Day 81

Dust, Haze, Cinders

A cold front from eastern NM pushed an enormous air mass full of dust raised by the weekend winds into the ABQ area overnight.  The Sandia Mountains were barely visible and air quality alerts were issued. 

After lunch with my old college buddy McGoey, I paused for a couple photos on the way back to the office.  I took several and deleted all but one.  Now, while looking for the image to include it in this post, the pic appears to be gone.  Curious. 

Day 80

Four-fifths of the Way 

Another day without much actual Glass activity, but I did get an e-mail from Vienna asking about my participation in the IAEA symposium next fall.  Word is getting around that mobile technologies (Glass included) can make a difference in some serious domains, like nuclear nonproliferation. 

Day 79

The Wind

With winds topping 35 mph and often higher, I pretty much stayed inside and left Glass to its own devices, so to speak.  I worked on the Mobile of OSI paper, including the inserting of a photograph of OPCW chemical weapons specialists in Syria wearing GoPros.  The bunker photos were downloaded and burned to disk. 

All in all, a very un-Glass day.  In reviewing the contents of the last few days, I still notice that videos don't always have screen-grabs for icons.  That does make it very difficult to know which video you are manipulating. 

I did manage a couple shots of the tulips in the vase on the dining room table.  A pair of them together made a nice vignette. 

With the winds forecast to die down tomorrow, perhaps I'll get some outside photos.  Wednesday, my usual bike riding day, will be cut short by a meeting with my financial adviser.  Expect garage sale imagery this weekend and then Berkeley Monday through Thursday next. 

Day 78

Another Windy Day

More wind, a typical spring day in NM.  That's kept me off the bike, but I did run some errands to the grocery store.  Our co-op had some pretty photogenic veggies. 

Potatoes, carrots, and a pork butt roast will turn into a crock pot dinner tomorrow.  Tonight, though, it's leftover vegetables and pan roasted salmon.

The video du jour is the firetruck in the middle of 12th St. on the way back from John Brook's.  Not sure what they were doing, but a utility truck was nearby as well. 

I'm finishing the afternoon with some baking, #gfree cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Cheers! 

Day 77

Wind

Today was one of those days when there wasn't much in the way of esthetic opportunity for Glass's photographic capability.  Ultimately, it came down to the 50 mph wind gusts last this afternoon as a cold front blew through town. 

Day 76

Bunkers Revisited

Sorry, you'll have to wait for official review and approval.  Here's the external view.

Day 75

3/4

Three quarters of the way to my goal of 100 days of continuous blogging about Glass. 

The Veterinarian

Once again I'm at the vet's.  This time it's Henry Cat's annual physical and Bella's bp check-up.  Henry turned crazy feral on us when the vet came in, so there was little they could do but roll him up in 3 towels like a cat burrito in order to give him his vaccination.  Bella's blood pressure is perfect -- we've got the medication just right.  Below is a pic of a pre-vet happy Henry. 

Day 74

Iris

The view of the iris bed #throughglass...

Day 73

The Acequia Ride

The spring winds weren't blowing, so I took advantage of a warm, calm evening to take the North Long Loop on my mountain bike.  I was able to knock off 8 minutes from my previous time and my pulse was lower at the halfway point.  For details, see http://goatheadreport.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-north-long-loop.html.  This montage gives you some idea of the variety of road and trail conditions that one encounters in the North Valley. 

Day 72

Firenze Pizza

Plenty of other good Glass stuff going on this week, but tonight I'll just recap my lunch experience -- the Firenze mobile pizza oven.

The tent. 

The oven and the pizza meister.  

The result.  

More to come tomorrow:  drive-by photos and a ditch bank bike ride.

Day 71

Easter

After yesterday's cooking, we were well set to entertain Mom for Easter lunch. There were tulips on the table...

Day 70

Easter Prep

I thawed out the #gfree pie crust and the lamb meat for tomorrow's Easter dinner with Mom.  The dough rolled out fine and baked up great.  Good to know that #gfree pie crusts can be frozen.  I cooked up the lemon and egg custard, whipped up the meringue, and assembled the classic lemon chiffon pie for tomorrow's dessert.  The result: 

Day 69

Sampling

As an experiment, I loaded myself up with a close approximation of an IAEA swipe sampling kit and used Glass to capture it.

What I find interesting is that Glass is aligned straight ahead to capture activity in one's main area of close-up vision, naturally.  Meanwhile, yours truly with bifocals is looking downward out of the bottom of the bifocals for up close work.  The result is that it takes conscious effort to keep the swipe within the field of view -- continuity of knowledge, you know.

