Those who know me personally have come to expect a certain amount of frustration when trying to contact me on my phone, which until recently was a Motorola W755 clamshell phone which frequently lost connections, often failed to ring on incoming calls, and had a broken USB connector requiring me to remove the battery and place it in my previous Motorola phone whenever I needed a charge!

Enter the Samsung Galaxy S (“Fascinate” in Verizon's lineup). Yes, I'm aware that the S2 should be arriving in the USA in the third quarter of this year, but it will probably be priced around $300. The original S already has all the features I'm interested in, such as 6-axis inertial sensing and the OLED screen; 4G is less valuable than one might think given a lifestyle that affords constant wi-fi coverage as mine does; finally, at this late date, any smartphone at all is such an enormous discontinuous jump into the present that I can't really lose with any choice at all in this market!

As an excuse to try out FAU's new Living Room Theaters I spent some time Sunday seeing a French film named Potiche, which was surprisingly and tediously political at the same time. The surprise was my own fault: I didn't research it too closely before buying my ticket. Blame for the tedium falls elsewhere! Whereas most of the audience, I expect, saw Potiche as a charming and funny celebration of female empowerment, I saw mostly a nightmare in which everything was politics, everything from business decisions to paternal pride to tender moments between husband and wife tainted with the tawdry operations of socialist democracy.

Altoids mints have for many years been marketed under a brand that has successfully conveyed an image of Victorian understatement, exaggerated politesse, and quirky humor. I would think these lovely characteristics, which carried the mints to such success in the US market, would be enough for Callard and Bowser. Apparently not! A reckless experiment in marketing has resulted in what strikes me as more of a misstep than previous Altoids attempts at boundary-pushing. Recently I opened the familiar tin of peppermints expecting to be soothed by anachronistic charm, instead to be assaulted by an earthy imperative:

“Open your mint hole”? How of-the-moment. Thank you, but I don't think I will.

I took these images of a total lunar eclipse early in the morning on December 21, using the intervalometer on my Canon G6. You can see how the autofocus lost it on the last exposures, probably because the moon became too dim by that point. The individual photos were taken three minutes apart and screened together in photoshop to make this image.

“Master of Science” is really very grandiose-sounding, isn't it? I promise I won't insist on being styled as such, now that the unthinkable day is here and I actually have my degree in hand.

For new readers: I've been working on a master's degree in electrical engineering for the past 5 years or so, acquiring along the way a textbook case of ABD (“All But Dissertation”, a disease which is actually a formal status in some parts of academia). This summer, growing weary of the debilitating symptoms of this illness, I sat behind my computer and effected a cure, which required every scrap of free-time available from August to November. Hence the lack of updates on this blog in recent months.

Now, of course, I have all the time in the world—time enough, at least, to start on some exciting new projects. Come back soon for details!