I skipped a couple of weeks but decided to get back to post these again
Went to Washington DC with the family during spring break. I always wanted to see the cherry blossoms in DC but so far every time I visited Washington DC it was in the middle of the summer. This year I got lucky because it was colder than normal for March so the cherry trees didn't bloom until the first week of April.
Here is a pic I took of the Jefferson Memorial with the cherry blossoms in the foreground.
The plan was to visit NPR studios, see the Air and Space museum in Virginia and then to hit a museum or two.
The drive from Princeton to the Air and Space museum was not bad, it took a little under 4 hours. There were a couple of things I wanted to see in the museum, these were
The Space Shuttle
The Enola Gay plane
The Concord
World War II fighter planes
Here is the space shuttle
For some reason I thought the space shuttle was bigger, I guess I was comparing the shuttle to a Boeing 747
We took a tour and the tour guide was quite good, he had some interesting stories and facts that he gave us
In the pic above you see the Enola Gay plane, this is the plane that was used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tour guy told us that when they were training in the US with this plane, there was only one person that knew what the real mission would be. It was interesting to see how shiny this plane was. I wonder who has to keep these plane polished and how long it takes
Here is also a close up of the cockpit
The plane below is a Hawker Hurricane IIC
The Hawker Hurricane IIC plane was the first British monoplane fighter and the first British fighter to exceed 483 kilometers (300 miles). Hurricane fighters fought the Luftwaffe and helped win the battle of Britain in the summer of 1940
The plane below is a Heinkel He 219 A Uhu
A Heinkel He 219 A Uhu was armed with up to 8 cannons and guided to its target by radar. The Heinkel He 219 A Uhu (Eagle Owl) was one of the Luftwaffe most formidable night fighters. On the aircraft's first mission, a single Heinkel He 219 A Uhu shot down at least five British bombers
Here are some Luftwaffe planes with swastikas on them
Finally here you can see the 'real' Air Jaws :-)
The Air and Space museum in Virginia is really cool, it is bigger than the one in Washington DC and the entrance is free as well
NPR
We took a tour of the NPR facility in Washington DC. The tour was really good, it took an hour and they took us to several floors as well as the roof. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures on ever floor so I can just share a handful of pics.
Studio
I was surprised that NPR had a bunch of windows machines... I expected them all to be Macs or even Linux but nope... all Windows machines. Below is a pic of the backup studio, the microphones come from Germany and are quite expensive
Sound Diffuser
What you see in the picture below is a sound diffuser.
Here is how wikipedia explains what a sound diffuser is
Diffusors (or diffusers) are used to treat sound aberrations, such as echoes, in rooms. They are an excellent alternative or complement to sound absorption because they do not remove sound energy, but can be used to effectively reduce distinct echoes and reflections while still leaving a live sounding space. Compared to a reflective surface, which will cause most of the energy to be reflected off at an angle equal to the angle of incidence, a diffusor will cause the sound energy to be radiated in many directions, hence leading to a more diffusive acoustic space. It is also important that a diffusor spreads reflections in time as well as spatially. Diffusors can aid sound diffusion, but this is not why they are used in many cases; they are more often used to remove coloration and echoes.
Diffusors come in many shapes and materials. The birth of modern diffusors was marked by Manfred R. Schroeders' invention of number-theoretic diffusors in the 1970s.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_(acoustics)
In the pic below you can see my daughter Catherine holding the Emmy Awards that one of the Tiny Desk hosts won
Tiny Desk, yes you read that right... tiny not tidy :-) Most of the stuff you see in this picture is the stuff that performers left after performing. Adele left her water bottle, I believe they KISS guys also left a water bottle. Pretty cool to see all this stuff
In the pic below is the camera David Gilkey was carrying when he was killed in Afghanistan on June 5th 2016. David Gilkey was a staff photographer and video editor for NPR, covering both national and international news
This Week I Learned
Learned a bunch of stuff about PostgreSQL by taking a Pluralsight courseThis Week I tweeted
Nikon versus Canon: A Story Of Technology ChangePretty cool post showing you how Canon gained ground on Nikon
The high-stakes battle for the Pentagon’s winner-take-all cloud contract
There is a battle afoot, one you might not have heard about yet, but it involves a high-stakes winner-take-all contract for the Department of Defense’s cloud contract. It could involve billions of dollars and when a humongous sum of money meets a set of powerful tech companies, intrigue can’t be far behind.
The story even has a Star Wars reference with the Pentagon dubbing the project the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). Who says the Pentagon is staid?
The tech names involved include the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Rean Cloud, LLC.
Based on Trump's tweets last week... I doubt it will go to AWS
Some cool stuff you might enjoy
It's time to head back to RSS?
THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.
Well I never left RSS, after Google Reader was shut down I switched to Feedly and have been using it ever since
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