Here's the view from a camera on a tripod nearby.  Which angle captures the activity most convincingly?

Day 68

Issues with KitKat

Three times in the last two days I've had Glass lock up with a black screen after taking 2 pictures in succession with the manual shutter button.  The problem requires that I manually turn off and then restart Glass.  Hmm?  Not good. 

Also, this evening during a friend's birthday celebration (see below), Glass overheated with perhaps only 20 minutes of use.  That was after 5 photos and 6 video snippets, none longer than 10 seconds. 

Mobile for Nuclear Nonproliferation

I'm finishing up the study on mobile ICT devices for arms control verification and treaty compliance.  Many different angles to the problem, but none of them insurmountable.  Also getting ready to put the final touches on my paper for the INMM conference in Portland in 3 weeks.  That will be my first foray onto a public stage with Glass.  Stay tuna'ed.

At work today I did manage a couple photos #throughglass.  One was of our display area downstairs; the other of the Spanish Broom in the parking lot.

The Birthday Bash

On a much lighter note, I had Glass on when Ric and Marlene came over tonight for some serious sushi.  Aided by my friend Kent, we were able to take out a prodigious amount of nigiri.

Day 67

 Why you should never leave your Glass behind

 As I walked over to the building next door in search of their Pepsi machine, I heard a strange "coo, coo" bird call.  It took a few moments to locate the source, a roadrunner (Geococcyx) up in one of the 15' pine trees at the south edge of the parking lot.  Every minute or so it would make a strange motion with its neck and repeat the soft "coo, coo" sounds a few times.  After hearing it, I'm more than convinced of the roadrunner's placement in the cuckoo family, the Cuculidae.  Of course, their 2+2 arrangement of toes is also a dead giveaway. 

Alas, in my haste, I did not don my set of Glass.  I could only capture the sound with the video camera on my Droid.  :-/

Wearable Technology for IAEA Safeguards

In the afternoon I learned from my manager that the process for submitting abstracts to IAEA for their October Symposium on Safeguards had been changed this year to include a requirement of a USG pre-review.  Abstracts have to be in by COB tomorrow. 

Hurry, hurry!  Scurry, scurry!  What a worry! 

In the end I had a reasonable 300 words describing our work with Glass and other mobile tech for on-site safeguards inspections.  That cut into my time for finishing my Prezi for INMM in Portland next month.  That paper and presentation are nearly ready for review. 

Google Auto-enhancements

Below is a shot of Bella lounging on her bed after Google did a strong enhancement of it. 

Compare with the unenhanced version...

I'm impressed.  I also liked the way the recent upgrade to KitKat bundled the photos into an album to reduce scrolling to find pictures. 

One more pair of images... enhanced yardscape under a flood light.

And the unenhanced version...

This time I might prefer the original.  Similar comparisons can be done with enhanced and unenhanced videos as well, but I'll save that for tomorrow or Friday. 

Day 66

Past the 2/3 Mark

Well, I've made it more than 67% of the way through my goal of posting daily thoughts on Google Glass.  It was a good day for Glass both in a national and local sense.

Nationally, today was the first-come-first-served online Glass sale.  Apparently, they sold out quickly even at $1500 a pop.  This confirms my belief that negative Glass events are rare and overdone in the major media.  Similarly, positive Glass reactions are common and mostly ignored by the media.  Happily, I can point to BBC's recent article that gives a very good look at the webcam-ness of Glass. 

Day 65

The Eclipse

I've delayed today's posting until I got some material under my belt for tonight's main event, a total lunar eclipse. 

Day 64

The Frittata

Cousin Kathie came over this morning and that gave me a perfect excuse to use Glass in the kitchen.  Below I construct a variant of Alton Brown's excellent ham and asparagus frittata.  In my case, I adapt his recipe to the absence of asparagus and the only porkish ingredient on hand, pancetta.

The ingredients, clockwise starting with the very yellow 6 beaten eggs combined with 1/8 teaspoon of salt and a 1/2 teaspoon of pepper.  Brown the pancetta in a skillet on medium-low to medium heat until crisp (drain on paper towels and chop coarsely).  Have a couple tablespoons of roughly chopped parsley on hand.  Finally, have an ounce of good Parmesan cheese grated. 

 

Stir the cheese into the egg mixture.

 
When everything is assembled, preheat your broiler on high. 

Return the pancetta to the skillet and heat on medium-high until things start to sizzle. 

Pour the egg and cheese into the skillet...

...give it a stir with a spatula to distribute the pancetta...

...and continue to cook for about 4 minutes.  The eggs will cook from the bottom heat and the top of the frittata will begin to firm up. 

