means that when winter sets in the Lander will likely be buried in ice and run out of power.

I mentioned above that I left The Shopping Channel studio briefly on Sunday. I had just enough of a gap between two shows to whip into town to watch that morning's Monaco Formula One Grand Prix with my friend Brian on his PVR. With gas prices at a record high ($1.27/liter!) I had to pause for a moment, but tradition won out over penny-pinching.

Monaco is Formula One's most glamorous circuit, but also the slowest. It's a crazy twisty city street course, with almost no view ahead for the drivers. Sunday's race was further slowed by heavy rain, which meant that the race ended by reaching the two hour time-limit (they almost made the full distance...). Because I only had 90 minutes to watch the race in anyway we used the PVR's fast-forward option except for when there was an interesting development. But there were plenty of those. The wet conditions and lack of view led to lots of spin outs and collisions. Although the Ferrari's started on the front row there was a lot of back and forth as collisions, repairs, pit stops, safety cars and weather changes came heavily into play. Lewis Hamilton overcame an early error to ultimately win the day, Kimi struggled for grip but was holding third when he had to accept a drive-through penalty, he eventually lost grip near then end of the race and drove into the back of Adrian Sutil's Force India car, ending Adrian's best race ever and dropping Kimi back to ninth. Massa started on the pole but events lead him to a third place finish behind Lewis Hamilton and fifth-place starter Robert Kubica. Kimi's poor result and Lewis' strong one means that Lewis has taken the lead in the Driver's Championship.

This afternoon will be my "big acting break", I'm shooting a scene for a Discovery Channel documentary about the human body. I'll be portraying a sperm, swimming in my triathlon wetsuit toward the Ontario Place Cinesphere (standing in for a human egg)! The things we do for art...

Listening to: Pork and Beans by Weezer from Weezer (their albums are all called "Weezer", this one's got a red cover). This song's video is a great collection internet memes...

Details, details

More fascinating photos from Mars as the high resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter comes on-line. Gorgeous stuff.

Follow-up to Wednesday's Provincial election: The Liberals are back in with a second majority, Conservative leader John Tory didn't even win his own seat (which happens to be my riding, Don Valley West). Let's see what happens this time.

I found a copy of the Hotel Chevalier short film "somewhere". Interesting back story for The Darjeeling Limited. Natalie Portman seemed uncomfortable with her nude scene though.

My poor over-worked iPod nano gave up the ghost after my hour of riding in the pouring rain. I've fiddled with it myself and had the guys at iRepair look it over, there was nothing to be done other than replace it at the Apple Store. :-( Still, the new nano is cute and has more capabilities. I bought the (red) one. Sheryl is looking forward to finding it cleaned up and placed under her Christmas tree when my Ironman training is over.

Lastly, but most importantly, my VRETA sofa has arrived from IKEA. Finally a place in which to sleep in front of the TV.

Listening to: 1234 by Feist from The Reminder.

Anticipation

Tonight Chris gets back from England with his grandmother. I'm looking forward to seeing him again and hearing about his experiences. I think he's got about 600 photographs to download! If past experience is any guide his photos will all be of pigeons and other small animals...

I'm also looking forward to Saturday night, which is Sunday midday in Australia. Thats when the 2007 Formula One season will start in Melbourne. There are lots of changes this year, including top drivers changing teams, rookies arriving with great promise, new car designs and new regulations. There's only one tire brand in use this year, but each team will have to drive at some point in the race on each of two tire compounds. The pre-season consensus is that Ferrari and McLaren are the teams to beat. Where does that leave double world champion Fernando Alonso? Looking pretty good with sitting in Kimi Raikkonen's seat with his new McLaren team. Kimi Raikkonen pulled off a convincing win in the highly competitive Finnish Kopparberg King snowmobile race last week, so we know he's not rusty... and he's got a hot Ferrari ride to boot. Renault and Williams look competitive, but Honda and Toyota appear to have their work cut out for them.

