Good Morning Internet

As I left Bal­ti­more and merged onto south­bound 95, a post-snow sun­set lit the clouds on fire. Even the plume from the Bal­ti­more smoke­stack par­tic­i­pated and turned pur­ple against the win­ter twi­light. I approached the air­port loop and watched planes ascend in sil­hou­ette. The light didn’t dim right away after the sun set, but instead shifted from vibrant gold and pink to deep orange. Traf­fic slowed as awestruck dri­vers gazed into the sky. It looked invit­ing, and I got excited about being in the air, a big deal for a guy whose whole body goes rigid dur­ing take-offs and landings.

We were for­tu­nate to miss the brunt of the storm over Christ­mas. Just east of us, other parts of Mary­land got nearly ten inches of snow. Had the winds blown dif­fer­ently or the storm tracked just a few miles west of where it went, we would have got­ten ham­mered, and my flight to Atlanta would have been can­celed. But I got lucky, and my flight only ran 33 min­utes late.

By the time I got my car sit­u­ated in long-term park­ing and shielded myself in a bus shel­ter from the razor-sharp gusts of icy wind, the hori­zon was blood red. Air­planes tax­ied, and the warm-colored light shim­mered on their alu­minum bod­ies. I was joined by a fam­ily head­ing home from the hol­i­days. The kids com­pared notes about new video games they got, and the exhausted-looking par­ents braced them­selves against the cold that still found its way into the shel­ter. When the bus arrived to take us to the ter­mi­nal, the show in the sky was over, hav­ing faded through pur­ples to navy blue to black.

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Josh and I went to see Tron: Legacy over the week­end. Despite its 49% rat­ing on Rot­ten Toma­toes at that point, I still thought it might be a fun 3D thrill ride.

Boy was I wrong. The movie opened with a title card that instructed us to keep our 3D glasses on for the whole movie, even though only cer­tain scenes were in 3D. It was if the film apol­o­gized to us before even get­ting started.

And then it was two hours of bor­ing. I don’t want to post spoil­ers here, even though I’d save you $13 and two hours, but the plot would be pretty dif­fi­cult to encap­su­late any­way. There were plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for smart, clever writ­ing, but it felt like they were made dull and con­fus­ing on pur­pose. To that end, I guess, it was faith­ful to the orig­i­nal. Oh, snap!

So then there’s this Daft Punk video, made with the same aes­thetic as the orig­i­nal Tron. There’s more awe­some packed into these three min­utes than all of the new movie, and who­ever directed it should have directed Legacy. Maybe then we could have seen the evo­lu­tion from the orig­i­nal 80s look to the rubber-and-leather sex­i­ness of the new com­puter world. Oh well.

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Early this morn­ing, I crawled out of bed and went to the front of my apart­ment to watch the win­ter sol­stice lunar eclipse. Thank­fully, I had the per­fect angle through my win­dow to watch the Earth’s shadow move across the face of the Moon with­out hav­ing to bun­dle up and face the cold like so many of my brave friends on Twitter.

I tried tak­ing some pho­tos, but the kit lens on my Canon T2i just wasn’t cut­ting it. My iPhone just laughed at me and spit out some blurry images. But I wasn’t wor­ried. I knew that the Internet’s bril­liant astropho­tog­ra­phers were snap­ping pho­tos with cam­era rigs far more impres­sive than mine. I decided to relax, put down the cam­era, and pick up the binoculars.

I think it was the most spec­tac­u­lar lunar eclipse I ever saw. The sky over Bal­ti­more was com­pletely clear, and the Moon turned a deep rusty orange that was stag­ger­ingly beau­ti­ful, even from the mid­dle of the city. Before we had sci­ence, peo­ple must have freaked right out when this kind of thing hap­pened. (Or slept through it.)

I was right about the tal­ented Inter­net pho­tog­ra­phers. Check out this time-lapse video of the eclipse by William Castle­man.

Win­ter Sol­stice Lunar Eclipse from William Castle­man on Vimeo.

[Win­ter Sol­stice Lunar Eclipse via Giz­modo]

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Ear­lier this year, I sub­mit­ted a pro­posal for a SXSW Inter­ac­tive panel called “Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands”. The ini­tial feed­back from the SXSW staff was very pos­i­tive, and peo­ple voted for it in the panel picker.

Over the past cou­ple months, my panel didn’t made the cut for the first two rounds of ses­sion announce­ments, so I had begun to lose heart. Maybe my lit­tle panel idea wasn’t quite up the stan­dards of SXSW programming.

And then, last week, I got this email:

We are very excited to inform you that your pro­posal has been accepted to be part of the 2011 SXSW Inter­ac­tive Fes­ti­val in March in Austin. We received more than than 2400 out­stand­ing pro­pos­als via the SXSW Pan­elPicker — so being selected for the event means that your pro­posal was one of the best of the best of the best. Con­grats!! And, thanks for putting together such an out­stand­ing proposal!

You should have seen my face. “The best of the best of the best”! My panel idea is just like Will Smith in Men in Black!

I couldn’t be more excited, and I can’t wait to into the panel plan­ning process with the SXSW staff. In the mean­time, I’m going to do a freak-out/happy dance in my apartment.

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As I got ready for work, this is what it looked like outside.

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• Sun­set drive to BWI