Sprinkle the top with parsley and then slide the pan under the broiler...

...for 2-4 minutes until the eggs finish cooking and the top is golden brown and delicious.  

Remove from the oven...

...and transfer to a plate for serving.   In this case, I plated the frittata with a small garnish of heirloom plum tomatoes and avocado slices.  Warm bread with butter, some Crenshaw melon and raspberries, and a chilled San Pellegrino limonata or hot coffee finished the menu.  

Day 63

More Acequias

After brunch with Mom this morning, I got home before the afternoon winds kicked in.  (I suppose you have to have lived in the Southwest to know how important that is.)  I unlimbered my trusty mountain bike and headed out for a quick ride.  Knowing that I should keep it short, I decided to track down some of the short dead-end irrigation routes nearby.

Day 62

Glass Video File Sizes

I ran a quick check to find out how large the Glass video files are.  A 2 min 21 sec video as I walked to a nearby building clocked in at 86.1 MiB.  That works out to 2.2 GiB/hour.  The 12 GiB memory in Glass probably won't get filled up in the 90 minutes or so before the battery is spent.  #goodtoknow

Day 61

Distance Learning

Had a meeting to discuss the Sharepoint Training Events system that the Bio Threat Reduction Dept. is trying to set up.  Their system is scaling poorly due to vast amounts of redundant information in their document sets.  I'll leave it to the Sharepoint gurus to struggle on and try to use a document sharing tool to address an enterprise collaboration need. 

Meanwhile, I ran some numbers on what distance learning with a few choice web-based tools could do for costs savings.  $15-20K(!) could be shaved off of a 5 day work shop by reducing the length to 4 days with some simple strategies:

• Half the instructors participate remotely via Skype, Facetime or Hangouts.  Glass could add a tremendous amount of value here, especially for laboratory demos.  
• Provide prerequisite material and qualification tests online in advance of the actual training event.  
• Distribute training material digitally instead of as printed hard copy binders. 

More from the Acequia Ride

Yesterday's ride was one of those perfect trips:  no wind, moderate temps, great scenery.   Although this view looks attractive, the lefthand ditch bank quickly turns to sugar sand and one ends up walking instead of peddling. 

Far better biking is found farther east between the Griegos Drain along side the east fork of the Griegos Lateral. 

Here are a couple more videos that illustrate how one can narrate directions and show the actual event with Glass.  

Eclipse Watch

Ric, Kent and I are already planning a Monday evening lunar eclipse extravaganza, weather permitting.  Stay tuna'ed.

Day 60

The North Long Loop

It was a beautiful day in the Land of Enchantment.  After work with daylight saving time working in my favor, I grabbed the bicycle and headed north with Glass to document another set of acequias.  This time I went for the 7.7 mile loop that carries me as far north as Tinnin Farms and Chavez Road before curving south past Los Poblanos.  See The Goathead Report for details and most of the photos. 

Day 59

The Medical Appointment

I took Mom to her 4 month follow-up appointment at her orthopedic surgeon's office.  Only the nurse that escorted us to the examination room commented on my Glass.  She made some very positive remarks.  I am absolutely convinced that Glass and other wearables will transform medical and veterinarian practice.  Here's a photo I snapped of Mom's x-ray showing... well... nothing.  The surgeon couldn't locate the old fracture.

I'm reminded how at times Glass can be very intrusive and with little effort it could violate HIPAA medical privacy regulations.   My advice to Glass Explorers everywhere, take special heed to be considerate in medical environments. 

The Apple Store

After dropping off Mom, I wandered over to Starbucks for a Frapuccino.  Along the way back to the car, I stopped outside the Apple store for this video, but no one gave me any notice.  Meh...

The Duck Pond

For my final Glass adventure of the day, I took a stroll through the UNM campus.  Here's the Duck Pond without any of the eponymous ducks but lovely in the warm spring sunshine. 

 

To my surprise not a single soul commented on my glass.  Maybe the combination of sunglasses and a hat made it that much more inconspicuous?  Perhaps the students are altogether too polite to ask.

Day 58

Night Photography

After a day at my desk with little actual Glass time, I figured I'd better get some images recorded for this blog.  At this late hour, available light photography in the back yard and a couple astrophotographs seemed like a good idea.

The astrophotographs were hardly, well, stellar.  The wide angle lens of Glass means the nearly full moon is just a bright dot and Mars, even at opposition, is barely visible.

The shots of the yard lights, fountains, and greenhouse at night, on the other hand, were pretty nice.  Enjoy...

