Snow in Houston

Last Wednesday, December 10, it snowed in Houston. Weather forecasters were surprised by the system, which did not show a strong chance for snow until Tuesday morning. It began with small ice bits at around 5:30 at the University of Houston, and grew to flakes large enough to land on the ground and not melt right away, as I was driving along Main Street, inside the 610 loop. It tapered off near home, but came back in an hour in force. My sisters enjoyed throwing snowballs at each other and me. Temperatures rose, and the snow, almost half an inch deep in places, melted later in the evening. However, it stayed cold enough in midtown Houston that at 9 AM on Thursday, there was still snow left on cars in the UH parking lot, where I quickly fashioned a snow bunny.

Bunny

The system was a regular nor'easter by midday Thursday, when it looked like this:
NOAA image

And now, temperatures are back in the 70s. Regular Houston weather, right?

Arboretum November 2

A puddle
Autumn Leaf
Autumn Leaf
Another Autumn Leaf
Pine Sap
Fresh sap drips from the thick bark

iPhone vs. Android

http://www.topnewsblog.info/tblog_11012.htm

Third week of college

The third week of college has gone by well. I'm settling in (sort of) and just got 88 on my first Pre-calculus test. Friday there is no school due to Hurricane Eisenhower (Ike), and so I will not be able to drive through a lot of rain and wind that the general and one-time president brings us. Ike is currently projected to pass just southwest of where I live, and bring us the greatest glory of his cavalcade. Unfortunately, people revere him so much that there will be few people out along the road to greet him, even though Texas is his birthplace (specifically Denison, along the river that forms the northern border of Texas). His current reincarnation, however, seems to have been on vacation in the Cape Verde Islands when he was called to duty. Hopefully, he will disappear quickly so that the populace can move on with its peaceful weekend.

On a different note, we have finished the Iliad in Honors Lecture, and received our paper topics. I may post the final copy here for you to read and criticize as a novice college paper. We begin Genesis on Monday. Can't wait!

Birthright

This past August, I spent ten (words can not describe my feelings) days in Israel on a Birthright trip of religious intent, or should I say, a religious group, that was co-ed. I took about 1000 pictures and videos. Many will be put on shmsoft.com/yosef in the coming weeks.
Israel was lovely and awe-inspiring. Birthright is a splendid program. The amount of activities that we did truly gave a full sense of the land, from exploring archaeological digs near the Kotel, to passing by miles of vineyards in the Golan Heights, to praying at the kotel, to floating in the Dead Sea, where, truth to tell, the water is 80 degrees and it's hard to stand in the water, there is so much salt. Aside from the need to keep one's head above water, it is a pleasure to just float, no matter how heavy one is, in water that is self-supporting.

Visit Piony's Journal for the best 15 shots, as chosen by piony, and I will upload the same in the original sizes soon.

Georgia vs. Russia

This man twitters about the conflict in Georgia: http://twitter.com/wardirect

He mentions this picture.

http://pics.livejournal.com/drugoi/pic/00gwa3cb.jpg

Snake partakes of frog

I saw this drama last Friday morning. The garter snake had partially engulfed the frog. After I'd annoyed it enough, it backed off the frog and quickly slithered off. The frog survived the close encounter, albeit with a flattened backside.


Garter Snake tries to eat toad


Snake - at most an inch in width


Toad - squashed

Secrets in the garden

Mother's pictures.


Ornamental "Black Pearl" peppers


Ornamental sweet peppers


Tiny strawberry



Lemon

Trip to Galveston Island - Stewart Beach

We went to the beach today, spending 5 marvelous hours there. Here are some pictures.


Daddy prepares

A view of the beach

Life in the age of sisters (1a)

Sisterly love

Seagulls

Dolly comes ashore

It's been ages since I posted. I hope to start again, regularly. Here is the sunset in Houston before Dolly came ashore, and a picture from Brownsville during Dolly.

Sunset before Dolly comes ashore near Brownsville
Tarantula clings to fence to escape from Dolly's floodwaters

Mother's excursion to a park in Houston

Reflected sky
Water and red rock
Pink grass
A light unto the nations

"An Introduction to Classical Music" Podcast

Here's the link. Right-click to save as mp3.
Here are the show notes: Show notes.

