Wanderers 2009.4.22

Jim Buxton is projecting pictures from his recent stay, with partner, in an off-grid XRL, solar and wind powered, in California.

I gave a "rolling thunder" (vs. lightning) talk about my GIS in Action talk, blending in a report from Chicago. I talked through the Flickr set then flipped through the PDF of my OpenOffice Presentation.

David Tver got a lot of value out of his early model programmable calculator, studying chaos, ray tracing, likewise from his Commodore 64. In my case, the HP-65 proved influential (RPN with stack).

Bill Sheppard had a stereogram of a nebula he'd printed. He jokes the images were taken 10K light years apart, to give the right parallax.

I was glad to get Warren and Carter Sande's Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners in the mail yesterday, a book for learning Python, also happy to see my name in the acknowledgments.

Thanks Jimmy, for letting me borrow the lawn mower again. I abused it some, but it proved up to the job.

Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope is in the news today.