Of course, this celebration is a far cry from last year when everything was cancelled (for the first time in 30 years) because Hurricane Sandy was moving up the coast, already sending heavy rains and high winds to our shores in advance. Although the powers-that-be did their best to salvage something for the kids - a mini-kids parade and costume contest - indoors at the Convention Center, it just wasn't the same. 
REID TOLD CAUCUS PETE SESSIONS WAS BEHIND OBAMA INSULT.WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told his Democratic caucus last week in a private meeting that a top House Republican said to President Barack Obama, "I cannot even stand to look at you," according to two Democratic senators who were present.
The account was confirmed by two Senate Democratic aides who said they independently learned of the exchange from other senators.
A White House official said Thursday that the administration did relay such a message to Reid, but that it was the result of a miscommunication.
“While the quote attributed to a Republican lawmaker in the House GOP meeting with the President is not accurate, there was a miscommunication when the White House read out that meeting to Senate Democrats, and we regret the misunderstanding," the official said in a statement.
Asked to clarify, then, what the White House meant to tell Senate Democratic leaders about Obama's meeting with House Republicans, the official said only, "Not going to read out the details of private meetings with the President, or private meetings between WH and Dem leaders."
The two senators who spoke to HuffPost did not hear the Republican make the remark, but said a top White House aide who was present during Obama's meeting with Republicans later told Senate Democratic leaders that the lawmaker who made the remark was Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Rules Committee.
Reid relayed the story to the entire Democratic caucus on Tuesday, Oct. 15, and named Sessions, according to one of the two Democratic senators who spoke to HuffPost. Reid also told the caucus that he was “sorry” to have to tell them about it, per this senator, but gave Obama credit for his “dignified” response to Sessions. Reid reportedly told the caucus that Obama responded to Sessions by saying he understood that they disagreed on many issues and he respected their differences.
So what did NASA do during the US government shutdown? You can’t just turn off spacecraft that are operating millions of miles away, so missions like the Mars rovers and the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn continued to send back images to Earth during the 16 days that most of NASA wasn’t up and running like usual. On October 10, 2013, as Cassini flew high above the planet’s equatorial plane, the spacecraft’s camera took 36 images of Saturn, a dozen each using the various red, green, and blue filters used to create color images.
The images were transferred back to Earth and put on the Cassini raw images page. Gordan Ugarkovic from Croatia, and a member of the image editing wizards at UnmannedSpaceflight.com, grabbed the raw files, processed them, then assembled the images into this jaw-dropping mosaic.
This is a view from Saturn that we could never get from Earth; only a spacecraft orbiting the planet could take it. You can see the north pole and the swirling maelstrom of clouds that creates the hexagonal polar vortex, the thin bands in Saturn’s atmosphere, and — of course — what really stands out is the incredible view of Saturn’s rings. To see the original 3 MB version, see this page on UMSF.
“You shouldn’t be surprised to see processing artifacts here and there,” cautioned Ugarkovic via email to Universe Today. “It is, after all, based on raw JPEG images only.”
See more of Gordan’s work at his Flickr page.
But in the words of UMSF’s Astro0, “That’s the sort of view I’ve dreamed I would only ever see in a science fiction movie or if we had some kind of amazing futuristic spacecraft orbiting around that distant ringed planet….WAIT! We do!”
For more of what NASA did during the shutdown, Bill Dunford at Riding With Robots put together a great summary, quoting the @SarcasticRover that “You can’t shut down awesome.” Bill started the #ThingsNASAMightTweet hashtag that reminded everyone of all the things NASA does, but they couldn’t tweet about during the shutdown. People from around the world chimed in, adding what was important to them about NASA, and as of today, tweets with that hashtag have passed 27 million impressions.
A few months after I finished chemotherapy for an extremely rare cancer, Hurricane Katrina hit and my childhood home was destroyed. With ideas about what is really important in life and what makes a home special at the forefront of my mind, I was compelled to record and share these thoughts through what would become my first film, Home. I was inspired both by what came to mind when I returned to my destroyed post-Katrina home and by what I saw when I returned to my pre-Katrina home in my dreams. The result, I hope, is something that is relatable, therapeutic, informative, and encouraging to everyone whether you've experienced a sudden loss like Katrina or not. I hope it can help us all to remember and honor what we've lost, but more importantly, to appreciate what we still have.
Thanks for watching. Feel free to contact me.- Matt
MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Hurricane Sandy devastated this barrier island community of multimillion-dollar homes, but in Peter Flihan’s view, Verizon Communications has delivered a second blow: the telecommunications giant did not rebuild the landlines destroyed in the storm, and traditional telephone service here has now gone the way of the telegraph.
“Verizon decides then and there to step on us,” said Mr. Flihan, 75, a retired toy designer and marketer. Verizon said it was too expensive to replace Mantoloking’s traditional copper-line phone network — the kind that has connected America for more than a century — and instead installed Voice Link, a wireless service it insisted was better.
Verizon’s move on this sliver of land is a look into the not-too-distant future, a foreshadowing of nearly all telephone service across the United States. The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category.
The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout.
“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.”
The Federal Communications Commission has long agreed. In its National Broadband Plan, published in 2010, the F.C.C. said that requiring certain carriers to maintain plain old telephone service “is not sustainable” and could siphon investments away from new networks.
