Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

Hey - blogger has added a way to upload a picture - without using Picasa/Hello/Bloggerbot! Cool! A picture I took while geocaching last weekend:

Due to a sanction the US government has against our space partner Russia, over concerns that Russia was providing space and missle technology to enemies, NASA is forbidden to buy lauches from Russia. Russia's contract to fly missions to the Space Station is completed with the next launch. Because of the grounding of the Space Shuttle, and the delay of repairs due to the hurricanes, that will mean the astronaut going up, will not have a defined ride home for the end of his 6 month scheduled stay. He has stated that he is willing to stay up as long as he has to. The US is hoping Russia will continue to fly mission out of good will. While Russia has been a very good partner in the space program, it is well known that they are financially strapped. While I would hope that they would help out if there was an emergency, I don't think we can really count on them to do much out of good will. So, that means our government needs to make an emergency exception. Add it to some of the K...

Thursday evening, my eldest son decided he wanted to make a Geocache of our own. We had been working up to it for a little while now. We had small notebooks for logbooks. I had saved a couple of 3 pound plastic picnic salad containers. We had some pirate themed accessories to go with our geocache nickname of 'WitzAbout Pirates'. My eldest son was really enthused about making the geocache that evening. He collected up a whole bunch of toys - older, but in good condition. So I printed out the geocache introduction sheet and gathered up the pieces needed. We headed down to a park about a mile away from our house. We parked in the lot, near the playground, and looked around for places to hide the cache. From my point of view, there were not a lot of choices. It was a pretty busy area, with a playground, 2 different ball fields - softball and soccer - and at the intersection of two pretty busy streets. I did not see any place near the playground that seemed good for the ...

Reading a new article on CNN, about the new Xbox 360, I learned something interesting about IBM. It seems they are not limiting themselves to Business machines these days. While Apple is jumping ship to Intel from the Power-PC chip, not one, but 2 new games systems are jumping over to IBM. Microsoft and IBM co-designed the chip for Xbox 360, based on the Power PC chip. But IBM also co-designed the chip for the next Playstation, PS3, with Sony and Toshiba, also includes a Power PC processor. Not a bad deal position for IBM - involved in the chips for the two big game consoles. I wonder if they can get an inside to the next Nintendo game console too? :) The original Xbox was built with PC-based components, including Intel processors. By going to Power-PC based chips, that means that supporting the older games will have to be done in an emulation mode or they will have to include an intel-based instruction set in the new console. The good news is that they have said the new system wil...

I went geocaching over the weekend. I was spurred by the fact that I had a travelbug* from the previous weekend to put back in circulation. So I headed out to an area in town I hadn't geocached in before - leading to the Pulpit Rock area. I'd hiked it once from the West 5 years ago, during the first few weeks I had moved to Colorado. I could not get anyone else interested in going, so I was heading out on my own. Having looked at the area with Google Earth, I decided to try using my bike. Coming from Academy, it made for a pretty easy trip. I wound up having to abandon my bike a few hundred feet from the caches. Well, it was easier on the bike at first. But I didn't realize that the last cache I wanted to hit was up from the first 2. Quite a bit up. Very far up the back of Pulpit Rock. I wound up pushing my bike slowly up, taking probably close to an hour. But I knew there was a dirt trail that lead to streets from having hiked it 5 years ago. It turns out the...

What do you get when you cross the idea of geocaching and reading? Leaving a book out in an open place for others to find, read, and pass on. Sorry Denver, Colorado Springs leads the state in number of books 10-to-1 Bookcrossings in COS

I went Saturday and Sunday morning to the Hot Air Balloon Festival . And to the Balloon glow Saturday night. I took a huge amount of pictures Saturday and Sunday. It was wild to see the balloons dip into the newly refilled lake. I'll have to post some pictures soon. Yesterday we did some Geocaching. We managed to find all 5 out in Falcon.

A man fired last year from a Highlands Ranch Colorado (Southern Denver Suburb) company won a contest for the oddest firing. He was fired a month after he ate 2 slices of pizza left over from a company event, unaware that other employees planned to take home the left over pizza. Crazy stuff.