Australia Day 3 - No Sleep for the Weary

-
Once again, my body pulled me up in the middle of the night. A quick check of the alarm clock showed 4:37am. With no desire to go back to sleep, I decided to take pictures of the sunrise over Broadbeach. You can see the sequence here.

At the conference, I enjoyed the interaction with the attendees. We helped them with hands-on labs tailored to give them personal time with a technology of their interest. By the time I got back to my room at 8:30pm I was exhausted. Tomorrow is a new day - back to it!

Popular posts from this blog

Smoot Marks

-
Image
In the fall of 1991, my involvement with the New Student Orientation program at my alma mater found our group attending a national conference in Boston. We arrived from Los Angeles two days early to take in some of the sights of autumn in New England. We strolled past a certain university campus in Cambridge just to be able to say, “Yeah, I went to Harvard.” And as we crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, I noticed that there were lines painted at regular intervals. Further investigation revealed these to be Smoot marks. What is a Smoot mark? In the spirit of a last-minute term paper, let me borrow liberally from Wikipedia: The smoot is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure ...
Read more

Light a Candle

-
"It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness." -Chinese proverb This morning I came across a CNN page that showed "Before and after" satellite photos of several locations across Gaza ( Link here ). It broke my heart - again. When Hamas crossed the border, murdering and kidnapping people, it broke my heart - again.  For years, our hearts have been broken by the cycles of violence, not only in the Middle East, but everywhere around us. And the worst part is the shouting we engage in if, for no other reason, a desperate search for catharsis. It is as if we turn to blaming or vilifying one group or another as a way to ease our sense of helplessness. Let me suggest an alternative. But first a story: Growing up in a home where I learned my Jordanian father was actually born in Palestine (Yes, that's what it was called in 1938), I learned about the history of the region from someone who lived through it. Over the years, I supplemented that knowledge with fur...
Read more