Day 57

Glass Weather:  Windy, Cool

It's been a blustery day in ABQ with interesting broken skies.  Almost a wee trace of precipitation, but no luck there in the end.  Just as well, I washed the car yesterday after the dust and ash of the Jemez last weekend. 

Speaking of the Great Jemez Mountains Botanical Expedition of 2014, I spent some time putzing with my nephew's data.  I found a great LANL reference on insolation.  It gives us Btu's/sq ft/day at the latitude and elevation of Los Alamos for any month and almost any aspect angle and slope. 

As it turns out, there's about a 20% difference in amount of sunshine at this time of year between the north-facing slope and the south-facing one.  Here's a typical plot on the south side of the canyon (#throughglass).  Pretty sad. 

Compare that with this from the north side (from my Droid camera). 

Despite the presence of a Schlepp bear, it's obvious that the north side of the canyon (south-facing) is doing much better.  The question my nephew must now answer is, why? 

In closing, here's yet another Wisteria shot.  This plant has definitely got its mojo on.  The bees were going crazy. 

Day 56

Photos du Jour

It was nearly a full day of Glass for me.  Early on, I caught La Chat Bella in the Hidden Garden with a fine view of our tree stump/bird feeder and the Wisteria behind.  The image had to be rotated inside the Google Photo app, not within Glass itself. 

Had a fun conversation with the counter-help at Flying Star for brunch.  He was very excited to see his first pair of Glass in the wild.  While running errands later in the day, I caught this view of spring flowers at Lowe's.

Still later in the afternoon, Neighbor Joe stopped by and tried on Glass.  To wake Glass up while Joe was wearing it, I used the shutter release and was rewarded with this selfie. 

All in all, a fun day with Glass and I see that yesterday's Wisteria mini-video is garnering 'likes' on Facebook. 

Day 55

Wisteria and Voice Recognition

First things first... the Wisteria are going crazy.  Here are some stills...

 

Including a vignette...

Interesting how the vignette's aspect ratio changes.  Hmm?  Must do the math.  Let's see, vignette 1920x1080, gives us a 1.78 aspect ratio.  Regular image, 2528x1856, yields a 1.36 aspect ratio.  The original ABQ Wx screen was 640x360 and has an aspect ratio of 1.78.  I'd say that vignettes are photos cropped to match the Glass viewscreen. 


Finally, here is the video.

 

OK, Wisteria are beautiful and they smell great, but perhaps more importantly today, I had an opportunity to do some voice recognition trials in the afternoon.  The question was, how well can voice recognition handle esoteric jargon?  The answer is... pretty dang well.

As an out-of-the-blue sample, I read the Chemical Weapons Convention list of Schedule 3 chemicals into my Droid notepad app and into Glass via Evernote.  Terms like phosgene, cyanogen chloride, phosphorus pentachloride, and even trimethyl phosphite were correctly transcribed by my Droid.  It did have trouble with the likes of chloropicrin (claro pikmin), methyldiethanolamine (methyl diopen hola mean), and a few others.  Droid's batting average was 73%.

Glass did fairly well although the sync option with Evernote hasn't caught up with the device even after 3 hours.  Triethyl phosfite, sulfur monochloride, and phosphorus oxychloride all transcribed properly, but "diethyl phosphite" turned into "die asshole phosphite."  Glass batted 71%. 

By far the more worrisome problem is numeric transcription.  Neither Droid nor Glass could handle CAS numbers like "6548-32-8."  These turned into "6548 dash 32 dash aight."  Most numerals are OK, even long, complex ones, but '8' and 'hate', '2' and 'to' are still problems.  Also, I've yet to have any voice-to-text system handle dictation of punctuation, carriage returns, and such in a satisfactory way.  Finally, Glass with Evernote needs a data connection.  At least my Droid's note-taking app works offline.  OK, Google, can offline voice transcription be added to Glass? 

Nuff for now.  Stay tuna'ed.

Day 54

Back at the Vet's 

Both Paddy and Bella needed to have a check-up now that they are on new medications.  Bella's blood pressure is still a little bit high, so we upped her Amlodapine.  Here's the video of the procedure, which uses a mini-cuff and ultrasound for detecting the pulse.

Day 53

Glass by Firelight

A windy day in ABQ and a busy one for me... early on a Zope server truncated its ZODB.  I spent the rest of the day looking for Python utilities and backup files.  The local Python-Plone-Zope guru will lay hands on the system Thursday.

Day 52

Wisteria

The weekend's field work has left me indisposed with a back injury.  Although I took a trivial number of photos #throughglass, the main item of interest was writing a section of my INMM paper dealing with Glass and Safeguards.  This blog will run through May 19th, but the presentation in Portland will be sometime between the 12th and 14th.