April 2011 Archives

You were wondering what it looks like when lightning strikes the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, Alisdair Miller has you covered. Follow the link for more from this series

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The Texas Forest Service undertook controlled burns on Sunday, April 17, 2011 to get rid of fuel on the mountains around McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Here, Black Mountain is burning. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope dome is at right. (Frank Cianciolo/McDonald Observatory)

America is doomed. So we might as well rip the bandage off quickly and no one is better suited to end the American experiment than Santorum. Why linger and limp along for a decade or so before the country completely and yet painfully slowly sinks into the abyss of third-world-ness? Let's just get it over with. Santorum is our man.

Boucheron (mentioned all over the place), has been working with Girard Perregaux for their watch collection since 2007.  For their next collection, Audacious, they have given up all pretense of restraint. 

The collection starts with a series of pieces in a sub-collection called L'Orientale.  The basic piece has a mother-of-pearl dial, carved, painted and inlayed with an arabesque of diamonds, and surrounded by a triple ring of diamonds on the bezel.  These are powered by the reliable, if inoffensive, GP 4000 movement.

Steel case, dial set with sapphires	Rose gold case, dial set with rubies

Moving up in the collection we come to a pair of watches names Shéhérazade. These have dials of semi-precious stone mosaic set with colored stones in a dizzying pattern or circles and arabesques. To reinforce the vertigo, the subsecond dial is replaced with a rotating multi-colored wheel at 7 o'clock. As usual, the workmanship is exemplary. (NB: the 'crazy' is part of the model name NOT an editorial comment)

Crazy Shéhérazade in rose gold and diamonds. Dial in Sonora Sunrise mosaic set with multicolored sapphires and diamonds.	Crazy Shéhérazade in white gold and diamonds. Dial in Lapis Lazuli mosaic set with multicolored sapphires, amethysts, aquamarines and diamonds.

Having featured animals in their watches, the basic subjects of the next three pieces is not a great surprise, but he execution is a bit unusual. For some reason, all three of the animal watches are referred to as "Crazy Jungle" although none of the animals depicted actually LIVE in the jungle.

Following in the same basic aesthetic as Sheherazade we have the elephant Hathi.

The Crazy Jungle Hathi in white gold set with blue sapphires, diamonds and tsavorites. Dial in a Murano aventurine glass mosaic set with diamonds, sapphires, tsavorites, amethysts and onyx. "Crazy Seconds" disc of aventurine glass marquetry.

In the last couple of years using aquatic themes has become really quite popular, so these two pieces are not a complete surprise. The "crazy seconds" disk in both of them is set below the dial with a pattern representing small fish and bubbles, to try and give some life to the underwater scene. Interesting that they use a Flamingo here, as one was featured as a ring in their spring 2011 collection.

The Crazy Jungle Seahorse watch in pink gold, diamonds, garnets, multicoloured sapphires and onyx. Marquetry of mother-of-pearl and petrified palmtree. Automatic GP4000 movement with "Crazy Seconds" disc of mother-of-pearl bubbles.	The Crazy Jungle Flamingo watch in white gold, diamonds, garnets, multicoloured sapphires, onyx and mother-of-pearl. Head of the flamingo and school of fishes appear under water. Automatic GP4000 movement with "Crazy Seconds" disc of shrimp and fish.

All this leads to the pinnacle piece of the collection, the Hera watch, a fully gem-set bracelet piece with a GP tourbillon movement. The watch has the form of a peacock, one of Hera's emblems. The movement is one of the GP three-bridge series, one of the more distinct and unusual of the current crop of Tourbillon movements, based on a late 19th century design. The watch has no dial per-say, but three concentric ovals of tourmalines set on the visable bottom-plate of the movement. The case is white-gold and set with 35 carets of diamonds, sapphires and Pariba tourmalines.

(pictures from TimeZone)
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Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can't. There's no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can't be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tightly integrated with the cooking machine that there's no way to intercept it between the two. A McDonalds kitchen makes exactly what's on the McDonalds menu -- and does so in an absolutely foolproof fashion. But it can't go off the menu, and any attempt to bend the machine to your will just breaks it such that it needs to be sent back to the factory for repairs.

Blatant Promotional Content Warning!

Apple approved my iPhone app for the European Watch Company, the local watch shop where I've done work in the past.  What's that you say, you'd like a link?

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