At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here

I subscribe and post updates from my weblog to a site that aggregates Oregon weblogs, called orblogs.com. If you're from the area and/or are interested in the wide variety of opinions and thoughts that make up the blogging community in Oregon, you should check it out.

It looks like as sometime recently they have a RSS 2.0 XML feed available. It showed up in my referrers this evening. Not sure how I missed that, but it's a welcome addition to the site.

Yay! Publication dates!!

From Engadget: Update on RIM Blackberry 7100t (aka, the "Charm")

"We’re not sure how much this is going to change things we mentioned earlier today, but now that some corroborating photos have surfaced on an unnamed website, now we’re admittedly getting a little (only a little, okay?) anxious about the supposedly imminent release of the RIM Blackberry 7100t. Apparently (as pictured) T-Mobile appears to be a carrier, and we also understand it may have Bluetooth 1.1."

Cool keypad idea on this one, where they put two characters per key and then use adaptive text guessing to form your words for you (kind of like T9 text input, but presumably more accurate since the probability of getting the correct key combinations correct will be much higher).

Okay, so earlier this evening I was over at a friend's place visiting, and two of the kids there are attending Science and Technology high school magnet academy here in Beaverton, Oregon starting tomorrow. I was talking about how cell phones can be business leashes and how Blackberries, while quite helpful and useful from a business standpoint, are more like a ball and chain on the “Tether Continuum.”

Okay you smart math/science./technology students - here's a probability quiz for you: The popular T9 text input method uses a standard phone keypad and does predictive text analysis based on the combination of keys you press against a known dictionary of words. This new device has two characters per key instead of 3. Given use of the same dictionary on both devices, and that you are typing the same words and phrases on each device, how much more accurate will the Blackberry Charm text input will be?

Via Newsweek and PVRBlog:

“... now couch potatoes are perched on the cusp of true paradise. Soon they won't even have to stand up to trudge to the mailbox; fat broadband pipes will let them directly download movies over the Net to their television ...

“... In an interview with NEWSWEEK last year, CEO Reed Hastings predicted that by the end of the decade, Netflix will deliver most of its rentals over the Net, supplanting its distribution centers and trademark red envelopes. "We named the company Netflix, we didn't name it DVD by Mail," he said.”

Nice - so if I am subscriber to both TiVo and Netflix (which I am), I can order my movies and have them downloaded straight to my TiVo for viewing? Woah, cool!

Keeping my eyes open for this one. Something tells me I'll have to have a series 2 TiVo, though... Like the one I was eye-balling at Frys yesterday... Might just have to finally give up on the haX0red series one box.

It's another long weekend at home, and after pretty much nothing but clouds and rain Saturday, the great weather today means an opportunity to get some stuff done outside. Among the around-the-house items I have been tending to this afternoon, I harvested a bunch of garden stuff:

• The first (of many, it appears) ripe tomato
• About 20 ears of corn
• About 20 carrots
• 10 beets
• 12 bell peppers
• Uncountable sweet peas
• A few strawberries

And there's plenty more of everything where that came from, with the exception of the corn - the plants were a little too close together, it appears, and most of the ears are too small. But the ones that did grow are awfully good.

If the weather holds out, there's going to be a tomato give-away happening pretty soon - there's just no way I can eat all of those.

Oh, and the big sunflowers are topping out at about 18 feet at the tallest, with stalks almost as thick as my forearm. Those are some amazing plants!

The forecast I received this morning on my trusty mobile device told me it would be 73 degrees and partly cloudy, and offered the same for the rest of the weekend.

So far it's been drizzling rain all day and completely clouded over. My garden needs some sun. The lawn is too wet to mow. I drove the motorcycle to the shop in the rain to get the brake recall thing done, and got wet. I turned on the heat for the first time in forever.

Trusty mobile device. Yeah, right.

If this is partly cloudy, what's next?