I spent most of last week in Banff, a small tourist town for snowbirds at the edge of the Canadian Rockies. This was made possible, even mandatory, because astronomers who have their budgets cut to the point where their projects can only afford to meet as a work-all-weekend add-on to another conference and its airfare costs are good at finding ( Read more... )

I aten't ded ( Read more... )

Two weekends ago, I attended a fabulous and very helpful portrait workshop run by freaking kylecassidy. Last weekend, I attended a get-together of some of my oldest tribe on a farm turned "Interfaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion" in the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania. Lacking some of the equipment and all of the time and energy to demand patient ( Read more... )

A reminder to myself I find useful now and then, and the biggest, certainly not easiest, thing I've learned from Feri-flavoured folks over the years is simply encouraging everyone to shine. Even oneself. Especially oneself, because that can be the hardest. Life is not a zero-sum game. It's a massively multiplayer collaborative game of creative ( Read more... )

There are two ways I could tell the story of my trip to Heidelberg for work ( Read more... )

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As you probably know, last night a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (an academically-associated NASA contractor much like my own employer) successfully landed an SUV-sized rover on the surface of Mars through a series of re-entry technologies strung together into a Rube Goldberg-like monstrosity few could bring themselves to believe would work ( Read more... )

When I left home for Italy at the end of May, I left with the nervous heart of a language-limited conference presenter and the words of a recently read and rather trite Tricycle Buddhist magazine article ringing in my mind. Those words were one of a set of tips for mindfully using social media, a growing concern for me in my worldwide network of ( Read more... )

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It appears to be time get a new monitor for my desktop. Last night's photo processing binge (four months late) may well be the last straw for discovering inconsistent and bad colour balance issues only after I look at the files again on a different machine. Bad I expect. Inconsistent is another problem entirely, and means bad can't be made up for ( Read more... )