After waiting a year and a half for the paper work to go through, it’s official:
Thanks to my mother being a Canadian citizen, I have now successfully claimed my dual citizenship. Next up I can get a Candian passport, and travel as a Canadian, instead of as an American, something that is more in more important in light of how well… loved the US is right now by the rest of the world.
I recently adopted a new family member:
His name is Schizo, or Schiz for short. He was found in the alley by my paragliding instructor’s house, and I’ve taken him under my wing, as it were. (Oy. Again with the bad puns.) The vet seems to think he’s about 8 weeks old. Don’t be fooled by his seeming quiet and calm demeanor. He’s as calm as he is in the picture about 9/10 of the time. The rest of the time he’s busy tearing through my apartment at break neck speeds.
In paragliding news, I got my P2 rating finally this past weekend, which means I’m free to fly at other sites, and without my instructor around, etc. I’ve currently had 27 flights, with 11.8 hours logged. I’m still absolutely loving it. As such, I’m starting to plan/save for a paragliding trip next summer to Europe. The current initial thought is to hit France, Italy, and maybe one other country sometime in June/July next summer. More updates will hopefully follow as I start gather more info online, figure out how long I can actually take off, etc.
Some friends gave me an Ambient Orb for my birthday recently, which is *very* cool. You can actually create your own custom “feeds”, which is really just saying you can push arbitrary data (color + pulse rate/pattern) to the thing via their web interface and they then push details to the orb via the cell/pager network. Starting to write a little daemon in ruby to pull weather data from the Crestline Soaring Society’s Weather Station, do some sort of “good flying day” heuristic based on the past 4-10 weather readings, and update the orb accordingly.
Currently I’m thinking of solid green being ideal, with blue being too light wind, orange/red being too strong winds. The distance from green will be multiplied by a factor corresponding to wind direction degrees away from ‘ideal, straight up the hill winds for launch’. If either the wind is blowing down (wind blowing down the hill is a deal breaker for launching) or a detected rotor (usually identified by the wind direction switching between blowing up, down and, cross in fairly rapid succession) causing a fairly rapidly pulsing red effect. Suggestions welcome for other ways of representing those sorts of details with this orb.
Other feed ideas I had included an Iraq Death Toll feed, either based on the daily death count (if I can find actual data for that online) or on the running monthly count. Morbid, I know, but I think there’s some potentialy for a meaningful use for this thing.
We also are thinking of buying one or two for the office, and hooking them up to our bug tracking software at work… Solid color representing the current bug count, and brief red rapid pulsing when severity 1 crasher bugs get reported. Other ideas?