Mars in the news: New satellite analysis shows that Mars' poles have sheets of nearly pure ice that approach 4 km in thickness...

Listening to: Big Bang Baby by Stone Temple Pilots from Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop.

This Just In

News flash: America is not winning the war in Iraq! This is straight from George Bush's lips. According to George though "not winning" is not the same as "losing", so don't get too worried. Heh. Looks like someone in the White House has stopped focusing on nicknames and realised he can't just make it up as he goes along. Time to fish out the old thinkin' cap!

Speaking of foul-smelling things that need to be tossed out, I've been much more aware of my kitchen wash cloth, which has a tendency to lie beside my sink for weeks at a time, since my father's recent visit. He mentioned (in a non-critical way) that he'd learned that dish rags are actually the biggest source of bacteria in the home. I now try to change cloths every few days, but I had always thought the kitchen sink was the worst spot. The expert advice is to hang your dish cloths over your faucet to ensure that they dry, which prevents bacteria buildup and to microwave them(!) for a minute before use.

Turning to "local" news I read that NASA has teamed up with Google to make their satellite imagery of the Earth, Moon and Mars available, including some real-time content. This is good news for me here on Mars, because even to us locals one damn sand dune looks like another. Perhaps with Google Mars I'll eventually be able to find my way around...

Listening to: This Could Be Anywhere In The World by Alexisonfire from Crisis.

Shine on, Harvest Moon

I'm just back from an evening run, along "the Beltline", an old rail line nearby that has been converted to a walking path. It was pitch dark most of the way... Good thing I knew the route well. The harvest moon was in my eyes all the way back, which made it even harder to see my way. it's interesting to note that the Moon is moving 4 cm away from Earth every year as it slows down...

Another celestial body was in the news today, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has started sending back unprecedented images of the Mars surface and today a high resolution image of Victoria Crater, where the Opportunity Rover is currently operating, was released. What an amazing image! Opportunity, even it's shadow, can be seen in the magnified view. This area will probably be the final resting place for the Opportunity Rover, as it is so far past it expected failure point and there is so much to be investigated here.

Sheryl and I saw The Last Kiss on Tuesday night, one of those 'man-child realises it's time to grow up' films. Well done, but the characters seemed pretty short-sighted. Maybe I'm just getting old... Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner played the parents of Jacinda Barrett's character Jenna well, showing their struggle to stay together. I have to admit that enjoyed Rachel Bilson performance as the tempting and possibly unstable Kim. Sheryl kept poking me in the ribs each time she appeared on screen, so it must have been obvious!

Listening to: Shed A Little Light by James Taylor from Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.

A quick trip to MaRS

Yesterday I took a quick trip to MaRS to see how the place was doing. It seems to be holding up well. In fact, it's never looked better. Why the strange spelling? Well MaRS is actually a technology centre downtown beside the University of Toronto campus. Originally it stood for Medical and Related Sciences, but it immediately became just four letters as a lot of non-medical tech ventures have landed in the $450 million facilty. I was there to network with fellow technology managers. It's an award-winning "intelligent building", but guess what? Really crappy cell phone reception.

Last weekend also saw the staging of the British Formula One Grand Prix. Fernando Alonso started on pole position and stayed there. Kimi Raikkonen was second on the grid, but pit stop strategy helped Michael Schumacher, who qualified third, get his Ferrari ahead. That was pretty much the way it went. The only other activity of note was a first lap accident that took out three cars out and a few mechanical failures, most notably Jenson Button's Honda letting go on lap nine. Too bad, Jenson had been on a charge after being unable to qualify well. Curiously all eight point-earning places were held by four teams, with BMW's drivers filling the last two spots. Go Jacques!

The last weekend activity to report is that Chris wanted to see The Breakup, so we went on Saturday afternoon. The less said the better...

Listening to: Same Old Scene by Roxy Music from Street Life.

