Mt Palomar

Went to Mount Palomar State Park and Mt Palomar Observatory on a glorious Sunday afternoon. It is a nice 2 hour drive from San Diego, with the last 15 miles quite steep and winding.

The observatory has a 200 in reflector, which was the largest telescope in the world for a long time, and a source of may important discoveries. Looking at the beast from the viewers' gallery is quite impressive. This thing was made 60 years ago, and that was quite a feat. This telescope has adaptive optics, in that it is possible to adjust for atmospheric thermal fluctuations.

The state park is the usual quiet alpine woodland with okay views, but once you get to the western edge, there is the spectacular Boucher view point. From here, we could see the ocean at Carlsbad about 35 miles away, and Catalina Island about 100 miles away! Quite impressive. Probably the farthest distance I have seen the ocean from (barring airplanes).

And don't miss the great food at a small cafe at the intersection of S6 and S7 (where the roads to the observatory and state park branch off).

Trip to Miyazaki, Japan. June 2006, Post 1

I went to Miyazaki, Japan in June 2006 for a meeting. Miyazaki is a small coastal town on Kyushu Island in South Japan. This was my second trip to Japan, the first one being to Tokyo/Kyoto/Yokohama in July 2003. Photos of the first trip will probably get scanned after retirement :)

We went to a great Chinese restaurant, very cheap and great food. For about $80, we could order enough great food to feed 6 people. Of course, there were only three of us, and half the food went uneaten. This is a photo of the food after we finished.

 

At this place, we ordered an interesting type of egg, Peking duck egg. The “white” of this egg is a transparent dark brown, like stained glass. And it was quite tasty too.

 

Miyazaki has one famous attraction, an indoor swimming pool at Seagaia. When I visited, the tourist season was low, so the place was almost empty. It’s one of those only-in-Japan kind of things. This place has a giant surf making machine too.

 

And finally, a nice sunset that I caught from my hotel .

 

Test post from Word 2007

This is a test post using Word 2007.

BTW, Wikipedia has a good summary of Office 12.

Office 12

Just installed Office 12, beta 2. It was a free download.

Finally, ten years too late, Word 2007 has a good Equation Editor. Type \Delta, and it automatically becomes Δ. And the equation editor has many other improvements too. Going from floating menu to ribbons UI has really helped.

Office 12 seems to be a positive step for Microsoft.

Showing off where you have been, enhanced

Okay, so tagzania lets me add a list of places instead of countries/states. Excellent use of the Google Maps API.

Man, Web 2.0 rocks or what. And there is also a bigger map



Tagzania: Items by this user

Showing off where you have been

This site allows people to tag countries and US/Canadian states they have visited. It's a nice start, but what I would like more is to be able to put flags at all places visited. That way, one trip to canada/russia will not make you look like a Marco Polo competitor :)

Update: Another site 43places allows a list of countries/states. It has a slightly better map than the one above.



create your own visited country map with world66.com.

Recyled computer

Dropped off my old desktop at the Miramar Recycling facility. The process was quite painless, and took only 10 minutes. Going to a recycling facility is a better idea than leaving possibly toxic refuse in the apartment dumpster, from where it will probably go straight to a landfill. Let's hope the recycling facility does something better with the computer.

CA has an entire program devoted to electronic waste, but it seems more concerned about displays. Probably displays have more toxic material.

A fun chemistry video

Best free videos accross the net.

Okay, now I am going overboard with the video posts, but it is irresistable

Robin Williams

This is awesome. Creating a blog-post right from YouTube. See-video, like-video, blog-video. So simple.

Took just a minute to add my blogger account to YouTube.

Digg Videos

Another great Web 2.0 site I discovered today (yes, I am late to the game) is digg

The video site is particulalrly cool. I like the UI where with one click a user can vote for a particular link. Excellent use of Ajax.

A good thing about this site is that it brings together the best of googile video, youtube etc. I used to spend some time looking for funny videos on google's list of popular videos, but the digg method easily beats that.

Multiple Computers

The home PC had been dead for a while (cheam emachines power supply and MoBo were fried). Got a new HP for $470. AMD 3400+ (2.4 GHz, 64 bit), 1 GB, DVD+/- RW. But my friends tell me I could have saved about $100 for this configuration.

Anyway, to get to the point, having multiple computers makes services like del.ic.ous and bloglines even more useful. It was very easy to upload my Sage feeds (OPML format) to bloglines, and from there include them in this blog. Web2.0 rocks. Now I will try to use both Sage and Bloglines and see which is better.

Now there is the issue of synchronizing two Quicken databases. Need to check if there is some online way to sync these up. Or maybe I should to yodlee

Star trek

Thanks to this new DVR I have from Timer Warner cable, I have been getting a good fill of star trek TNG. A recent episode was interesting, it talked about Fermat's last theorem being unsolved 800 years after Fermat. How events can overtake fiction.

And Captain Picard, I have a better TV screen than you ever dreamed of. Take that.

Dinner in San Diego

Got dinner in a great restaurant in Coronado. Peohe’s is near the ferry landing in San Diego, with a great view of the Coronado Bridge and the San Diego skyline. Best to get there before sunset, and finish dinner after. And make reservations early to get a table with a good view.

The lava cake totally rocks.

And that reminds of another great place in San Diego, Just Fabulous is in Kengsinton at Adams and I15, and serves great dessert and great coffee. It's a small place, so best visited on weekdays when the crowds are smaller. The pudding was very good.