Welcome to 2008!

Heron in Japanese Garden

When you give a cat some catnip...

This kitten decided to sit in the garden tools basket

After one sprig of catnip...
Sleep comes easily after the excitement

Beautiful weather phenomena

Here's a picture of a 22-degree halo that appeared yesterday as a cold front moved in.



Notice faint rainbow colors
Twenty-two degree halo

Trains and Graffiti

When completing the outer loop trail in the Arboretum I always climb over the small fence enclosing the center to go the train tracks right next door. Often there are trains standing there. The cars are usually brightly decorated with graffiti.

Solar energy at $1 a watt

"A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar has shipped its first solar panels — priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing. 'The company [has developed] a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.'" The outfit also happens to be backed by Google, a fact that's getting some attention at tech media sites.

Frosty Monday Morning

The first frost of the year snapped in overnight. Good thing I covered the peppers.


Garden Early Morning
Frost on grass
Sunrise
Frosty grass of bayou

Chanukah Pictures

Chanukah was delightful. On the eighth night, mom and I had a photo op. Mommy made sufganiyot twice. Hers are small balls reminiscent of donut holes but with a firm texture, glazed with powdered sugar after being fried in luscious olive oil. Here is a picture of the sufganiyot:



Sufganiyot

It's been a busy past month

This past November, I was really busy, mostly with SAT prep. My last Reasoning Test was on December 2nd. The math section wasn't as great as it could have been; panic overcame me on the last 20-minute section. However, the essay was better, and I anticipate paradoxically better scores on the Writing and Criticla Reading sections. But now it is all over. Freedom! I did not write about our high-school retreat, which was from SUnday, November 18, to Tuesday, November 20. We had a form of color war, i.e. 'Gender War'. I will upload some of the best pictures later this week, hopefully. They can also be found on Facebook, albeit in lower quality. Here is one album, and here and here. After the SAT, I downloaded a "Linux live distribution for penetration testing" called BackTrack 2. It has hundreds of tools for testers, including network surveillance tools, password and brute-force crackers, and much more. Get it Right here. Download the 690 MB distro and burn it to CD with Nero in Windows or just right-click to burn onto CD in Linux.