Racing and Celebrity

It's been a busy week here on Mars. First, the Sprockets film festival started. I did shifts Thursday and Friday evening at the Ryerson Theatre. Second, the San Marino Grand Prix took place this morning. Finally, this afternoon was my step-father's 75th birthday party.


Sprockets has been fun so far. Thursday was Opening Night, with a red carpet for the star of the new film version of Lassie. I was outside helping with the line-up and red carpet, which was fun. There were 600 kids desperate to see Lassie, who arrived in a black stretch limo with his trainer. (Apparently Lassie the character has always been female, but Lassie the actor has always been male.) Before the screening Mayor David Miller made a short speech and then Lassie answered some questions (the answer was always "woof"). I didn't see any of the film, so I can't give an opinion.

Last night I was Volunteer Captain for the screening of Over the Hedge, a new DreamWorks animated film adapted from the cartoon strip of the same name. The film is a "prequel" of sorts, describing how the strip's two main characters (RJ, a racoon voiced by Bruce Willis, and Verne, a turtle voiced by Garry Shandling) meet. It wasn't quite finished when this version was assembled, so a few scenes weren't fully rendered. The director (who also directed Antz) and two other production people were there and they answered questions for about half an hour after the screening. I saw most of the film; it was entertaining and well received. For the adult audience members there was the usual layer of extra meanings and references including a certain misplaced children's sled.

Which brings us to this morning's Formula One race in San Marino. The Imola track is pretty boring, with hardly any chances for overtaking. The race's interest came from strategy choices and incidents. The first incident was on the first lap; Christijan Albers was bumped from behind going into a corner and his car went flipping through the air before coming to a stop upside down. He walked away from it... Michael Schumacher's Ferrari was on the pole and managed to stay there for the whole race, in spite of having to nurse poor tires for the second half of the race. He was going so slowly that cars he had lapped earlier were catching up again! Jenson Button's Honda started second but needed to stop three times for fuel, which put him out of contention. He also had a scary pit lane incident that saw him pull away before the fuel nozzle had been removed. It ripped from it's hose and he had to stop while his team removed it. Point leader Fernando Alonzo started eighth in his Renault, but by pitting later than everyone else he was able to catch Schumacher and spent the last half of the race all over Schumacher's rear wheels. If Renault had stuck to their planned pitstop schedule he would have got past and won the race. The next race is the European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring track.

Listening to: Daddy Wasn't There by Ming Tea from Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Made it!

NASA's latest and greatest Mars probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, began circling Mars today. This is a tricky process, requiring great precision to execute successfully. About one in three Mars probes have been lost, usually during this stage. Click on the image at right to see a 10 MB QuickTime animation of the process.

Moving along, I finally saw Capote this week with Sheryl. I found it a bit slow but thought it was a great insight into Truman Capote's personality and talent, especially through Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal. The film focused on the time he spent writing In Cold Blood and didn't mention the loss of his friends later in life because of his continuing literary betrayals.

I also have to mention my son's recent scheme. A few weeks ago Chris found an old Christmas Latte coupon from Starbucks in his mother's car. I think it was from 1998. He wanted to try to cash it in, so when we went to see Date Movie (his choice, you may want to avoid this movie) he brought it along. Sure enough, the baristas honoured it with a laugh. But they ran out of whipped cream and had to change canisters before they could finish. So they gave him another free drink coupon! He cashed that one in a lot faster, getting himself a Venti-size Caramel Macchiato a few days later.

Last thought before signing off. At the pool today one of the regulars was wearing a wet-suit! We struck up a conversation and it turns out he's going to race in a half-ironman triathlon in San Diego next week. He was actually wearing his girlfriend's wet-suit, as he'd picked up the wrong one by accident on the way out the door (she was swimming too, but in the usual bathing costume). I'm looking forward to getting into my new wet-suit sometime soon.

Listening to: The Long and Winding Road by The Beatles from Let It Be... Naked. Not in the iTunes Store...

