Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
This year’s porch pumpkins were carved tonight. Sweet spouse Linda did the hard work and cleaned the pumpkins (thank you dear!). Given my current reduced motor skills, this may not be the best job we’ve ever done. But this has been an important family ritual for as long as I can remember. John and Julie will be coming over to man the door tomorrow night… we usually get 50 – 100 goblins…
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Apparently, the Mars Rover designers did not anticipate their craft would endure much beyond the 90 days of the original mission plan. As both Spirit and Opportunity came up to their 1000th sol (the Mars day, consisting of 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds), engineers realized an upgrade would be necessary: the machine’s day counters would only go up to 999. Spirit, parked on a Sunny hillside for the duration of Martian winter, is already into its 1004th sol, and apparently is working fine, thanks to the upgrade. Opportunity, which is canvassing an interesting crater called Victoria, has also been upgraded – it’s 16 sols away from clocking 1000. These are probably the two coolest machines in the Solar System… pic above is a ‘self-portrait‘ of Opportunity… Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
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Judging from the number of friends, acquaintances and strangers who have relayed their experience with brain tumors, I’ve picked the right decade and place to have one. A woman in SF wrote that her oligagiloma was removed at Stanford more than a decade ago: a friend-of-a-friend documented 2 relatives’ return to health and active lives, including one person whose tumor was far bigger than what I have. Apparently, if you’re going to have a brain tumor, this is the time, and the Bay Area is the place, to have it dealt with. Very encouraging news…
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