Off to Chicago to celebrate the life partnership of friends Michael Herman and Jill Perkins. I’m looking forward to a weekend of fun and merriment and celebration of these two people. I have had the pride and pleasure to work with Michael for five years now on some amazing projects in Open Space, including an important summit in Alaska in 2002, to co-editing of the Open Space Technology Users NON-Guide, the Giving Conference in 2004 and practice workshops all over the place.
I met Jill at the Gioving Conference in 2004 and have rarely laughed so hard with someone. She is an amazing woman, a retired particle physicist (.pdf) and currently an organizational development consultant and coach.
And, as an added bonus, I get to stay with Ted Ernst in Chicago, who is another gem on this earth.
So light blogging ahead as we celebrate a terrific union.
So it says here that 38 is, among other things notable because:
38! – 1 yields 523022617466601111760007224100074291199999999, which is a factorial prime.
There is no answer to the equation φ(x) = 38, making 38 a nontotient.
38 is the sum of the squares of the first three primes.
37 and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits.
38 is the largest even number which cannot be written as the sum of two odd composite numbers.
Also, it’s the number of games played by each team in the English Premiership, the atomic number of strontium and the number of slots on an American roulette wheel.
And it’s also the age I turned today. Yay! Cake for me!
I’m no expert but I spent much of yesterday trying to fix my new Dell laptop’s connection to the web. I was getting a wireless connection but was totally unable to view web pages. With linksys support on the router I deleved around in the guts of the machine but we couldn’t fix it. They did help me get a gateway IP again, which seemed to be one problem.
Searching the Dell forums for help I discovered WinSock XP Fix and ran it. The problem was immediately resolved.
Dells aside (I have never set up a computer by wiping more software than I installed!) this vexing problem seems to be common, and the ease and speed with with Winsock XP fix worked was impressive, so here’s a note here.
[tags]Winsock XP fix, web connectivity, Dell[/tags]
Parking Lot…ranked above the fold on Google for:
- beatitudes and commandments
- starbucks customer relations
- Examples of Great Websites
- appreciative inquiry experiences
- fido
- fido prepaid phone cards
…and that’s just from today. Interesting thing is that the posts on fido and Starbucks were both highly critical of their customer service. In the case of the last link, I actually rank number one, obviously higher that fido’s own website.
This blogging thing…it works?
[tags]blogging, google, fido, starbucks[/tags]
Rainbow that set the sky on fire:
In a breathtaking blaze of glory, Nature puts on one of its most spectacular sky shows.
Reds, oranges, blues and greens create a flaming rainbow that stretches above the clouds.
But this circumhorizon arc, as it is known, owes more to ice than fire. It occurs when sunlight passes through ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. It is one of 15 types of ice halos formed only when the most specific of factors dovetail precisely together.
This blanket of fire, covering hundreds of square miles, is the rarest phenomenon of them all. It was spotted in the US on the Washington-Idaho border around midday last Saturday.
I am a sucker for atmospheric phenomena, and this one takes the cake. It’s raining here on Bowen Island today, so it seemed appropriate to post this instead.
[tags]circumhorizon arc, rainbow, atmosphere[/tags]