My brief self-description describes myself as "a vegetarian who cheats a lot". I stick to a mostly plant-based diet, with a good variety of salads, veggie soups, fruits, pepperoni-and-veggie pizza, and occasional turkey pot pie - but only if it's loaded with veggies. Never a thick slab of steak, or a mound of meat. Ugh! I've heard of vegetarians, vegans, and even fructarians, but no term to categorize weirdos like me - just "vegetarian who cheats".

While web-surfing today i discovered there *is* a word for this eating preference: flexitarian. it's in wikipedia, so its official! Found The Word in a recent article on American-style eating and health by Michael Pollan in the NY Times (link to page 11 of 12:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=11&ei=5090&en=a18a7f35515014c7&ex=1327640400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss)

Cold, snowy, windy....more so tomorrow. To work from home tomorrow becomes appealing. Thanks to Subversion, i can check out files from various projects and crank away. No mucking aroun in a telnet or SSH session, making tarballs, tapping in long URLs that i dont' get right the first time. just a dumb-simple "svn update". Many use subversion every day, as we all make use of indoor plumbing, artificial lighting, and other marvels of modern invention, thinking of our task at hand but hardly ever thinking of these technologies themselves. Except, of course, for plumbers, electricians, and software developers.

I am very glad for Subversion and look forward to working from home tomorrow.

Well, this was worth getting up early for - Enceladus plume images, spectacular ones, released from CICLOPS today. http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1688. There's definitely something going on there at Enceladus' south pole. Seeing this heavenly orb with what appears in overexposed images like rocket exhaust reminded me of a painting - Frank Kelly Freas' illustration of the Earth boosted by a giant rocket engine embedded in Antarctica (hmm, the south pole...) - art for the story "Sins of the Fathers", Stan Schmidt, published in Analog 1973, and reproduced in Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction, publ. in 1977.

We are being slashdotted! The intriguing new images of Hyperion and Tethys went online (ciclops.org) and we watch the apparent sluggishness of our http server. It's actually a quite powerful machine set up as right as can be by our talented sysadmin, a machine that never breaks a sweat with even the biggest spikes of traffic, but i guess we need to convince the boss to upgrade from the 300 baud modem as our link to the outside world....

It has been fun watching these images appear in the media, but now it is late and i must sleep well so I can help make more of these magnificent images - i think it is Dione getting the next flyby. So many great images have been made, every target we image in the Saturn system has had surprises - Cassini scientists are having more fun than cats at the tuna cannery.

Though this will go down on my permanent record, i must create at least one admittedly lame Entry, just to see what happens... (in fact i didn't know /. had a Journal feature til i started poking around just now)