Category Archives: Odds & Sods

November 27, 2013 · 14:14

Odds & Sods For Wednesday, November 27th

Item The First: Should it be “The Long Suffering Wife” or “The Long-Suffering Wife”? I’ve been going with the former, but someone suggested that could be construed as her being “nine feet tall and suffering” as opposed to “suffering for a long time”. Now, I would think that “The Long, Suffering Wife” would be “nine feet tall and suffering” and that no hyphen is necessary. Punctuation is important, you know. (Ask Grandma tomorrow when the kid either yells “It’s time to eat Grandma!” or “It’s time to eat, Grandma!”)

Item The Second: I have been known at times to rant about the “freakin’ idiots” of the world, and this often targets politicians and our legal system. (Sorry, I’m not the one who invented the system. If politicians and lawyers would like to stop being highlighted as freakin’ idiots, they’re free to stop doing freakin’ stupid things any time they want. But I digress.)

Having gone off at the mouth about some of the bad things I see, it’s time to highlight a good thing that caught my eye. NPR has an article (and I went hunting and found a more detailed article at the Chicago Tribute) about a couple in Illinois that’s being allowed to get married immediately, rather than being forced to wait until June, 2014 when the new Illinois law allowing same-sex marriages goes into effect. Their circumstances are extreme, and tragic, and I think we should all congratulate the judge, US District Judge Thomas Durkin, for making a ruling that demonstrates compassion and common sense.

Item The Third: I understand why are there television shows that start with a voice-over and a card that says, “This show is a work of fiction and is not in any way based on any actual person or event”. (Hint, it rhymes with “too many lawyers”.) What I don’t understand is why they do that after the previous two hours of sitcoms have had teaser commercials for the show at least once every half hour and every single one of them screams “AN EPISODE RIPPED FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES!” Doesn’t that by definition mean that either the marketing department or the legal department is lying? (Yes, you get extra credit if you immediately pointed out the excellent odds that both of them are lying.)

Item The Fourth: The last two days NASA-TV has been running live interviews where NASA folks (astronauts, scientists, researchers, etc) have been going through these long series of one broadcast interview after another being done and recorded. On Tuesday it was scientists from Goddard being interviewed about Comet ISON, on Wednesday it was interviews about what the astronauts eat on ISS for Thanksgiving.

I understand that TV news anchors and personalities are no longer hired for having the same journalistic chops as Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley. They’re hired because they look good in front of a camera and can be pleasant on command. This leads to a fair number of them who appear to be unable to recite the alphabet without a teleprompter. It’s never more clear than when they’re doing these interviews. Leading off with statements like, “There are three people in space right now, one American and two Russians” is not only blatantly incorrect, it’s hideously lazy journalism. How hard is it to go the the NASA website, or simply type “Who is on ISS right now?” into Google to get a dozen correct answers. (Like, here, and it’s currently six people, which breaks down as three Russians, two Americans, and one Japanese.)  You can do that on your phone, for crying out loud! I commend the various NASA personnel being interviewed for not spending their entire interview correcting the stupid things said.

That having been said, is there an astronaut training course called “1,001 Ways To Say ‘That’s A Great Question'”? You hear it when they’re doing interviews in the studio, on orbit, from Houston, or at a public event like a Google + Hangout. They say it whether they’re talking to the president, a reporter, or a fifth-grader. They say it on every, single, freakin’ question asked! Is there a Department Of That’s A Great Question at NASA? (I rant, but I still love NASA and the astronauts and the scientists, would kill to work with them.)

Item The Fifth: Tomorrow is do-or-die day for Comet ISON as it slingshots around the sun, only 730,000 miles above the solar surface. (For reference, that’s only about three times the distance between the Earth and the moon.) That qualifies it as a “sun grazer” and it will be the point where it’s most likely to shatter into pieces or simply evaporate. The astronomers who have been tracking Comet ISON think it’s big enough to survive and come around the other side toward Earth (it can’t hit us, even if it falls apart, closest approach will be over forty million miles away), which will at least give it a chance to be spectacular in December.

