Megabytes

The new look for June is poppy. These luscious flowers are just outside my back door. I love the size of this variety of poppy.

Widgets - those handy mini-apps accessible at the touch of a key (F12 on an Mac OS 10.4+). Some of them provide useful data, like the weather widget or the stock ticker widget. Others are purely entertaining, like the Sudoku widget.
Well how about one that is a little of both? That is, silly and useful. Check out Corporate Ipsum widget. It generates filler copy using either corporate style meaningless jargon or the classic lorem ipsum text. You can set the number of paragraphs, the number of sentences per paragraph, and whether or not to include HTML tags.

I thought that Lollapalooza was a just a cool name for a music festival, so when I heard my mother use the word in a context having nothing to do with music or a festival, I had to look it up.
I thought the spelling was lalapalooza and to be sure, that is a variant spelling of it. Webster’s New World Dictionary points me to the correct spelling and defines this term as a noun, meaning something or someone very striking or exceptional.

Cooliris Previews is a great browser add-on that pops up a link preview without clicking on the link and leaving the page. It is available for Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers.

You may have noticed the bright new image at the top of my blog page. This magnificent cerulean-hued flower is Ceanothus Dark Star. Each April, our backyard is dominated by the striking color of this tall bush from its position in the southeast corner of the yard.
According to “Pigments through the Ages” website, the name “Cerulean blue” comes from Latin caelum = sky. At the Las Pilitas website, I learned that another name for this ceanothus is Small Leaf Mountain Lilac. Dark star is a showy Ceanothus with tiny leaves and round flower clusters; and grows 6 ft tall and eight ft wide.
As an astronomer, I appreciate its name, Dark Star. Though, if the stars of the night sky were truly dark, they wouldn’t be seen. On the other hand, there are many areas of the sky that are dark and worth looking at. The dark rifts of the Milky Way, for example, are enjoyable to gaze upon.
But I am off on too many tangents. Back to the image in my blog header – After experiencing how simple it was to change the image and manipulate the text, I intend to do so on a regular basis. Watch for a new header image in June. Will it be a glimpse of our cherry tree or one of our many roses?