Presenting "An Introduction to Classical Music" Podcast

This project has been long in the planning. I began working on it last year, but then shelved it because of SATs and 12th grade workload. With summer, I can resume work, and have released Episode 1 of this podcast.

I will post a link shortly. If you wish to have individual pieces, ask me and I will upload them to my site.

Last Day of School

Today is my last day of school, of twelfth grade, at Robert M. Beren Academy. I have mixed feelings, but rejoice, too. Now I will ceremonially clear out firefox of its passwords. First, however, I will drink a cup of sake.

Tomato pictures

Courtesy of Mommy.
Cluster of Hybird Goliath tomato
Roma tomatoes
Horny denizen

Happiness

Last night, I finished my online AP Government course which I had left until two weeks before it was due. Starting with 27% complete, I finished 40% in one week of round-the-clock computer work while the senior class was on its spontaneous trip to New Orleans. Yesterday, I did the midterm, final multiple-choice section, the last assignment, and the last quiz. Hurray!

The Garden is doing well. I can't wait to work a bit on repotting plants and applying fish fertilizer after not doing that for at least a month. The Pole beans have climbed the two poles that I stuck in the ground and produced beans that are a delightful mottled green-and-black color. (The black disappears during cooking.) Pictures will come shortly. All the tomatoes are also ripening. The Roma tomatoes are the best so far, with the most juiciness. They are plump and almost wriggle and pop off the cluster with pleasure to be eaten. (I'm listening to Scriabin's Symphony No. 2, maybe it affects the mood.)

Gardening News

This has got to be the best year ever. Thanks to a cooler April, the tomatoes have set like never before. The Salad Romas are beginning to ripen, and there are so many of them! For the first time there are really clusters of tomatoes. The Goliath has one giant cluster that bunched up together. Its first tomato actually got squeezed off early because of that (or maybe because I had not watered it for two days), and is ripening on the kitchen sill window. The bush beans have begun to produce, and the pole beans have grown ten feet tall and just began to flower with deep pink flowers. The eggplants are coming along well, too. Important note: Plants, like those of the Solanaceae family, that will fit in small pots much prefer really big pots to grow unrestrained, especially indeterminate tomatoes. Eggplants love big pots, but the small-fruited variety will do well in smaller pots. Pictures will come soon.

Proposed USAF American botnet

Military intelligence - no longer such a paradox.

Tomatoes in Houston

I've noticed that when dedicated work is put into the garden, it gives back wholeheartedly. Now that the rainy La Nina-effected summer, and winter, is over, the plants can get back to normal with wet and dry periods. Thank G-d, the tomatoes are doing better than ever before. This year, I bought Bush Celebrity, Roma, and Goliath Hybrid seedlings. (The Roma was supposed to be another Bush Celebrity.) Wonder of wonders, they all are loving it. With an early start, especially in this year's very early season (loquats fruited a month early, blackberries flowered and fruited three weeks earlier than usual), the bush Celebrity now has 13 tomatoes, the Goliath has 8, including my first ever cluster of 5 (!), and the Roma, which I'd tried before with no results, has 13 furry babies. Here are some pictures:



Goliath early on
The cluster of 5
Bountiful Bush Celebrity
Lovingly sculpted Goliath (not Brandywine)
Roma six-pack (See the fly in the upper right corner?)

Pesach in Africa (thanks mom)

Thursday at university of Houston

I just spent an entire day at UH Main Campus. The map is quite difficult to read, so today ended up being mostly an exploration of the campus, and I did not go into any classes. I will go again on Friday.

Trees in front have been trimmed

The new house
Here is the new look.

We have a Cyber-warfare Air Force?

Youtube troubles in Linux

When I tried to watch a video in YouTube of an elephant painting itself, it didn't work. After downloading it with the great Firefox addon Download Helper and trying to listen to it, it still didn't work. Even worse, totem movie player advised me to buy some codecs for 16 euros. Realizing that once again Fedora wanted money for codecs that are supposed to be free, I googled for the codecs that playback required. Turns out that ffmpeg will easily change from an flv to an mpg. This page shows you how. It worked, but now there was no sound. Oh well. I'll keep trying.

