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A year ago, Pasadena and the surrounding communities were layered in smoke and ashes as the huge Station Fire burned acres upon acres.

The Station Fire in the hills behind the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo by Bill Westphal.

One year ago, this is what the hills above my workplace looked like.

Even though I lived through it, it's still hard to believe such a monster fire was so close.

The MESSENGER spacecraftt took that shot of the Earth and the Moon on its way to Mercury. It's hard to imagine that I'm sitting on that dot, writing a blog post.

I just read an interesting story, an obituary of Bill Millin, who played the bagpipes during the D-Day landing in Normandy.

Millin began his apparently suicidal serenade immediately upon jumping from the ramp of the landing craft into the icy water. As the Cameron tartan of his kilt floated to the surface he struck up with Hieland Laddie. He continued even as the man behind him was hit, dropped into the sea and sank.

Millin was surprised not to have been shot, and he mentioned this to some Germans who had been taken prisoner. They said that they had not shot at him because they thought he had gone off his head.

Rest in peace.

I put together a new version of Tellico, version 2.3, and threw it out for release this past weekend. It is dedicated to my lovely wife, Kim, and we could code-name it, Hot Vegas!

The previous release was back in February, so this one has quite a few bug fixes and some new features. Freebase was added as a data source, which is rather useful. Freebase has tons of info available, and is constantly being updated. It even has some limited comic book information, too.

I messed up some of the links on the download page, so embarrassingly enough, for a few days after the release, the links were broken. Those should all be fixed now!

I also jumped off the deep end and downloaded Choqok and registered on identi.ca which is something like the open source version of Twitter. Much less popular, so by definition, much cooler! Software nerds use it a good bit, I've heard. Anyways, I took the handle stephero.

One of the primary features I'd like to work on for the next version of Tellico is better statistics. I'm looking forward to working with the KDE plot widgets.

How have I not seen this before? Jimmy Fallon has a recurring sketch by a guy who loves the Hubble Space Telescope. Bashir Salahuddin, a.k.a. "Milky J", raps about Hubble's great images.

And Goddard actually invited the Jimmy Fallon crew to come in and see the information about the James Webb Space Telescope. Sheer awesomeness!

Check out all the details of the visit and previous videos from Jimmy Fallon over at
Geeked on Goddard.

I just installed openSUSE 11.3. Now instead of virtuoso taking all the CPU cycles, it's plasma-desktop. Time to do so digging, I suppose it's probably related to the Nvidia driver or somesuch.

I can't get enough of the Old Spice guy. I think my favorite is his response to his daughter.

Deadspin is having Tim Donaghy, a former NBA ref who served time for gambling on games, give critiques of the referees for the NBA Finals. See his reviews of game 1 and game 2.

I think this is great. The NBA has the worst officiating of any sport in the world. Inconsistency, allowances for "star" players, home crowd influence, and so on. It drives me insane sometimes. If a game were called consistently, you'd either have no fouls or 100 fouls. Players are constantly pushing on each other and then they get called for a foul when they hand-check? What?

Richard Hemby at the Online Education Blog has a comprehensive list of cataloging software and ends up giving high honors to GCstar for Linux and Windows. A little tongue-in-cheek, I imagine, he mentions cataloging mini vehicles:

Other collection management software allows management of these items but GCStar has jumped out ahead of competitors because the software allows you to catalog your favorite television shows directly from TVBD channels and allows you to catalog mini vehicles. Cataloging mini vehicles will require some manual efforts but the detailing offered is priceless.

GCstar is a fantastic bit of software. In my opinion, one of its biggest strengths is the sheer number of websites that it can scrape for info. Tian, the primary GCstar author, even added a feature for using GCstar as a standalone data fetcher. As a result. Tellico can use any of the GCstar data sources directly. The interface is a bit slower, but it works pretty well. I'd like to make Tellico as modular and useful in return, but haven't been able to yet.

Congratulations to GCstar!

NASA and KidTribe teamed up for this unforgettably entertaining "hip-hopera" designed to teach kids about the solar system. Described as 'MTV meets Science', "Space School Musical" is one small step for man & one giant moonwalk for kid-kind!

So starts the blurb about Space School Musical

This weekend, May 23! That's pretty crazy...