iPod touch! Sweet!

I bought some new toys. If you wish, take this as a plug for Apple. Being a student, I can use an education discount and some other sweet deals meaning I COULD have bought a computer, an iPod, and a printer for about $2000, but I DID buy all those things for only $1250. Can you understand how cool this is? I have an iMac! And an iPod touch! And I still have my PowerBook. Apple power! At my work we also use Apples. The school library has all iMacs and I'm just super happy to have my hands on such amazing technology.

It was sad, and somewhat amusing, the other day when the thing I was trying to download would not work on a Mac. I complained about the windows machine I had to use rather loudly and whined that I wanted my Macs back. For the record, I'm typing this post using my new iPod touch. I will give windows something though, at the time it was my first experience using the windows 7 OS and since then I've figured out a few new things about it and I suppose it's not that bad. Admittedly I'm not used to it at all. What can I say? Apple is way cool! And you might expect a few of these posts to be written from my iPod because it's a great use of time while I'm riding public transportation! THIS new toy has convenientized my life. Thanks, Apple!


Sent from my iPod

Another Jam

We had a guest jammer this time. I hope the sound is okay, it sounded great while we were playing. Comments?

Ano . . . I mean what do you think you're doing! The "I can't speak English today" post

Today, I had trouble speaking English. It was an interesting phenomenon. I suppose it was a somewhat stressful situation and I just couldn't express myself in English!

So one of my jobs is called Science in the Parks. We take cool sciencey stuff to parks in Ogden so kids can play with it and be excited to learn. Today what we took were things you fly. Like paper airplanes, and air rockets, and alka-seltzer in film canisters. I was at the alka-seltzer table. First we were letting the kids put their volatile film canisters on the sidewalk. I ended up being the person keeping people away from the explosion zone. Kids can be brats, you know? you tell them over and over and over "DO NOT get close to the other canisters" but they still do. One way we tried to solve this was by getting a second table, and then they could only put their volatile canisters on the table, and then BACK AWAY. It's quite a job keeping a bunch of kids AWAY from this type of thing. If they're not reaching their arms over and getting their face close to the others already going, they're trying to pick up the pieces from off the table or grab theirs again if it's a dud. There were also countless canisters that went off in kids' hands while they were watching it instead of putting it on the table, but no serious injuries.

I was talking constantly saying most of the same things over and over, "stay back" and "they could explode at any time" and "only adults can take things off the table" and at a couple points my frustration level got pretty high and my English just deteriorated. It doesn't help that most of them know Spanish, and may not be great at English. I knew I needed to communicate in simple English but the words would not string together. A couple times I really did slip and say "ano" or "iyon" which no one would understand but maybe it's good I couldn't say much other than "stay back from the table" and no one was offended. It was a great trial of patience, and I guess I survived :-)

I concluded the day with telling our advisor that we need shirts that say "I survived Science in the Parks." Then he said the bookstore will probably donate shirts to us, so arranging the printing won't be too hard. I'm excited for this. 1 park down (well, tomorrow), 5 more to go. If I really do survive through July I'll let you know.

"A Dream to Some, A Nightmare to Others" poetry jam

here's another of my brother-in-law's poems, that we put to music on the spot.

A day in HARBOR

that's High Altitude Reconnaissance Balloon for Outreach and Research

It began last night, when deciding not to have a slumber party at WSU I just showered and went to sleep in my clothes to facilitate a 2:30 ish wake up time. Because the team had to meet at WSU by 3:30 am to depart for Duchesne, Utah, about a 3 hour drive. The whole drive was dark, cold, cloudy, and rainy, much to our dismay, but it's a darn good thing we didn't turn back because once we came out of the canyon and as the sun came up all those things disappeared. It was a perfect day to fly a giant helium balloon! After some hot cocoa and donuts at the airport we had a hurried balloon worshipping session (that's just what it looks like as we steady the thing while inflating it with helium) and got it off into the atmosphere before 9am so the FAA couldn't have a fit with us.

We then drove to Roosevelt, where there is conveniently located a satellite of, well, Utah State University, but it's okay because one of their staff and a student were with us. Still was fun to parade in there with all our purple shirts on. The computer people watched it with their computers, and some of us watched it with our eyes, until the GPS transmitter (aka BATS) indicated the thing was now falling back down to earth (after reaching a height above 92,000').

I guess they did a quick flight prediction and found a bunch of Google maps in the area we thought it would land and started driving that way. So after this, we stopped receiving data from BATS long before the thing hit the ground. That's bad. There was a lot of communication that tried to happen but mostly succeeding by way of MY cell phone, which included new flight predictions, good and faulty GPS locations, and shortage of maps in the actual fall zone to name a few. Some of us met up and we tried to chase the other group but with such limited communication out there in the Utah wilderness it didn't work well.

We ended up an hour down this dirt road with still no sight or GPS of the equipment, when what happens but one of the trucks dies. This is also bad. Cell phone coverage was sooo sketchy someone suggested we try texting, which did work, and we asked for some phone numbers to get a tow truck. Although what ended up happening was (eventually) we went to the Ford dealership in town and gave them the GPS coordinates of the truck we left in the wilderness and they'll go get it. We reorganized ourselves into 2 cars and shortly thereafter who do we meet on the road but the other chase group! They also had no sign of the equipment and said they'd keep looking for a few hours.

We went back to town and then to the airport to move the equipment trailer when what do we realize the trailer keys were still in the truck . . . oops. It's okay. We then proceeded to Heber where we had a nice Mexican dinner (thank you!) and then on home. The other group called while we were eating and said they were unable to locate the stuff or ever get a GPS transmission from BATS. So we have a pretty big area to search where it could have landed (although one [very unlikely] explanation why it stopped after 11,000' is that it unwonderfully happened upon an airplane) and someone realized somewhere that we didn't actually put the "please return to WSU" labels on anything . . . oops again. A friend from the airport will do a flyover tomorrow and team members are willing to go back up another day, like Saturday, to go looking again. But if anyone happens in the Utah wilderness off of U.S.88 past Ft. Duchesne and finds a couple boxes with a parachute, please return to WSU!

Hence
Launch: check.
Flight: check.
Landing: uh, hmmmm.
Recovery: definitely UNcheck

"Waking a Dream" jamming to poetry

This is a poem my sister's husband wrote, and we made a song out of it. Totally made up (except for the words) so post your comments again!

Another test 1.....

We've been jamming for a while, my sister and I, this is in reminiscence of one of our first jam sessions. Please write your comments! What you like, don't like, etc. on all of these