10 years

This is my father at White Sands Missile Range in the 1960's. Most of his career involved designing, building, testing and running equipment for upper atmospheric research as a civilian electrical engineer working for the US Air Force. His work took him all around the Western hemisphere, places like Thule Greenland, Alaska, Peru and Ascension Island, his devices, stuff like charged particle detectors and automated cameras, were on or observed research airplanes, numerous rocket launches and the space shuttle. He took me to watch STS-60 launch from the VIP stands, his group had particle detectors on the Wake Shield. 10 years ago today he died of a heart attack.

Best personal checks yet

For most of my checkwriting life I have used the plain old bank issued "security" check, it is only recently, under the influence of my wife, have I slowly moved into the world of custom checks. Every year or so I spend far too much time browsing pictures of bunnies, licensed characters, ye olde script and just generally bad art looking for something that remotely feels like a fit.

While recently repeating this ritual my wife pointed out a check printing site that allows you to use your own image on the check and then commented "You could use images from that site of yours", brilliant.

I chose the four rotating images series:

(As a special treat to my faithful readers, the third image is a yet unpublished view of the Cocotron laboratories)






I ordered these at uniquechecks.com. The site expects a 6"x2.75" image, minimum 432x198 (72dpi) and the images should be only a few hundred k or you'll have trouble uploading. I used 288dpi high quality jpg's and am completely happy with the results.

April Showers

The view this morning, fortunately not the predicted amount because I've already packed the snowblower away.



Almost the same view from Google Earth, I can't tilt my head up enough.