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Apparently an expert in Tokyo suggested that if millions of people watered their streets it would drop the temperature by 2 degrees in an attempt to beat the summer heat. Now, I wonder how would that go during our current water restrictions…

I got my copy of Lotus Advisor magazine this week - with everything else going on at the moment, I had completely forgotten I subscribed a few weeks ago. Hey Rocky, now I know what you look like since your photo is all over the magazine… Good articles, and loads of info on current technologies; should be exactly what I need to keep up there days.

I’ve been so busy with the sessions I haven’t have time to put any updates the last couple of days. The 2 nights at Victoria Gardens (Richmond) were a great success. Last night we had at least 3,000 people patiently waiting to catch a glimpse of the red planet through the clouds. The weather wasn’t kind to us but the crowd was determined to see Mars; every time there was a break in the clouds, a cheer followed… lasting only 10 seconds or so (I was forced to rush people through to give everyone a chance).

While we waited for a break in the clouds I decided to run a ‘Mars quiz’ with the people in my queue (we had to do something) and that was a lot of fun. As per usual, plenty of questions about Mars, telescopes in general, the ASV, the universe, you name it… Lots of $2 donations (thanks everyone!) and I even managed to sell quite a few ‘I saw Mars…” posters too. Next sessions are at Bundoora Thursday-Friday, followed by Mt Waverly on the weekend.

Whilst most of us Notes Developers immediately think of IBM Websphere when it comes to J2EE, I was suprised to find how many other implementations of J2EE application servers there are. Let’s see, Sun has their own Sun ONE J2EE application server, Oracle another, theres the Tomcat stuff, God there’s even the Acme server! I guess many of those implementations would be open source models but still, Websphere is not alone.

Wow! what an overwhelming response! More than 2,000 (Correction, 10,000!) attended last night’s Mars Attacks! public demonstrations at Braeside park hosted by the ASV. I was there with my 3.5″ ETX-90 telescope (next to the 16″ and the 10″ telescopes!) but hey, a lot of people said that they could see more detail with the ‘baby’ telescope than the big ones… There was some confusion at the start of the night as everyone was trying to find out where to make their $2 donation, in the end they ended up giving us the money. It was a great night overall, the sky was crystal clear (so much for tonight) and everyone had a good time (I hope). Plenty of questions about Mars, along the lines of “… why is it orange in colour?”, “…are there people on Mars?” and “…what is the chemical composition of the southern polar cap?”

It’s getting better and better each day; for the first time I could “clearly” see several surface features on Mars! Syrtis Major was there, staring right at me. Hopefully the weather will be kind to us for the first public demonstrations starting this Friday 22nd & 23rd at Braeside Park; if you haven’t been following my Mars updates for the past 2 months (where have you been?) do yourself a favour and come along to one of nights with the ASV; entry is only a $2 fee to help us with the construction of our new 30″ telescope. Observing sessions begin at 8pm. Hope to see you there!

Look, I just couldn’t wait any longer - I bought an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, the Gigabyte one to be more precise (the price of this given hardware will not be disclosed here for the usual spouse reasons). Ha, and I thought (all this time) that my nVidia Ti4600 was fast… well, the ATI is something else… x8 FSAA, x16 AF and still no slowdowns??? Am I ready for HL2 and DoomIII? yeah, I think so. I’ll post my 3DMark2003 scores when I get a chance too.