Item The First: Today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day – what, you’re NOT looking at it every day? I’ll wait while you fix that…) is freakin’ brilliant. It’s a simple idea carried to an extreme and used to create something beautiful. Ken Murphy pointed a camera at the sky and had it record a picture every ten seconds. For an entire year. He then took all of those pictures and put them into a HD composite image.
Image credit & copyright Ken Murphy (MurphLab)
Looks cool? Yeah, but it’s not just a still picture, it’s a video.
He synched up the time so that each frame shows the time-lapse video for that day starting and ending at the same time, then has them run simultaneously. And because he starts before sunrise and ends after sunset, and because he’s in San Francisco and not at the equator, at the beginning and end you can see how the days lengthen and shorten with the seasons. You see pink sunrise clouds, orange sunset clouds, rainy days, sunny days, an entire year in one short video.
Item The Second: This is another truly amazing video, showing all of the Space Shuttle flights (well, at least snippets from every one of them) in 8:01. Do yourself a favor and watch it full screen, HD, and turned up LOUD. Repeat as necessary to regain your sanity after dealing with freakin’ idiots. Except of course it made me think of the freakin’ idiots who mothballed the Shuttles… Breathe. Breathe. Om, om, om, om…
Item The Third: I knew that when telephone area codes were assigned in the late 1940’s we had only rotary phones, so New York City got “212”, Los Angeles got “213”, Dallas-Fort Worth got “214”, Chicago got “312”, Detroit got “313”, and so on so that the users in the big cities could dial long distance faster.
What I didn’t know is that in 1999 a relatively “low” area code was given to a less densely populated area of Florida instead of to densely populated suburban Chicago. A behind the scenes campaign by Florida lobbyists convinced the numbering agency to change their mind and thus Florida’s “Space Coast” got the “3-2-1” area code. (That whimsical bit of trivia just about made my day!)
Item The Fourth: Pop Quiz!! What is it you never, EVER do when taking simple astrophotos of the sun with your $1 “Solar Viewer” card? Your answers will be graded on creativeness as well as on accuracy.
Item The Fifth: The gremlin body count is slowly rising, which is a good thing. It was getting pretty frustrating there for a couple of weeks.
The cable television problem finally got fixed by a great repair guy from Time-Warner, but only after some serious frustrations with their service department before I could get him out. I had already done a fair amount of troubleshooting on the problem and had eliminated the first several dozen things they wanted me to try. (“Reboot your cable box and wait three days – if that doesn’t work, get a new cable box.” “Really? Have you listened to a single word I’ve said to describe the problem?”) I was about 99% sure I knew what the problem was and where, but I can’t access that equipment and I don’t have the parts to replace it. Once the cable guy got here, confused by the notes the service department had left him, I quickly showed him what I already knew, he came to the same conclusion I did, found the fried parts, replaced them, and we’re all happy now.
The computer that died is really dead. It wasn’t the power supply, probably the mother board or CPU, but on an eight-year-old computer it’s not possible or worth it to repair. The hard disks were all fine (no data lost) as were the video card, sound card, RAM, and so on, so a new motherboard & CPU got the system back up and going. Of course, Windows 7, MS Office, and a number of other programs are freaking out and wanting to re-authenticate since they’re seeing a “new” system, but so far that’s been an inconvenience, not a killer.
The iShower bluetooth speaker is back up and running with some new batteries. The first one I had died after three and a half months but they were great about giving me a full replacement anyway – kudos to their customer service department! But when that first one ran low on batteries I got warnings for about a week before the batteries were completely dead. This second one has given me no warnings at all, it just died. But replacing the batteries seems to have been the only problem. It was about time for new batteries, based on my experience with the first one, I just wonder why I didn’t get warnings this time. Whatever, it seems to be working again now and I really like having it in the shower to play tunes in the morning.
Best of all, I also again tackled the problems with The Long-Suffering Daughter #2’s car. I’ll tell you some time about how this whole mess started (short version – a four-day lost holiday weekend in Coalinga) but for now I’ve just got her car sitting in the driveway gathering cobwebs. (She’s in China – or Europe, it depends.) I don’t want to let the car sit too long without being driven, and the added incentive was that her car needed a smog check to get registered for the year. I was able to get it started, got it smogged, ran some errands, and put it back into the driveway. We’ll get a permanent fix when one of us can afford $2,000 to replace a $20 part, but that’s another story.
First world problems, all. But like I said, I live here in the first world. You take your little victories where you can.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 