Extraterrestrial

What a sight! This is the latest image from the Cassini probe circling Saturn (click on it for a larger view). The moon is Dione. The horizontal lines near the bottom are Saturn's rings viewed almost on edge (they're very thin). The "stripes" on Saturn are the shadows of the ring's individual bands.

Mars has been especially bright and large lately because it's in almost its nearest position again. I always like to pick it out because, well this blog alone is a good enough reason. At the moment it's also close to the moon in the early evening so it seems even larger.

Back here on Earth I learned yesterday that I would be getting a new boss today. I've been carrying the load of both I.T. Manager and I.T. Director for six months now, so it's good to have the position filled (although I would have preferred to fill it myself). Of course it remains to be seen if we can work together. I'm pretty relaxed about such things, but I may find that my new boss wants to sweep the broom... Same old same old I guess. I always worry that a new boss won't appreciate my efforts or will feel threatened by me. We had a good introductory lunch today, so that's a start.

Another authority figure has been back in my life for the last two weeks. My father has been in town for a visit. He moved back to Australia in 1980, and I haven't seen much of him since until the last few years. Now he returns to Canada each summer to work on some TV projects and he usually comes through Toronto in the Fall. He usually stays with me when he's in town and visits my sister and his old friends. It's been good to catch up with him and to help his grandchildren get to know him, but I'm a bit tired of the prolonged political discussions...

Listening to: Nothing. Weird, huh?

Mars: the wet planet?

Looks like the ESA Mars Express satellite has found a deposit of water ice 35 km wide in a crater on Mars. A bunch of nuts optimists, assuming such a find, have well-established plans for a permanent colony on Mars. I'm moving over before real estate gets too expensive...

Turning to earthly matters, Chris arrived home from camp today and seems to have a had a good time, Next year he wants to go for a month! He's looking pretty grubby, which is another sign of a good experience. It's good to have him back in his own bed. Funnily, it was raining when he left and when he returned. They had good weather in camp though, including their overnight canoe trip.

Listening to: Like Wow, Wipeout! by Hoodoo Gurus from Mars Needs Guitars!

Over has hell frozen

Sorry, chanelling Yoda there for a minute. The tech news of the day is that Apple has announced that it will be switching next year from IBM's PowerPC chip to Intel's Pentium series. That's a b-i-g change. Turns out that Apple has been secretly maintaining Pentium versions of Mac OS X ever since the first release five years ago. Of course the whole time they've been busy trash-talking Windows and the Pentium chip. They can still trash-talk Windows I guess...

The funny thing is that the presentation was run on a PC for the first time, and software developers can get a headstart right now buying special PC hardware from Apple. So we're faced with Mac developers using PCs to create new Mac software and at the same time Microsoft developers are using Apple's PowerMac G5 computers to run prototypes of the Xbox 360! Ironic.

Turning briefly to film, I did see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith last week. My team wanted to go together, so we headed over to the Silver City movie-plex after work. Although I enjoyed the special effects I have to say I was disappointed in the film. It all seemed rather pointless: just layer after layer (after layer) of special effects, silly gadgets, and improbable landscapes. And in spite of the technical polish the whole thing seemed unsophisticated and predictable. I just couldn't "suspend my disbelief". As an exercise in graphic art Revenge of the Sith is entertaining, but as a film it is a waste of rendering time. Bleah. We did have some good laughs over a beer afterward.

In a combination Sci Fi and technology news, it seems that Opportunity, the Mars rover that has been stuck in a sand drift for a month has been worked free and is once again on the prowl! Kind of like a real little R2D2... The three month life-spans NASA had hoped for have been left far behind.

Listening to: Daft Punk Is Playing At My House by LCD Soundsystem from LCD Soundsystem.