Purim costumes

Rockstar Programmer
Rockstar Programmer (Father)
Large Troll (Yosef)
Large Troll (yosef)

Arthur C. Clarke dies at age 90

The world of science fiction lovers mourns today, remembering this great wise man who wrote so much and fired the imaginations of countless kids.



Partial bibliography (From Wikipedia)

[edit] Novels

* Prelude to Space (1951)
* The Sands of Mars (1951)
* Islands in the Sky (1952)
* Against the Fall of Night (1953)
* Childhood's End (1953)
* Earthlight (1955)
* The City and the Stars (1956)
* The Deep Range (1957)
* A Fall of Moondust (1961)
* Dolphin Island (1963)
* Glide Path (1963)
* 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
* Rendezvous with Rama (1972)
* Imperial Earth (1975)
* The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
* 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
* The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
* 2061: Odyssey Three (1988)
* A Meeting with Medusa (1988)
* Cradle (1988) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama II (1989) (with Gentry Lee)
* Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) (with Gregory Benford)
* The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990)
* The Garden of Rama (1991) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama Revealed (1993) (with Gentry Lee)
* The Hammer of God (1993)
* Richter 10 (1996) (with Mike McQuay)
* 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
* The Trigger (1999) (with Michael P. Kube-McDowell)
* The Light of Other Days (2000) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Time's Eye (2003) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Sunstorm (2005) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Firstborn (2007) (with Stephen Baxter)

[edit] Omnibus editions

* Across the Sea of Stars (1959) (including Childhood's End, Earthlight and 18 short stories)
* From the Ocean, From the Stars (1962) (including The City and the Stars, The Deep Range and The Other Side of the Sky)
* An Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus (1965) (including Childhood's End, Prelude to Space and Expedition to Earth)
* Prelude to Mars (1965) (including Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars)
* The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night (1968)
* An Arthur C. Clarke Second Omnibus (1968) (including A Fall of Moondust, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars)
* Four Great SF Novels (1978) (including The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama)
* The Space Trilogy (2001) (including Islands in the Sky, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars)

Against the Fall of Night in Startling Stories.
Against the Fall of Night in Startling Stories.

[edit] Short story collections

* Expedition to Earth (1953)
* Reach for Tomorrow (1956)
* Tales from the White Hart (1957)
* The Other Side of the Sky (1958)
* Tales of Ten Worlds (1962)
* The Nine Billion Names of God (1967)
* Of Time and Stars (1972)
* The Wind from the Sun (1972)
* The Best of Arthur C. Clarke (1973)
* The Sentinel (1983)
* Tales From Planet Earth (1990)
* More Than One Universe (1991)
* The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000)

[edit] Non-fiction

* Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics. London: Temple Press, 1950
* The Exploration of Space. New York: Harper, 1951
* The Coast of Coral. New York: Harper, 1957 — Volume 1 of the Blue planet trilogy
* The Reefs of Taprobane; Underwater Adventures around Ceylon. New York: Harper, 1957 — Volume 2 of the Blue planet trilogy
* The Making of a Moon: the Story of the Earth Satellite Program. New York: Harper, 1957
* Boy beneath the sea, Photos by Mike Wilson. Text by Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harper, 1958
* The Challenge of the Space Ship: Previews of Tomorrow’s World. New York: Harper, 1959
* The Challenge of the Sea. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960
* Profiles of the Future; an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. New York: Harper & Row, 1962
* The Treasure of the Great Reef. New York: Harper & Row, 1964 — Volume 3 of the Blue planet trilogy
* Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age. New York: Harper & Row, 1965
* The Promise of Space. New York: Harper, 1968
* Into Space: a Young Person’s Guide to Space, by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Silverberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1971
* Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations. New York: Harper & Row, 1972
* The Lost Worlds of 2001. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972
* Voice Across the Sea. HarperCollins, 1975
* The View from Serendip. Random House, 1977
* The Odyssey File. Email correspondence with Peter Hyams. London: Panther Books, 1984
* 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures. New York: Ballantine Books, 1984
* Ascent to Orbit, a Scientific Autobiography: The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984
* Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. London: Gollancz, 1989
* How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village. New York : Bantam Books, 1992 — A history and survey of the communications revolution
* By Space Possessed. London: Gollancz, 1993
* The Snows of Olympus - A Garden on Mars (1994, picture album with comments)
* An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, 1995, St. Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-15119-5 (Online Version)
* Fractals: The Colors of Infinity (1997, narrator)
* Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Works 1934-1988. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999
* Profiles of the Future; an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (updated edition). New York: Harper & Row, 1999, ISBN 057506790X, ISBN 9780575067905
* From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Letters Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis (2003) with C. S. Lewis
* The Coming of the Space Age; famous accounts of man's probing of the universe, selected and edited by Arthur C. Clarke.

