Pelanne.Com

From the annals of history, the first IT help session ever recorded. Read the subheads on the top…

We just returned from a short stint in the British Virgin Islands -about a week on Tortola and a few days on Virgin Gorda.

The people are very friendly (and tolerant of the fact that tourists generally leave their brains at home) and the mood is refreshingly laid back. The surrounding scenery is dreamscape beautiful of course, so when you add that to the mix, it’s pretty much all you can ask for from a vacation.

The fact that they use the dollar instead of the pound was not lost on us as being a big plus, either.

So, with all that said, specifically, we can enthusiastically recommend:

• Long Bay Beach (and it’s absolutely idyllic younger brother, Smugglers Cove)
• A walk through The Baths on Virgin Gorda (watch yourself on the rope line)
• The BBQ Jerk Chicken at the Top Of The Baths restaurant
• Every single dish at the Sugar Mill Restaurant on Tortola
• The Trellis Bay Cyber Cafe (you can’t beat an honor bar with a stick)
• The power of rhum in its many incarnations
• Georgio’s Table Restaurant on Virgin Gorda (wine stored right!)
• The friendly and politically spirited Wendelling Taxi Service, found at the grocery store at Trellis Bay
• Painkillers made from scratch. They are melted-ice-cream-caliber nectar goodness.
• The funky rhythm bands that play to you when you’re sweating in line at San Juan airport

It was a week and a half of

FUN…

SUN…

CUTE AND DELICIOUS CHICKEN (cute pictured below)

If you know me, you can check out the photo-journalistic quality documentation of the trip. Just go to http://pelanne.com/<name here> - just replace <name here> with the lower-cased first name of the apartment-mate I knew after college who was famous for his intensive studying regimen.

Developed at Carnegie Mellon, the keepon is the latest generation of little dancing robots that have been around for a decade or so. This one is unique in terms of the range of motion it gets with it’s two spheres, and with no arms and legs to boot.

It probably wins some award for the cutest dancing robot too…

To quote one You-tuber: “Damn marshmellow dances better than me!”

Steven (that’s without a “ph”) sent me this great link. The player’s name is Bryan Sutton, and he’s playing a tune called Texas Gales - basically it’s a flatpicking festivus. Tony Rice and Norman Blake do a great version of this song as well.

The thing that gives me hope in this video is that he barely uses his pinky at all.

The Pleiades, as captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Technically, they’re known as the M45 open cluster - also known as the Seven Sisters. To the naked eye, they appear as a faint blur in the constellation of Taurus. It it’s about 12 light years across and contains approximately 500 stars. The cluster is passing through an unrelated cloud of dust, which reflects the light of the brighter blue stars - this is especially evident in this Spitzer photo.

The 19th-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson described them as “glittering like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid”.

High res photo

Yay - it’s time for the Bald Eagle Cam! This one is located right across the state in Norfolk.

I was told about this duo by one of my co-workers, and thank goodness for that.

The elevator pitch version of their bio is that they’re from Mexico City, where they were in a thrash metal band, and then moved to Ireland where they started playing this amazing high-energy acoustic guitar. Another of my co-workers noted that the next logical step would be for them to move to China and start playing Celtic ballads.

That story itself is pretty cool - but seeing and hearing it is even cooler.

Behold - Dublin being rocked: