Author Archives: momdude

momdude's avatar

About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
January 6, 2024 · 23:39

Pink To The East

Sometimes you need to remember to look behind you.

Normally when I’m checking to see if it’s a pretty sunset I look out that front door there and look to the west, where the Sun’s setting. On this day it was clear as a bell and unremarkable as far as sunsets go.

But there was still sort of a cotton candy pink neon glow coming from somewhere…

Ah, there it is! I crossed the street and found all of the clouds piled up over LA County and the Santa Monica Mountains, and they were a very nice selection of shades of pink, orange, and red.

Check your six!

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Sunsets

January 5, 2024 · 23:39

Disappointment

I really, REALLY need that part for my printer. And I double checked, and, YES!, I ordered a new one..

To their credit, when I called they passed me straight to a supervisor who immediately refunded my money as well as asked for pictures so he could go see who in the warehouse had so obviously messed up.

But they don’t have an actual new one. Office Depot will let me order one, says it’s “in stock,” but when I try to order says its expected delivery is in March. I called to verify and had the most fascinating discussion about the meaning of the term “in stock.”

The end is near! Or at least that’s what the maintenance daemon in the printer driver tells me.

Planned obselescence raised to the Nth degree!

Leave a comment

Filed under Computers, Freakin' Idiots!, Photography

January 4, 2024 · 23:36

About 25 Years Apart

Looking for something to share tonight, I ended up back in the pictures I took on my iPhone 13 just after Thanksgiving. We were visiting the Science Museum, primarily to see Endeavour, but also to see an IMAX film.

One of the pictures I took there reminded me of a picture I remember from just a month or so after I got my first digital camera, in 1999.

640 x 480 pixels. 100,512 bytes. Taken with an Epson digital camera that my dad gave to me. (He worked at Epson, got an early peek at these newfangled devices).

This is the entryway between the IMAX theater and the main museum lobby. Purple tinted skylight, several hundred gold balls hanging down.

It was July, 1999 and my three kids were with me, ages 9, 12, and 14. I was doing the single dad thing and it would be almost another year before I met The Long-Suffering Wife.

(There was no building out back with a Space Shuttle in it.)

4032 x 3024 pixels. 4,705,344 kbytes. Taken with an iPhone.

It was November, 2023 and two of my three kids were with me, ages 33 and 38.

The museum has grown considerably, and is quickly growing even more as the annex to hold Endeavour, the last flight-rated external fuel tank, and two flight ready solid rocket boosters, all combined into a vertical stack just like they would be when ready for launch.

The photographic resolution has skyrocketed. Today’s “older model pocket-sized supercomputer” (i.e., an iPhone 13) has forty times the resolution of yesterday’s cutting edge next big thing.

Welcome to the future!

Leave a comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Space

January 3, 2024 · 22:43

2024’s First Rainbow

Gotta love rainbows!

Gotta love daughters that send a text saying, “Dad, can you see the gnarly rainbow outside?” I had not seen it, being at my desk with the start of the new work year being somewhat “Set SCE to AUX!“-ish.

She had been watching for a bit from closer to Downtown LA and had a spectacular view of a full 180º rainbow. I later saw that others posted pictures on social media of  a full 180º double rainbow over West Hollywood.

From our yard in the west San Fernando Valley I could see a bit of it through the trees. Nothing like a full 180º, but very bright. But…trees.

So I took off down the backside of the hill we’re on to where the street turns in that direction and I could get a clear view.

It was starting to fade, but it was still worth the effort. Happy 2024 Day Three!

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Weather

January 2, 2024 · 23:37

Random Old Photos – January 02nd

It’s another of those years. One of the big ones, ending in a zero. And we’re getting to a point where we have to wonder how many more there will be.

Back in the day it was common to have three or four trips a year. Sometimes more. For example, in 2004 it was San Francisco, Vermont, Montreal, and Boston.

Then came the pandemic. It got unsafe.

Three years ago it was one trip to Las Vegas. And nothing else.

Two years ago it was one trip to Chicago and one to San Antonio. And nothing else.

Last year it was Winnipeg. And nothing else.

In 2024, COVID willing and we figure out how to pull it off, it’s Texas for the eclipse, Vermont, Buffalo, and Glasgow.

A bunch of “ifs” there.

“Normal” still isn’t.

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Travel

January 1, 2024 · 23:49

New Year’s Day 2024

So it’s going to be like THAT, eh, 2024?

We got woken up early when the LA Shake earthquake warning app went off and told us to expect possible shaking any second.

That will get your attention. We got ready for a rumble. Which never came.

A minute or two later I started checking social media and found that there had, in fact, been a fairly good shaker. A M4.3 earthquake in the ocean off of Palos Verdes, about half way between Long Beach and Catalina Island.

Good that the system works, I guess. Good that there was little or no actual damage that I’ve heard of. Good that it wasn’t a false alarm. Somewhat less good that we started the year by being woken from a sound sleep and having the crap scared out of us.

I’ve spent the last few minutes posting a warning on all of my social media outlets, so I’ll repeat it here.

Heads up, y’all! All of a sudden this afternoon I had the following showing up in my email spam filter…
These REEK of being a phishing or malware scam. Yes, I know all of these folks, but some only very, very remotely, and I seriously doubt that any of them would be sending me e-greeting cards for New Years.
If you see these in your email, I STRONGLY suggest you delete them without opening them.
The evil bastards seem to be out in force with the new year. Be careful.

1 Comment

Filed under Disasters, Los Angeles

December 31, 2023 · 23:16

New Year’s Eve 2023

2023 has most certainly delivered its share of stress and angst, hasn’t it? But now it’s behind us.

Gone, but not forgotten, and its detritus and loose ends and ongoing chaos is likely to stretch all the way through 2024 and beyond. What worries me the most is that in 366 days (remember, 2024’s a leap year!) we’ll look back on today’s state of the world as “the good old days.”

But I’m something of an eternal optimist in the end. It’s probably a byproduct of my Catholic school programming, but I have to have faith that there will be good things (love, adventures, ball games, concerts, plays, travel) that will outweigh the bad (politics, wars, hatred, pandemics, Raiders fans). And maybe even some of those bad things will be defeated, or at least nudged back toward the light.

Despair is a danger. Getting so overwhelmed that we give up just allows the evil bastards to win, so I don’t recommend that course. It’s hard, but let’s keep our eyes on those good things, but let’s do it with our eyes open and our brains engaged.

New Year Resolutions? As we generally do them, it’s bullshit, so let’s not. Yes, we all want to lose 10 pounds and promise that we’ll exercise more. But we all know that by about next weekend we’ll be craving that pizza and not feel like getting off the couch on the weekend, so why set ourselves up for certain disappointment and depression? If you want a New Year Resolution that you can easily keep, try this one – “I’ll never vote for another Republican again, from President down to assistant dog catcher trainee, NO MATTER WHAT!” See, you’ve already improved the world and given yourself some peace of mind!

Instead of strict resolutions that will only get broken and make us feel like failures, let’s try to focus on self care and making our individual worlds better.

I had mentioned passions a while back – try writing down a few of those and thinking about how much you actually allow yourself to indulge or participate in them. When I did that I found that there are a lot of them that I’ve almost completely set aside (until “later”) because of “priorities.”

For example, “reading” is something I love to “waste” time on so much, but the To Be Read pile is growing much faster than things are being taken off of it and I’m not buying that many new books. I’m just not allowing myself the time to “waste” reading for pleasure.

“Flying.” Yeah, when was the last time I was in the left seat? It’s been years.

And so on. For me, “travel,” “music,” and “astronomy” are high on the list. While I make time every now and then for a taste, I rarely make time to really immerse myself and explore and grow.

So I recommend that we all spend 2024 actively, intellectually, passionately identifying the things that we’re missing, the things that we long for, the things that bring us joy, and putting in the effort to make time for those things in our lives.

Who’s with me? We’re taking back our lives! We’re taking back our passions! We’re no longer going to be satisfied with “good enough!”

WE RIDE AT DAWN!

Welcome, 2024.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fireworks, Photography

December 30, 2023 · 23:49

2023’s Last Gasps

It’s odd how we have placed into place such an imperfect, almost totally arbitrary system of numbering the years and months, and yet we simultaneously tend to put such importance on that same system.

Days and years are based in reality, the rotation of the planet and its orbit around the Sun, things that existed long before humans did and will survive long after we’re gone. But seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, and months are all artificial, as are the starting points of the year.

There is a loose association with the “new year” occurring about the time of the winter solstice. The days get shorter, the nights get longer, winter comes, and early humans start to get hungry and die with no knowledge or assurance that the Sun will return along with spring and summer. But then the days DO start to get longer. That right there is a known, measurable point to start the year. And perhaps it did at one time lost in the passage of time.

But the year isn’t exactly an even number of days long and over millenia the beginning of the year drifts away from the solstice.

Nonetheless, we stick with the system now and choose this not-so-special “special” day to reflect, to sum up, and to look forward. We make resolutions, vowing that on January 1st we’ll be better humans than we were on December 31st.

Sometimes we actually are.

Leave a comment

Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather

December 29, 2023 · 23:45

Skyscapes – December 29th

It’s been wispy.

That was the last two days, with fog in the morning. Tonight the fog is already here and we’re expecting rain by morning, all the way through Monday morning.

The aforementioned “Monday morning” would be January 1st, 2024. There are a few local activities which have only been rained on once or twice in their 100-year-plus history. Some people are freaking out a bit.

I expect the parade itself to be fine, and the football game definitely will be dry. Or at least dry-ish. But all of the tourists camping out on the sidewalks in Pasadena on Sunday night into Monday morning, trying to reserve that perfect spot to watch the parade, might be a bit soggy by the time the B-2 bombers fly over.

The Pasadena Home Depot stores and Lowe’s stores might see a run on plastic sheeting this weekend.

Good times!

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Weather

December 28, 2023 · 23:49

Haze

Not clear, but less cloudy. Last night and tomorrow morning it’s fog, pea soup off the coast. But for now, you can see the brighter stars and Jupiter through it.

The house looks nice, the (a couple days past) full moon is rising, and way up at the top right you can see Orion. (You’ll probably have to click on the image to blow it up to full-sized.) But with this exposure, with the iPhone exposing for the bright moon and Christmas lights, you can only see the brightest stars in Orion.

If you take the Christmas lights out of the picture (again, click on it to see it full-sized) you can see a lot more of Orion. In the “sword” you can see the Orion Nebula (the middle “star”) and you can see even the dimmer stars in the “neck” of Orion. You can clearly see the red tint to Betelgeuse (left shoulder) and the blue hue to Rigel (right foot). But between the haze, the city’s light pollution, and the bright moonlight being scattered around, that’s about it.

It beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick! But I still want to see what shows up on a clear, dark night.

Another goal for 2024.

Leave a comment

Filed under Astronomy, Christmas Lights, Photography