One of the perks that Meghan gets through her job are invites to swanky resorts. Last week was Wentworth-by-the-Sea, this week was a client inviting her to the Loon Mountain Ski Resort for a day of snow sports.
The sleds kick up lots of snow, much of which winds up on the back of your head
Meghan and I don’t ski, but they have more than skiing; our activity of choice was sledding. This isn’t any ordinary sledding, though: they seem to have repurposed an old ski lift and trail. The sleds are snow-tubes with rails and brakes. You take a lift up to the top, ride down for as long as 30 seconds, and head back up. There were few other sledders so we had zero waiting.
After a group lunch with the client and their other guests, the two of us decided to sight-see. We climbed in the car and drove up into the mountains along the Kancamagus Highway. Despite the clouds the views were beautiful.
Looking out from a scenic overlook just below the Kancamagus Pass (3k’ elevation)The sun was starting to peek out to the east, but west was still solidly clouded over. There had been snow earlier in the day, but only in these higher elevations.The low clouds meant we couldn’t see the mountain tops, as they faded into the clouds
Meghan’s employer invites all employees and their families to an annual three-day retreat at a fancy spa and hotel called Wentworth-by-the-Sea. This is our second year.
Last year we mostly stayed n the hotel due to a snow storm, but this year we ventured out a bit to take in some local color. We found a state park called Fort Constitution (also known as Fort William and Mary), which is situated inside the grounds of a Coast Guard station.
Fort Constitution, as seen from the water (or closest I could get it from the little tip of rock that extends out)
I don’t normally pay much attention to geology but the bit of rock that juts out into the water is very eye-catching.
I was drawn to the striations in the rock. This is a great example of sedimentary rock with lots of iron in it.A different section, with a shoe for scale. The layer inclusion on the right (might no be the technical term) is what caught my eye
We also drove around a bit; the town is reminiscent of Mystic, CT.
Date: Evening of December 31, 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Event: New Year’s Eve
Baba and Alpha, watching the carousel
We rang in the New Year in traditional style: a night out in Boston. This year we had the very good fortune to be joined by Baba (Meghan’s mother, the girls’ grandmother).
Most years we take a train into the city to avoid issues with ‘amateur night’ drivers, but not this year. Being a Saturday, the commuter rail only runs a limited schedule; there are extra trains but not until later in the evening.
We reserved parking right next to the Commons (Parking Panda to the rescue!) but planned to start the night at Quincy Market. I dropped the rest of the family off there and ran downtown to park the car. I made the short walk back to meet with everyone again in about fifteen minutes.
We shopped a bit before getting an excellent early dinner at The Black Rose. We’ve been there several times; despite it’s location right next to Quincy Market it doesn’t have the air of a tourist trap. It does have excellent Guinness on tap, though!
Let me back up a few days before I present the next photo: both girls have had braces on their teeth for a long while, until this past week. Beta will be getting a second round when she gets a little older, but for now they both have brilliant smiles.
Alpha, Mom, and Beta, dinner at the Black Rose in Boston
Dinner was followed by a little more window-shopping, a brief stop for Blink, the Greenway Carousel, and dessert in the market.
We walked from Quincy Market to Boston Common, about a mile. We stopped for hot chocolate and hot apple cider across the street at The Thinking Cup Cafe. Both were very good.
Finally, at 7 pm: fireworks.
NYE 2016 Fireworks – my phone’s camera cannot do them justice, but they were right over our heads
After the fireworks, our decision to park across the street paid off. We picked up the car and made it out of the city before the rest of the traffic.
Baba slept over our house to avoid amateur night traffic, rain – the threat of rain made good shortly after we got home – and for a promise of waffles in the morning. Meghan and her mom stayed up to watch a show, Hinterland, but everyone was asleep well before midnight.
One day I was sitting in my 2nd-floor apartment in a multi-family home. I was the meat of the apartment sandwich: a family below me, and a family above me. The house was owned by our very good friend Val Scott Barker.
One Saturday afternoon I was quietly reading at home when a tremendous crash echoed from upstairs. I, like so many apartment dwellers before me, stood under the source of the sound for a long moment and wondered just what exactly happened up there.
My wonder only increased when several minutes later the ceiling fan in the middle of the room started dripping a whitish fluid. Inspection was inconclusive because it was tinged reddish-brown. Had they killed someone with a can of white paint up there? The lamp had a steady stream for a short while, and dripped for almost an hour; I caught it in a small cup. Upon further inspection it appeared to be milk that had picked up dirt from between the floors.
Several days later the mystery was put to bed when I talked to one of the occupants. Their toddler wanted something on a high shelf in the fridge, and had pulled an entire shelf out — one that included a full gallon of milk. Most of the milk disappeared into the hardwood floor before she could clean it up.
We moved out a couple of years later, into a house of our own. Bill and Laura had created a second small adorable child, but they never topped the milk pouring out of the ceiling while I was there.
Living in our new home town occasionally yields surprises, some good and some not. Tonight’s surprise is definitely the former.
We’re located no more than 15 miles from Boston (as the crow flies) and we’ve come to expect a certain level of light pollution from the city and surrounding suburbs, including our own commercial strip here in town.
So color me shocked when Meghan strides in at 10 pm tonight, returning from a friend’s house, and announces that she can see the Pleiades.
We head back outside to look and, as we stand where the driveway meets the street we count six of the seven sisters. If I recall correctly that was considered good in ancient times; seeing all seven was reserved for the eagle-eyed among us. Pretty good for front-yard star gazing.
