Here’s a nice view of the heart of JSC. Over at Flickr, I have an annotated version showing the various places I’ve worked (and eaten) within JSC.

Paul Festa, who writes a weblog over at c|net has noticed the ticker on Gmail’s login page, the one that shows the increasing amount of storage Gmail is giving users for their e-mail. As I write this, it’s at 2096 and counting. I dug into the Gmail page source the other day, found the constants […]

Congratulations to Bryn, who brought home an all-A report card yesterday!
We pay for good report cards around here in lieu of allowance. Pay for performance is they way of the world, and it’s never too early to learn that hard work pays off.
Since the iPod Mini came out, I’ve been promising the girls an iPod […]

It’s the first few words of this sonnet that we should find the most appealing:
Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
William Wordsworth
Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned–
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only–this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the […]

Under The Harvest Moon
Carl Sandburg
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
One way to observe […]

This is the Fred Hartman bridge and its shadow. The Hartman is a relatively new and beautiful bridge that carries Texas Highway 146 across the Houston ship channel, joining Baytown and La Port.

On The Screened Porch
Elizabeth Biller Chapman
Suppertime. Corn, cooked–some milk
in the water–always threatens to boil over. You let those ears
stand, when it’s seethed, two minutes. More tender, that way.
My mother and I
at summer’s edge, the garden not as it was, but
lush, intensely green, the lawn’s near perfect.
She says, “I love the shadows long”–
[…]

The Coin Behind Your Ear
Connie Wanek
Before you knew you owned it
it was gone, stolen, and you were a fool.
How you never felt it is the wonder,
heavy and thick,
lodged deep in your hair like a burr.
You still see the smile of the magician
as he turned the coin in his long fingers,
which had so disturbed your ear
with […]

Here is the Texas State Capitol building, located on Congress St between 11th and 14th streets in Austin.

I had intended to accompany this photo with an aerial photo of the Alamo. Unfortunately, the aerial photos of downtown San Antonio are fairly low resolution and uninteresting.

A simple, thoughtful poem by Billy Collins:
Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light […]

Here’s the most infamous place in all of Texas, Dealey Plaza, where John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. You can see it all in this aerial photo: Elm Street, the Texas Book Repository, and, of course, the grassy knoll.

unto thee i burn incense
ee cummings
unto thee i
burn incense
the bowl crackles
upon the gloom arise purple pencils
fluent spires of fragrance
the bowl
seethes
a flutter of stars
a turbulence of forms
delightful with indefinable flowering,
the air is
deep with desirable flowers
i think
thou lovest incense
for in the ambiguous faint aspirings
the indolent frail ascensions,
of thy smile rises the immaculate
sorrow
of thy low
hair flutter the level […]