The reports it might be “as bright as the full moon!” are total nonsense and always have been. There have been comets that have been bright enough to be seen in daylight and some early estimates thought Comet ISON had the potential to do it, but now it doesn’t seem that will happen. But for the last week or ten days it has been visible to the naked eye as it approached the sun, and there are some truly spectacular photographs out there on the Internet. Assuming it survives, once it comes around the other side of the sun it will start to be visible before dawn and by mid-December it will have gone far enough north that it will “circumpolar”, which means it will be visible all night long for northern hemisphere viewers. (Sorry, southern hemisphere folks!)

Tomorrow, despite it being Thanksgiving in the US, there will be a lot of astronomers skipping the turkey and monitoring Comet ISON’s progress. You can do it as well online (you can’t see it yourself, it’s right next to the sun, you’ll go blind, use common sense) since NASA will be having a Google + Hangout from 13:00 to 15:30 EST, 10:00 to 12:30 PST. (Perihelion is at 13:25 EST, 10:25 PST.) You can send in questions via Twitter, or you can just watch as the satellite images come down (here‘s the latest one, with Comet ISON approaching the sun from about the 4:00 position) and see what happens.

If you want to know more, there are hundreds of articles and news stories online — I recommend you start here, with Emily Lakdawalla’s excellent live blog on The Planetary Society’s website.

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Filed under Astronomy, Death Of Common Sense, Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!, Odds & Sods, Ronnie

October 29, 2013 · 07:00

Odds & Sods For Tuesday, October 29th

Item The First: Heads up! (Literally.) I’ve seen several folks on Twitter talking about how they’re seeing bright ISS passes listed for their cities in the US this week. Check it out, especially for Halloween night. If you’re already out and about with the kiddies, setting your phone to go off a minute or so early will give you the “heads up” you need to see a pass.

Here in Los Angeles, there was a pass  last night that I didn’t think I would see because of the heavy clouds. But I happened to be taking Jessie out at the right time and found some holes in the clouds to see the VERY bright ISS blinking in and out through the gaps. Spectacular!

For the rest of the week, at least for Los Angeles, there are passes this week tonight (Tuesday, the 29th) at 18:22 and 20:01 (the first pass is higher and brigher), Wednesday the 30th at 19:14, and Thursday night (Halloween!) at 18:23. The Thursday night pass is supposed to be especially bright, rising in the WNW with a maximum elevation of 47.2 degrees, a magnitude of -3.2 (which is much brighter than Venus), and setting in the SSE. You can’t miss it!

Item The Second:  Yes, the central scientific idea in my October 24th Flash Fiction story is similar the idea in Larry Niven’s “Inconstant Moon”. Yes, while mulling over the random title I got (“Fire On The Sea”), I did think of Niven’s story as a source of the fire, since I wanted to do something other than just telling a story about a guy in a burning boat or oil rig or something. That’s how my thought processes go. I don’t want to do the “usual”. What else could be on fire on the sea? An oil spill? A large explosion of some sort? Maybe an asteroid impact over the horizon. What about the sun? What was that Niven story? Maybe the guy in my story is dealing with something similar. He’s looking east, waiting for the sunrise, so where does that put him. Jersey? Virginia? Florida? I don’t want to do the “usual”, so let’s make it Africa. OK, that works, so what’s this guy doing and thinking in that situation. (By the way, if you haven’t read “Inconstant Moon”, go do so immediately. It’s a classic and most excellent.)

Item The Third: So far, neither Rocky, Raquel, or “the kids” has managed to pry the screen off of their hidey-hole. Sorry, Pat! But I’ll keep an eye on it. They’re up there on the roof every couple of nights, there are plenty of half-eaten oranges left around, and the dog’s water bowl is occasionally quite muddy from where they’re using it to wash their food – but they haven’t reclaimed their hidey-hole. Yet…

Item The Fourth: Two thoughts on the media’s changing reaction to a certain couple of pieces of music. First, I thought that it was interesting to see Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot” being used as the background music in an episode of NBC’s “The Blacklist” a couple weeks ago. A few years ago, when the song came out, I remember quite a bit of protest about it and folks trying to get it banned. Ditto for “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats, which I heard on a middle of the road, “classic rock” FM station the other day. Back in the day, I remember folks hollering for KROQ’s license because they dared to play it.

