• UK Telegraph: Stephen Hawking’s Explosive New Theory – “They argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.“

The summer is finally upon us, and I thought it would be fun to list some of our favorite local activities here in Sammamish (we’re the city to the east of Redmond).

First, there are some great farmer’s markets. We love these because the produce is bright and fresh, as are the flowers.

• The Redmond Saturday Market takes place adjacent to Redmond Town Center, May through October of each year.
• The Sammamish Farmer’s Market takes place on Wednesdays at the Sammamish Commons in the middle of the Sammamish Plateau, late May through early October. It just started this year but from what I hear it is going well.
• The Issaquah Farmer’s Market is held in the Pickering Barn near Costco. Runs mid-April through mid-October each year.
• The Kirkland Wednesday Market takes place on Wednesdays, April through October, in the middle of Kirkland.

Next, a few fun summer events:

• We went to our first Fremont Solstice Parade yesterday. This is the place to go in Seattle to see the fun, fringe part of our community, including the famous naked cyclists.
• The Movies at Marymoor are great. The movies are projected on a large, inflatable screen. Bring chairs and blankets; it gets cold when the sun goes down.
• Fourth of July at Gasworks Park is a lot of fun. The best plan is to take a blanket, get there early in the day, and take it easy. If you don’t want to go all the way to Seattle, the Family 4th in Bellevue is a worthwhile alternative.
• The Redmond Derby Days celebrates Redmond’s status as the bicycle capital of the country.
• SeaFair is the month-long water and sea celebration, topped off (at least for us) by the air show at the beginning of August, featuring the Blue Angels.
• Bumbershoot, our local music festival, takes place at the end of summer on the grounds of Seattle Center.

These are my personal favorites. What are yours?

• The Big Picture: Martian Skies – “High, wispy clouds cover a large portion of Mars, seen in this, the first true-colour image of Mars generated with the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue color filters.“
• Greg Verdino: 7 Tips For Real-World Businesses in Second Life – “I feel like those of us who have been advising clients on virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular for the past year or two have been prescribing a set of (if not best practices) rules of the road designed to help marketers entering the metaverse steer clear of danger. “

• David Hornik: Know Your Competition – “How do you know a great entrepreneur when you meet one? Great entrepreneurs would do a better job running the competition than their competitors are doing. They can tell you not only the ways in which their strategy is better than their competitors’, but also the ways in which their competitors have created the very opportunity that they are exploiting.“
• Tom Raftery: Introducing the Negawatt – “What then is a NegaWatt? A NegaWatt, is a MegaWatt of electricity that you don’t use! Huh?“
• Hank Williams: Memo To The Semantic Web: Drop “Semantic” And Become The “Graph Web” – “It turns out that thinking in terms of graphs is far easier than thinking in terms of tables and relations. The semantic web community is so busy trying to sell a utopian vision of data access that they are burying the lead, which, for a typical developer, is in large part, about ease of development and time to market.“
• Vollee – “Welcome to the Vollee beta. You can now access Second Life whenever & wherever you want to.“

• MindMeister: Collaborative Online Mind Mapping – “” – Via @cloudgirl.
• eBirdseed – “eBirdseed.com does one thing extremely well – we ship the highest quality wild bird seed throughout the United States.“
• GigaOM: Vermont Oks The Creation of Virtual Corporations – “Johnson was instrumental to crafting the bill’s language; he, along with his NYLS students and a couple of professors at Vermont Law School, spent the last two years putting it together. He foresees virtual companies launched for countless reasons, such as the production of software or publications written by people across the country, even for corporations that exist only in Second Life.“
• Suchi Software Solutions: S3 Firefox Organizer – “New Features in v0.4.1: – Compatible with Firefox 3.0 ” – Yay!

• Eureka Science News: Scientists Confirm That Parts Of Earliest Genetic Material May Have Come From The Stars – “Because meteorites represent left over materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components for life — including nucleobases — could be widespread in the cosmos.“
• Astronomy Picture of the Day: M51 Hubble Remix – “Image data from the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has been reprocessed to produce this alternative portrait of the well-known interacting galaxy pair. The processing has further sharpened details and enhanced color and contrast in otherwise faint areas, bringing out dust lanes and extended streams that cross the small companion, along with features in the surroundings and core of M51 itself.“

My son Andy just graduated from the Running Start program at Bellevue Community College. This program allowed him to spend his last two years of high school on a college campus, taking college-level classes, culminating in an Associates degree (with honors no less), which he received earlier today!

In addition to holding down a full load of very tough classes, Andy found the time to teach piano to 15 students and to create an awesome music video. And he’s always smiling too!

He’ll be entering an honors program at the University of Washington this fall, rooming next-door to his big brother Stephen.

Needless to say, I am very proud of him!

I’m working from home today, putting together some presentations and working on some plans.

I have a couple of bird feeders outside of my window. It is fun to watch the birds (and a squirrel or two) come and go. Some of the smaller birds appear to be insensitive to my presence behind the window. I can move my chair, get close to the window, and even snap pictures while they nibble on sunflower seeds.

Others, the blue jays, in particular, are a lot more skittish. When I hear the creak of the chain, I have to turn slowly and quietly in order to avoid scaring them away. This morning I managed to snap a nice picture of one:

• Zha’s Virtual Musings: Happy Jumpy Ruths… Interop Takes a Step – “What’s to unusual about logging into OpenSim? Nothing. But.. this wasn’t a normal login. All three Avatars had been logged on via the Agent Domain in the Linden Lab Aditi test grid. The Agent Domain took a “placeavatar” request from the client, and issued a “rezavatar” request to the OpenSim, which handed the Agent Domain the necessary details so it could relay it to the client, and permit a login.“

• Consumer Reports: Your debt – 8 benchmarks for borrowing – “Those who are financially well off might be tempted to turn the page. Don’t. Debt problems can stalk anyone, especially in a slowing economy. “
• Cosmic Log: Space Telescopes Team Up – “In all, more than 800,000 images were stitched together into a mosaic of the Milky Way’s galactic plane that takes in 120 degrees of width and just 2 degrees of height. The portrait is so detailed, shallow and long that you have to post it on a wall – or look at it using a zoomable image browser – to get the full impact.“
• NASA: Spitzer Space Telescope – “This page contains high-resolution images from the Spitzer Space Telescope which you can interactively zoom into and pan around. “
• NASA: Spitzer Space Telescope: Spitzer Wallpapers – “Now you can decorate your computer’s desktop with exciting Spitzer wallpaper. Simply select the one you want, download it at your preferred resolution, and select it in your operating system.“