American in Spain

Several months ago, amongst random meandering thoughts, I realized that there would be a day this year that would match three consecutive numbers on the Fibonacci sequence. For those of you who can’t remember your math teacher’s face, the Fibonacci sequence is the sequence of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and creates each number in the sequence by summing the previous two. So it goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89… You may notice that three of those numbers are 5, 8, and 13, which are today’s date. In the United States and nowhere else. Anyway, this sequence is important throughout mathematics, including the awesomeness of the Golden Ratio and its surprising, but not so surprising when you think about it, occurrence in Nature.
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When I shared the final photo from this post a few days ago, it got much praise on the social networks. One of my friends told me that when she first saw it, she assumed – as is always possible with my photos – that it was a Photoshop fake. She said that it looked “too perfect”. I had also noticed the especially pleasing aesthetic to the photograph, but it took me a bit to put my finger on it. What is amazing about the original photograph is the perfectly spherical appearance of my wife’s belly.
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Have you ever left your computer in the shop or with your employer’s IT department for them to fix? You can’t help but wonder, why are they taking so long?

I’ve worked for several IT departments, and I’ve worked with some really nice, competent people, and some really cranky, incompetent people. Being a network administrator is a huge power rush. When I was 16, I was interning at a local government institution and had full administrator privileges across the entire network with hundreds of users. I could view people’s screens or delete their files on a whim if I so chose. Luckily I was a benevolent deity.

After all my years of experience, I now present the secret that the IT department doesn’t want you to know: what they are really doing with your laptop.
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Recently, my watch broke. Well, kind of. I’ve never seen a watch break like this. Rather than the second hand moving 6° every second, every two seconds, it goes tick-tick and moves 12°, thus keeping perfect time. While on another errand to the local jeweler to see if they could fix my mother-in-law’s earring, I casually showed it to the jeweler to see if she’d ever seen something like this. She explained, not very clearly (to me), that often watches have an auxiliary battery or chip or something that ticks every two seconds, and that when the battery runs low, it switches over to the two-second ticking.
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Over the past few years, the technology of 3D printing has shown itself to be a complete game changer. In a few very short years, with the initial investment of a printer, it will be possible to download physical objects. The plastic molding industry is going to be the first to feel the pain but eventually all manufacturing will be at risk. I expect to be a grandfather before complex electronics can be printed at home, but a wide variety of knickknacks and general household replacement items will be coming sooner, e.g. already you can download and print replacement knobs for a variety of items.
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Last Christmas, after seeing me express some coveting interest in a geeky product on the internet, my parents gave me a binary clock. Part of what I love about it is that it reminds me of the very first circuit (with a chip) that I made in my high school electronics class. We had a breadboard – that’s a board with lots of holes to push wires into to connect them, not something to serve a cheese platter on – and a timer chip, a counter chip, a battery, some LEDs, and some wires to connect them. Sure enough, they started blinking and counting in binary! It’s sort of the Hello World of computer engineering.
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This week, I am traveling to Brussels to meet some very good friends of mine, with whom I communicate on a daily basis, but whom I have never actually met in person. This is a very, very strange phenomenon which has only been possible since the rise of the internet. Maybe before the internet, you could have a pen pal that you get to know intimately before meeting, but that’s not the same as feeling part of a social group dynamic like I do.
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I love it when creative photography ideas come to fruition. When Nora was six months old, pretty much as soon as she could maintain a propped up sitting position in time for me to snap a photograph, I created a composite photograph of four of her sitting on our ugly green sofa. Then, a year later, I followed up with a shot of her six month old self with her eighteen month old self, which clearly left two spots on the sofa for older versions. Last year, I filled in the third spot with a 2.5 year old Nora. The time has now come (I set a calendar reminder) to continue the September tradition and add the fourth Nora to the sofa.
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Like many of my friends, I rarely watch live television anymore, aside from sporting events. I did, however, watch the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics alone on my sofa. Except it didn’t feel like I was alone, because I had my smartphone, and many of my Facebook and Twitter friends were also watching the same event and making witty comments about what they were seeing. Though separated by vast distances, we enjoyed the spectacle much more than if we hadn’t had the social networks to unite us.

My friends in the United States, however, could not participate, since their Olympics coverage was delayed in a ridiculous prime time ratings power play by NBC. A few of them expressed annoyance at my “spoiler” comments about the event. And sure enough, when it aired in the US, there was a wave of social media commentary as they were witnessing the event. That’s when the idea came to me…
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If you even remotely dabble in or read news about social networking, you may have heard of a recent hoax in which a graphic was passed around by millions of internet users depicting the digital readout from the time machine in the Back To The Future trilogy, with the date being June 27, 2012, the date the hoax image went viral. The creator of the image, a social medial manager by the name of Steve Berry, created the image to promote the Blu-ray box set release of the trilogy. This is not the first time such a hoax image was passed around the internet.
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