What have we come to?

Peripheral Vision, in a non-technical definition, means the ability to see stuff outside, around, above, below, to the side - of the point at which our eyes are aimed.

So, if I am walking on the sidewalk and my head and eyes are pointed straight ahead of me, I may be able to tell if there is a big black hole that I am about to step into - or if a car traveling on the street is coming near me.

The thing that I wonder about is dogs.  When they are walking they certainly have a sense of what thier legs are about to encounter from the terrain they are traveling on.  They can make adjustments if they approach a hole in the ground or a curb to go up.  But this would seem to be working for their front legs - what is looking out for their rear legs.  I've never seen a dog glance behind them to see if their rear legs are about to encounter some obstacle.  I guess they must just have some visual memory of what has been coming and the ability to process it and compute what their hind legs have in store for them.

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.

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.

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.

(photography by Marsha)

Joyce and I took a roadtrip to visit our friends Dave & Marsha in their home in Chillicothe OH this weekend.  Since it's the middle of the summer and it looked like we could squeek by without rain, we decided to take the Corvette.  The picture above is on Sunday when we were setting out on our return trip and there was actually a little bit of sun.  On Saturday, we got about 2/3 of the way to Chillicothe and actually stopped and put the top up because it got so cool.

Dave and Marsha's home is great and they have done a marvelous job redoing it.  We had a great time hanging out with them, drinking a little wine, eating a little dinner (including some Graeters).  We miss you guys but are glad to see you are having so much fun.

I am fortunate enough to be a member of the Dive Crew at the Newport Aquarium.  We are a group of 100+ Scuba Divers that volunteer our diving time and skills at the NA.  I've even got a clip of me doing my thing in the Shark Tank on my website at here.

You can go to my photo album and see this in a zoomed in view (use the magnifying glass in the upper right corner) as well as the version that I made with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

From Ground Zero 5/09