Giant Rat Sighting

It is just plain crazy the kinds of things you notice when you decide to blog about strange sightings caught on a cell phone camera.  How about a giant rat?  I spotted this giant rat on my way into work this morning setting in downtown Rolla at the site of our "Opening Soon" Walgreen's.  Enjoy!!

Earthquake!!!! Magnitude 4.6 :: 27 miles SE of Calexico, CA :: Fri Sep 5 21:54:34 2008 UTC

I am a member of a really neat list that monitors seismic events in Southern California. It is one of the many uses of the computational clusters that I have been supporting. Cal-tech uses their computational cluster to generate what they call shakemaps within minutes of an earthquake in Southern California they release a movie to geologists studying the basin that gives immediate feedback of the seismic activity. I just think weather and earthquake data is very exciting so I thought I would share it here. I am going to try and attach the movies to this post as well just for the fun of doing it.

These are movies of a 4.6 quake that occurred late on Friday.

There is new media now available for download on the recent seismic event:

ML: 4.6
27 miles SE of Calexico, CA
UTC: Fri Sep 5 21:54:34 2008
Latitude: 32.38
Longitude: -115.24

All movies for this event are available from:
http://shakemovie.caltech.edu/event?evid=10347253

The movies available include:

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
http://shakemovie.caltech.edu/dl?evid=10347253&product=socal&style=orange&size=small

LOS ANGELES BASIN
http://shakemovie.caltech.edu/dl?evid=10347253&product=la&style=orange&size=small


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You will see an Email Password and Unsubscribe buttons at the bottom left.

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Seismic Event Simulation Portal Notification System.


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Funny Sighting from the Past

If you look really close at this picture you will see a Tonka dump truck strapped to the truck bed just behind the end loader. We thought this was so funny it had to be shared. I only wish our cell phone would have had a better camera.

Elijah's First Soccer Games

I have just finished watching Elijah's first to games of the season. His team was great. The one the first game by a narrow margin of 2-1 against "Galaxy" The only goal scored was while Elijah was goalie, it bounced off of our defender, Nick, and went sailing past Elijah on the far end of the net.

The second game was even better that had a 7-0 shut-out victory over Mac United II. My favorite part of this game was when there was a hand-ball in the box and the other team got to take a Penalty Kick right at Elijah. He blocked it with a beautiful dive to his left sending the ball just past the right post and out of the end zone resulting in a corner kick. This kept the game at a shutout victory.

This was an awesome Sunday afternoon, watching the Rolla Knights win there first two games.

Mantis Sightinging

I am really enjoying trying to catch strange things on my camera phone. This one is really not all that strange, but still worth blogging about. Check out the Preying Mantis that was setting on our satellite dish. It's not often that you see them and even less often that they pose for a picture.

A Sighting by Ange

Ange and Erin spotted this gasoline powered hang glider flying over Edgar Springs, MO. I had never seen one before. Earlier that morning I saw one fly over our house, but didn't get a good picture of it. It's funny how many unique sights you see when you start blogging. Check back often for more strange sightings.

Linked my blog to Facebook

I just figured out how to link my blog to my Facebook account. This is nice. Now I'll only have to log in one place to update things going on in my life. I hope everyone will enjoy following my blog, either here or on Facebook.

Repairing A Ford Escort Wagon

If you are the owner of Ford Escort do not trust the repair manuals, or information from the dealerships. I learned my lesson the hard way when the fuel pump went out in my 1998 Ford Escort station wagon. Everything on the internet and information from the dealership suggested that replacing the fuel pump required dropping the fuel tank from the car.

I proceeded to follow the directions and dropped the fuel tank only to find that it was attached to the wiring harness under the rear seat at an access panel. I could have simply removed the rear seat, removed the access panel, and replaced the fuel pump. The job should have taken a couple of hours tops, instead I spent my entire weekend under the Ford Escort removing the fuel tank.

The good news, my car is running great again.

Well that's it for now. Hope you are all having a good day.

Wienermobile Sighting

We spotted the Wienermobile on Highway 63 just at the end of our road toady. This was very exciting.

I was on my way to get the fuel pump for my car when the Wienermobile passed us on the highway. I got a really lucky shot at it with my MotoQ.

Open Source Project Idea

I have an idea for a new open source project that I may start soon. I have found a real need in my work for a solid scheduler for Linux clusters. I have found Moab to be very buggy, slurm, maui, and torque lacking features that I need. Our cluster has been unstable for the last three days due to issues with Moab that tech support has not been able to solve.