I’m attempting to set up an HTTP server in NiFi to accept uploads and process them on-demand. This gets tricky because I want to submit the files using an existing web application that will not be served from NiFi, which leads to trouble with XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and setting up CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing [1]).
The trouble starts with just trying to PUT or POST a simple file. The error in Firefox reads:
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).
You can serve up the Javascript that actually performs the upload from NiFi and side-step XSS, but you may still run into trouble with CORS. You’ll have trouble even if NiFi and your other web server live on the same host (using different ports, of course), as they’re considered different hosts for the purposes of XSS prevention.
HandleHttpResponse processor config
To make this work, you’ll need to enable specific headers in the HandleHttpResponse processor. Neither the need to set some headers, nor the headers that need to be set, are documented by NiFi at this time (so far as I can tell).
Open the configuration of the HandleHttpResponse processor
Add the following headers and values as properties and values, but see below for notes regarding the values
You may want to review the value for Access-Control-Allow-Origin, as the wildcard may allow access to unexpected hosts. If your server is public-facing (why would you do that with NiFi?) then you certainly don’t want a wildcard here. The wildcard makes configuration much simpler if NiFi is strictly interior-facing, though.
The specific values to set for Access-Control-Allow-Methods depend on what you’re doing. You’ll probably need OPTIONS for most cases. I’m serving up static files so I need GET, and I’m receiving uploads that may or may not be chunked, so I need POST and PUT.
The actual headers needed for Access-Control-Allow-Headers is a bit variable. A wildcard is not an acceptable value here, so you’ll have to list every header you need separately — and there are a bunch of possible headers. See [3] for an explanation and a fairly comprehensive list of possible headers. Our list contains a small subset that covers our basic test cases; your mileage may vary.
You may also want to set up a RouteOnAttribute processor to ignore OPTIONS requests (${http.method:equals('OPTIONS')}), otherwise you might see a bunch of zero-byte files in your flow.
Weird Al Yankovic was a big part of Meghan’s and my childhood, and pretty much anyone in our generation. You could say he’s a hero of sorts. When I found out, quite by accident, that his latest tour had dates near us I bought tickets the same day. The only decision was which venue.
I chose the Lowell Summer Music Series; as Meghan said, if it rains we would be able to say that not only have we seen Weird Al live, but we saw him in a high school gymnasium. (The high school next door is the rain location.) It’s outdoors and BYOBlanket; so long as it didn’t rain and move indoors the kids are free.
So, on the appointed date and earliest possible time after work (which was earlier today, as I write this) we packed up the kids and a blanket and headed to the park to stake out a spot.
The stage, shortly before the show started. They waited for dark so they could recreate the roaming camera scene from the ‘Tacky’ video (which was the opening number)
The show was flawless. It was small enough to be fun, large enough to let the crowd’s energy really flow, and turned-down enough that I wasn’t deaf at the end. Alpha and Beta spent most of the show in a corner of the park with some other kids, but they enjoyed the show immensely as well. Their view was better than ours, despite the distance — they could see over the crowd, while we had to contend with the sound booth/tent.
Weird Al in the fat suit singing ‘Fat’. My childhood has been redeemed. Apologies for the potato quality, all I had was my cell phone and the stage lighting was particularly bright and direct during this song.
There was a good mix of old and new songs over a couple of hours, interspersed with video clips while the band changed costumes. Among other songs (in no particular order), there was Tacky (the opening number), Dare to Be Stupid, the aforementioned Fat, Amish Paradise, White and Nerdy, an awesome arrangement of Like A Surgeon set to the “unplugged” arrangement of Eric Clapton’s Layla (really), a couple of polkas interspersed throughout (of course), and closing with Yoda.
Cover of Weird Al’s latest album and tour
The girls were buzzing as we left the park, and wide awake despite a) being 10 pm, b) after a regular day of school, and c) on the first week of school. They can sleep in tomorrow, there’s no school, and Meghan and I aren’t setting an alarm — our jobs are flexible enough that we can afford to be a little late.
There’s a small, boring backstory: Meghan renewed our membership with the Museum of Science (MOS), then asked me if we should renew it (she asked me via text, so she may have a different order of events). I said we shouldn’t, since the girls haven’t been interested in going and we basically did not go at all last year — HOWEVER if we were to actually go just once I would be happy to renew while we were on-site. Despite talking about this all over text, Meghan’s disappointment was evident as she dutifully cancelled the renewal.
I considered my options carefully, as the couch isn’t a particularly comfortable place to sleep, and gently reminded her that the MOS has an observatory that they open on Friday nights to view the stars — therefore it would be open later that night, and I would happily renew while we were there. All we had to do was get the kids on board with going, or figure out what they would do while the two of us went. (The girls thought this was a cool idea. 50 points to Gryffindor.)
Credit to https://bkellysky.wordpress.com/
A few hours later we found ourselves standing on the roof of the MOS parking garage, waiting for our turn at the telescope. Sadly, I could not photograph the view from the telescope, but it was a surprisingly clear view of Saturn. A number of other people have taken photographs that are pretty similar to what we saw. Happily the docent was informative and happy to answer questions, and didn’t make us feel rushed. The MOS seems to have crowd management around the telescope down pat.
While we were waiting our turns, we took a few other pictures of Boston and astronomical phenomena, and watched the city bustle around us.
Look to the left and up from the moon, that’s Jupiter. High, thin clouds were moving in, backlighting the view and obscuring the dimmer stars. The photo was taken with my cell phone, apologies for the potato-like quality.
Weird Al Yankovic
