This group of people is absolutely amazing. They are some of the finest professionals and the most dedicated customer service focused  folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Check out this excellent article from American Surveyor Magazine.

My GIS Crew rocks!

I am definitely a child of the TV age, distinctly remembering watching the Apollo 11 moon landing from our black and white set in the living room. I discovered my love of SciFi movies and shows in the 80s with Star Trek and Dr Who.

So, it was with some trepidation this week that I canceled our cable TV subscription. On Tuesday they will be coming to pull the plug and we will be connected via 10 meg Internet pipe only to the world of news and entertainment.

I think we will be fine. I’ve built a nice media center setup over the years around the 42″ plasma that Jess bought me while we where in Massachusetts. That combined with a couple gaming consoles, Roku Player, Netflix along with the entire Internet should provide more content than we could possibly consume.

I’ll let you know how it goes in a couple of months…

Well, that was exciting. Our hosting provider lost connectivity between the website and the database. All seems to be working now though!  On to the rest of the week.

Well, I am impressed with my upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS). I really loved Karmic but this distro seems even better. I must admit that I do miss the earth brown tones in Karmic, the purple theme is just not really me. I’ll have to see if there is a way to use the 9.10 layout.

My programs seem snappier and my WINE install of Sony’s Guild Wars still works just fine, it might actually be snappier itself.

Anyway, the in-place  upgrade was painless (I let it run over night… the servers were darn busy!) and everything worked wonderfully. Now to really go exploring!

I am not a web designer, but I enjoy a little coding now and then. Last year I built Jess’ website (jesshartley.com) using the open source project, Joomla. It came out very nice despite a bit of a learning curve, mostly due to Joomla’s specific nomenclature. Once I got through those concepts, it has turned out to be an excellent tool-set for this sort of thing. Its a vast improvement over WordPress which she used for years and finally just outgrew.

Spent a bit of time last night out in our back yard with the telescope enjoying the crystal clear skies from this altitude. We have the most amazing night sky here. The only place I have ever been that was more impressive, was the heart of the Mojave Desert in winter.

At times the clarity is so dramatic, that you almost feel like you are falling, up into the heavens…

My Valkyrie loves animals. When we moved out from New England to The AZ, we spent several extra days on the trip just so we could stay over extra and see both the St Louis  and the Denver Zoos.

Not only does she love animals, but she is also a very talented artist and is always drawing them in some unique and beautiful way. She just finished this illustration of a Tapir that I wanted to share.

🙂

Our house in Bisbee sits at just about 5050 feet on a south facing slope about five miles from the border with Sonora. Its a beautiful view, with panoramas down deep into the mountains of Mexico. On a clear day I swear you can almost see to the Sea of Cortez (You can’t, but it does seem that way!)

Bisbee is located between two deserts. The Chihuahuan to the East and the Sonoran to the West. Despite that, the altitude gives us wonderful weather throughout the year. Most years we receive all of our rainfall in the late summer when the tropical monsoons roll up from the tropics. You can actually watch the thunderstorms build to the South and roll up the mountains. Its really lovely.

Winters here are usually very dry (this year has been a bit of an exception…) and the difference between summer and winter moisture can be very challenging. Last year I built and extensive drip water system and put in a bunch of native, and low water trees and plants. The idea is to start off on the public water system and eventually move the entire system to rain water cache to provide the primary water supply for the plants. I am also looking at grey-water systems to provide some additional moisture in the gardens and for the trees.

Winter seems to be letting up here, and all of the trees, except for the Mesquite, are already budding out. The Mesquite are usually the last to come in.

So, I spent the last couple days walking the irrigation system and replacing some of the drip heads, patching pipe and resetting the timers for Spring. There is just something amazing about watching trees grow in this country and I can’t wait for the rest of the plants to start coming in.  Won’t be long now!

I have been tinkering with some small simple robots from  a wonderful book  called “Junkbots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels”. They are easy to build and lots of fun to play with. They are cool on a completely different level than my first generation “Lego Mindstorm” gear and I am really enjoying the scrounging, found art-aspect of the construction.

Restoring a “Time-machine” backup today on an OSX server. I am really not sure I can wait around that long, maybe I should go do lunch…

What is that in dog years?