Good news from "Home"

I have an interest in astronomy and space travel (an occupational hazard of being a kid in the Sixties), so the news that NASA's rovers are still going strong on Mars after a year was a pleasure to read. They were only expected to operate for 90 days. That's the thing about space exploration; things either go very wrong or go very well. Luckily the semi-autonomous Spirit and Opportunity rovers have gone very well. Too bad for the unsuccesful Mars Polar Lander and Beagle 2 lander. Spirit and Opportunity have only covered a few kilometers distance in total, but their movement has been carefully planned and has been a treasure trove of discovery. It now seems pretty clear that Mars had liquid water at some point...

Click images to see full size image

Listening to: Into Temptation (iTunes Store link) by Crowded House from Temple of Low Men.

One week until MY Christmas!

No, I'm not Ukrainian. I'm just going Geeky on ya.

I'm an I.T. guy, with a personal preference for Apple's technologies. Next week's MacWorld trade fair in San Francisco will, as usual, feature a keynote speech by Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs. This is where all Apple's coolest new hardware and software is unveiled. Things like the iPod... Current hints suggest that Apple will present a lot of updates to their applications and hardware, but the most interesting development is a possible tiny stripped-down ultra-cheap ($500?) Mac that can be attached to any monitor. Not a powerhouse graphic design box or serious gaming system, but great for web browsing and as a "iPod for your whole house". Perhaps with easy home theater hook-ins. That could be cool...

Staying geeky, I've also been massaging my blogger template to add pop-up menu access to my archives on the right side and to slide a photo of Mars behind my blog title. Let me know if they work for you. Later I want to make the archive pages display entries with the oldest first, and use the archive menu technique to list interesting blog links (so I can start returning all those favours).

Listening to: k.d. lang's cover of Neil Young's song After The Gold Rush (iTunes Store link) from Hymns of the 49th Parallel.

I've been to Mars, have you?

I decided yesterday that I wanted to find a picture of Mars to use here, so I started Googling. Almost immediately I saw images from the "Haughton-Mars Project", which is a NASA-sponsored effort to use an island in the Canadian Arctic for testing equipment and techniques that may be used on an eventual trip to the Red Planet. The island is Devon Island, and the area they are using is the edge of the Haughton Crater which is the remains of a very large meteor impact 23 million years ago. It's way up in the Arctic and is considered the closest equivalent to Mars that can be found here on Earth in terms of climate and landscape.

The funny thing is that I've actually been to this desolate and remote place, although not to the area this project is using. I spent the summer of 1986 helping to map the geology of the north end of this fascinating and beautiful (in a Martian kind of way) island. Amongst other claims to fame it is the largest un-occupied island on Earth. Most of it is only accessible by helicopter, and that is after a series of flights in successively smaller airplanes. Perhaps some day I'll post a few of my old photos.

Nice picture of Not Mars. It's actually summer in the Canadian High Arctic! Colours adjusted by original artist to match Martian lighting. The real thing is mostly grays and light browns. Note tiny astronaut-wannabes in lower right...

What fresh Hell is this?

Blogging… Everybody's doing it, why not me? I've had a really lame web site up for years that I call my "cobweb". It's mainly a place to put the Macintosh software I've written and give away but is all obsolete now. I thought I'd also use my web site as a journal but that hasn't happened. Maybe these handy blogging tools will remove the technical impediments (as opposed to the usual time excuses.)

Why The Martian Time-Slip? Well mainly because it sounds a bit mysterious, un-like me. Also it's the title of a fascinating Philip K. Dick novel set on Mars which deals with the nature of reality and the human mind. Don't judge his books by Blade Runner, Total Recall or Minority Report. They're… quite different from the films. The Martian Time-Slip also refers to the fact that a Martian day is 37 minutes longer than our terrestrial one. Some people who think about these things suggest that clocks on Mars should stop during those extra minutes so we could use our terrestrial time system there.

Here's what I've just realised – this blog is my 37 minute escape from Earth. A place to reflect and re-orient until the clocks start ticking again… Also The Martian Time-Slip would be a great name for a dance. Maybe someday it will be the new dance club sensation. Guess I'd better get to work on the steps.