“The challenge for the country,” the F.C.C. said, is to ensure “a smooth transition for Americans who use traditional phone service and for the businesses that provide it.”
But as far as Mr. Flihan and others in New Jersey are concerned, that transition from a reliable service — one that has given them a sense of security all their lives — is not smooth at all. An array of state-sanctioned consumer advocacy groups, as well as AARP, have petitioned regulators to disallow the replacement of Mantoloking’s copper lines with Voice Link.
Not only will Voice Link not work if the power fails — a backup battery provides two hours of talking time, hardly reassuring to people battered by Sandy — but Verizon warns Voice Link users that calls to 911 under normal conditions might not go through because of network congestion. Medical devices that require periodic tests over phone lines, like many pacemakers, cannot transmit over Voice Link. Fax machines do not work over most wireless phone networks, including Voice Link. Neither do many home security systems, which depend on a copper phone line to connect to a response center.
“They told us this was the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Flihan said. But he estimates that roughly 25 percent of the calls he makes through the Verizon Voice Link service do not go through the first time he dials, or sometimes the second or third. Occasionally, the call is interrupted by clicking sounds, and sometimes a third party’s voice can be heard on the line, Mr. Flihan said.
7: Do you want to be single/married/in a relationship?
A tiny, mysterious moon orbiting Neptune has been spotted for the first time in more than 20 years.
By analyzing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., have caught sight of Naiad, the innermost ofNeptune's moons. The 62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) moon has remained unseen since the cameras on NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered it in 1989.
Scientists recently tracked Naiad across a series of eight archival images taken by Hubble in December 2004 after using a different technique to help cancel out Neptune's glare. Neptune is 2 million times brighter than Naiad, so Naiad is difficult to see from Earth, SETI officials said. [See photos of Neptune, the mysterious blue planet]
"Naiad has been an elusive target ever since Voyager left the Neptune system," SETI scientist Mark Showalter said in a statement. Showalter announced the new findings today (Oct. 8) during a session at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, held in Denver.
Now that scientists have spotted the small moon again, there are other mysteries to be solved. Naiad seems to have drifted off course: The new observations show that the moon is now ahead of its predicted path in orbit around Neptune, SETI officials said.
Scientists expect that the new trajectory could have something to do with Naiad's interaction with one of Neptune's other moons that caused the innermost moon to speed up in its orbit. The exact cause of the moon's new orbit won't be known until researchers collect more data.
"It is always exciting to find new results in old data," Showalter said. "We keep discovering new ways to push the limit of what information can be gleaned from Hubble's vast collection of planetary images."
The same images taken by Hubble also helped Showalter and his colleagues find another small moon orbiting Neptune — a discovery they announced in July. The newfound moon, called S/2004 N 1, is much smaller than Naiad, at 12 miles (20 km) across, but it was easier to spot in the images because its orbit takes it farther from Neptune than Naiad's orbit takes it from the planet, SETI officials said.
Behold! I am writing my first post on the new Mac MINI and I AM LOVING IT. Set up would have been a beaucoup easy had I not second-guessed myself looking to make it more difficult. That's the Windows user in me talking. Nothing was ever easy with Windows. 
Now you know I am bored to tears. I wish I could be out and about and among the living, but for now that's not an option. MUSIC MAKES THE PEOPLE COME TOGETHER
1. How often and where do you listen to music?When I'm in the car, at the restaurant (we have Sirius there) but the contemporary stations play the same crap over and over, so depending on the customers, we'll put on House, Oldies, or Latino. It is a Mexican restaurant, after all. At home there is always something playing in the background as I cook, clean, or just for company.
2. When was the last time you bought music in CD format?About 2 years ago. I bought a PUPPINI SISTERS Disc.
3. Do you buy complete albums or just a song at a time? Is this different now because of iTunes? I haven't bought music in a long time. I have an iTunes acct., but haven't used it yet.
4. From who do you purchase your digital music?
See above. I am switching to Mac, and may begin collecting again. I have transferred a few fave CDs to the now dead PC and uploaded them to the iPod, KIndle and phone, but that's it for now
5. Do you listen to satellite or internet radio? How about Podcasts?
I have a few selected channels on Pandora and listen when I am in the mood. There is only one Podcast I listen to on a weekly basis.
6. What are your favorite kinds of music?
Theatre music, pop, Big Bands of the 30s & 40s, jazz, classical; pretty much anything except rap and hip-hop.
7. Today's music_____!
There are few new artists I can listen to, mostly because the storytelling (if any) and lyrics turn me off. (i.e. Katy Perry - "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?") I mean, WTF?
8. What music is you guilty pleasure?
No guilt, only pleasure. Depending on mood, either Mahler (sends my spirit
soaring) or The Pet Shop Boys (when in a happy dancing mood), if that makes sense.
9. Have you heard a song recently that reminds you of someone?
No, fortunately I don't know anyone who feels like a plastic bag. Or any other bag, for that matter.
BONUS
Do you play music to set the mood?
No, my mood sets the tone for the music to enhance it.
Once it's set, what do you play to keep the action moving?
I've never played music while indulging in bedroom calisthenics. It just gets in the way and can be very distracting.
