Dolphins blowing 'Smoke' rings

Joyce and I went to Miami last week and visited the Miami Seaquarium.  My grandparents took me to the Seaquarium when I was 5 years old.  There are a  number of animals that put on performances there and one group that we watched were the dolphins.  They are of course beautiful, and you have to believe they are pretty intelligent.

After the topside performance we went downstairs where we could watch the dolphins through viewing windows.  One behavior that we observed was pretty amazing.  A dolphin would expel some air from its mouth and it would be in the form of a ‘smoke ring’ like that that smokers blow – only these were with air, of course.  If that weren’t enough, the animal would create a second ring soon after the first one and you could watch one ring follow the other in the water column.  AND THEN, the dolphin was able to use it’s snout/beak or whatever you call it to disrupt one ring and the two rings that were moving one after the other would each break at one point on their circumference and join into one large ring.

To give you an idea of what the ring blowing is like – I found this video of some other dolphins blowing rings – in case you haven’t seen this.

OTL - Out To Lunch with Friends

While Joyce is suffering in Mexico eating great food and studying her art - we're not doing so bad back here in Cincinnati.  Today I was fortunate to go out to lunch with my next door neighbors, William, Gretta, Jeff and Alex.  We had fine dining at Skyline Chili.  It brings back memories of when our girls (in their early 20's now) were little ones.  What fun.  The way a cousin of mine described this age - 'we only go out to eat in restaurants where you look up (to the menu on the wall) to order'.

Famous Lawn

I have been cleaning up my office the last couple days and pulled out this photo from a few years back. Can you recognize the backdrop? It's a pretty famous lawn somewhere in the US.

If you said the White House Lawn - you are correct.

SquareSpace.com is GREAT

Many of you that know me know that my world is full of Information Technology.  Many of you also know that Joyce (my wife) is an artist and she is totally 'right brained'.  Joyce is extremely creative in her world of art and I try to help her use the technology however I can to help her business thrive.

Sometimes my idea of easy doesn't really coincide with Joyce's idea of easy - when it comes to computers.  I offer to help her but she wants to be able to do things herself (sometimes) and she often gets quite frustrated.  For example, there are a few online services that Juried Art Shows use to accept submissions of slides of artwork - to be considered for entry into their Art Shows.  So, the various online systems are completely inconsistent in the specifications that they require for the slides.  These issues are not difficult to comply with if you are familiar with Photoshop - but how many people are really familiar with Photoshop?  Images for one service must be 1920 pixels x 1920 pixels.  Most photographic images are not square.  The 'canvas' needs to be expanded to square dimensions and the additional space MUST be black.

 Because Joyce wanted to be able to easily update her business website herself, I thought it would be useful to set her site up using www.SquareSpace.com

I did this setup a few weeks ago with a few of her images of art pieces.  Tonight, we finally got to sit down and get her started do the updates herself.  I spent just a couple minutes showing her how to manuever in the Photo Gallery section of her website and turned it over to her.

After a few minutes she said - "This is easy".  I couldn't believe it.  I was afraid it was going to be another frustrating computer experience.

Thank you SquareSpace.

Calculator Deal!

In about 1972 or so, I was taking an upper level statistics course at Ohio State University. It was the first class when I found out from our instructor that we were going to need to have our own calculators. I had never owned a calculator before of the electronic type (I had of course, had a slide rule). I was a poor college kid and I had to go out and buy my first calculator - it might have cost $199. I do know that it was clunky and it had FOUR functions, add, subtract, multiply and divide (some people might say that is only 2 functions - I don't want to argue).

Fast forward to 2009. My twin daughters will be seniors this fall. Stephanie is doing a summer internship in Mexico at an archeological dig site. I understand she wants to do some astronomical computations (meaning stellar - not big). She called and asked me to send her calculator to her but when I looked for it I couldn't find it. Taking the easy way out (because it is almost impossible for me to call her to ask for better directions) I stopped in to Radio Shack to see what they had in the way of calculators.

So I bought her a Radio Shack 65-115 Scientific Calculator with 10 Digit 2 Line Display 241 Built-in functions plus a slice on case to protect against scratches. For this masterpiece of technology I paid the paltry sum of $2.47! Unbelievable.