Music players for Linux

Music players in Linux are a varied lot. Some play only one format, some play all, and most can be configured to play everything. (Bad sentence, but I tried.) Getting Linux may be a giant step for man (you), or not. So if you've gone ahead with it, and gotten Fedora, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, Mandriva, or any one of the hundreds of distributions on the the Wild Wild Web, get this: it's not Windows. For starters, you can really do anything you want without paying a cent, and with so much to choose from.
Now, about music (and video). There truly are no media players that can do everything you need, whether playing mp3 (a proprietary format, more about that later) or .AVI video files. Having four or more is the norm, with no real limit on how many you can have. I have 44, and I use 10 regularly. Many come if you add the KDE entertainment package from the add/remove applications menu. Their names are usually preceded by K-. Let's start with a basic list.
MPlayer plays video files when configured correctly. (For information on how to configure MPlayer, click here.)
VLC media player is much praised, but I don't use it.
Sound Juicer CD Extractor, while not strictly a media player, is really useful for CD burning.
Songbird is one of the best media players (though that's subjective). It is browser based, and sports nice skins and organizational abilities. It is a good replacement for Realplayer in that it effectively lists your music in the Library by album, artist, year, or what not. (Realplayer for Linux doesn't do much more than play music, and that's it.) Songbird is in its 0.4 release, still in development. As I have it configured, it sits in a folder on my desktop that I have to open to get at it, and click to run.
That should get you started. Ask around and Google for other media players.
P.S. Linux generally uses open-source formats, like OGG and FLAC. These are lossless music codecs, meaning that unlike low quality mp3 files, these can preserve the original bit rate of the music on CD (and is generally considered High Fidelity audio) and most CD burners will burn to them. mp3 is proprietary, and Linux, being free and not wanting to wrangle with lawyers about download and playback issues, uses free codecs. You can pretty easily get the requisite codecs for mp3 files though, and play them on Linux, so don't worry. Have fun!

Outing to the Arboretum January 20th

Ester
Mossy Tree Trunk
The clearing in the middle of the Arboretum
The pond in the Arboretum
Azaleas in the middle of winter

A idyllic pond

This photo... What is it...?

Pond

Gould, simultaneously playing the piano while sniffing cocaine.

Gould

Thank you to Mom for sending this over.

Google Calendar bug

I just noticed this. I'm always logged onto Google. Searching for google calendar, I came across the sponsored link that usually shows up for Google products, this time for Google Calendar. I clicked it, and behold, the browser got caught in a vicious cycle of trying to verify who I am, seeing that I'm logged in, reloading, and trying again. I refreshed the page and tried again. Same result. Is such a problem expolitable?

RIAA Wants Songwriter Royalty Lowered

It is now set in stone. The RIAA is a bunch of old fogies who have no better way to get people's money than by stealing from the songwriters they "represent" and 'rob the poor to feed the rich' from their customers, supposedly to protect the law-abiding citizens. So this is to the RIAA (Italy's V-Day): Va-fan-cullo!

Command-line flac player

This is a cute little command line flac format music player. You can get it Here, or though the Add/Remove Software tab on the Applications menu (in Fedora).

Pirate Bay hit with legal action

An interesting development concerning the RIAA and its pointless court cases

Sergey Brin answers the Davos question

Outing to Arboretum on Sunday

Sunbow in water reflection
Inverted scene
Reflections
Some Berry
A bee, a wasp?