The second, equally upsetting thought, was the realization that “Hey Man, Nice Shot” came out in 1995 (eighteen years ago) and “I Don’t Like Mondays” came out in 1981 (thirty-two freakin’ years ago!!), so when I casually think to myself that it was “a few years ago”, the only one I’m fooling is myself, I guess. It’s not just a river in Egypt any more…

Item The Fifth: Which NFL team is undefeated at 8-0? Hmmmmm? Face it, coming off of a terrible year in 2012 at 2-14, this year we sincerely hoped that we would be better. Most folks were praying for an 8-8 year, and a few brave souls thought we might get to 9-7 and squeak into a wildcard playoff spot. To say that we need to reassess those goals and expectations is the understatement of the year. I don’t think we need to be reserving hotels and airfares to New York just yet. But it’s much, much better to be 8-0 at this point in the season than it was being 1-7 last year!

Item The Sixth: I swear, someone in the neighborhood has a kookaburra. I hear it almost every night, right around an hour before sunset. It’ll sound off repeatedly, sometimes a dozen times. I have no idea if it’s caged in someone’s house or if it’s on the loose (like Lester), but I would love to track it down and see it, take a few pictures, maybe some video. If nothing else, just to prove that I’m not hearing things and hallucinating.

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Filed under Astronomy, Critters, KC Chiefs, Music, Odds & Sods, Science Fiction, Space, Sports, Writing

October 14, 2013 · 11:47

Odds & Sods For Monday, October 14th

Item The First: The raccoons have (I hope) been evicted! Last week’s windstorm caused some minor damage on the roof. While making those repairs, I checked out the “hidey-hole” that the raccoons have been using for an occasional home for the last year or so. I hadn’t heard them in a couple of days so maybe they were off causing problems at someone else’s house. On close inspection, the hidey-hole was found to be vacant, so I nailed up some screening over the opening again. (Don’t worry, I checked, double checked, and triple checked. There aren’t any raccoons or raccoon babies in there to be trapped and starving to death.)

photo 2 smallThey can still eat our oranges and dates and run around on the roof and in our trees, but they can’t live under our roof.

Assuming they’re not clever and/or strong enough to simply pry the screen off…

Item The Second: On my mother’s side, I come from a family of practical jokers. Nothing malicious mind you, just enough to keep you on your toes every now and then. (Other stories, other days.) On the other hand, The Long-Suffering Wife doesn’t much cotton to that sort of nonsense.

We recently had need to buy a new washer and dryer set and it got delivered and set up while The Long-Suffering Wife was out of town. It occurred to me that this was an ideal setup for a most wonderful prank! Since we had gotten machines with lots of new bells and whistles, I needed to sneak into the laundry room before she could after every load was finished in the dryer. If I fold everything and then put it stacked neatly back into the machine, maybe I could convince her that this was a new automatic setting on the fancy, schmancy dryer!

photo 1 smallDiscretion (and a desire to not sleep on the proverbial couch) was the better part of valor, so I did not pull this trick on my lovely wife. I did tell her about it, but while I was giggling and enjoying the story, she was not amused, so I guess I had made the correct choice. This weekend, having let her in on the joke, I did go in and do it for one load, but got only a, “Cute, dear!”

Proof that I’m easily amused. But we knew that.

Item The Third: Following up on my posts from Saturday and Sunday, Biology-Online.org has responded to Dr. Lee with an apology. It appears to be earnest and sincere. Good for them!

In addition, as a subscriber to Scientific American I receive a slew of their email newsletters, such as “Scientific American Daily Digest”, “Scientific American Basic Science”, “Scientific American Space & Physics”, and “Scientific American Weekly Review”. I find these extremely useful and valuable for keeping me up to date on what’s going on in the sciences, as wells as providing easy links to the full length stories. Since many of the Scientific American blogs are included in the stories featured in these newsletters, I was wondering if anything regarding this weekend’s events would be mentioned there.

I wa pleased to see that his morning’s newsletter includes a link to yesterday’s blog post from Mariette DiChristina. Transparency, openness, and communication are all really good things.

Item The Fourth: With yesterday’s win over the Hated Raiders of Oakland, my beloved KC Chiefs are now one of just two undefeated NFL teams at 6-0. This is a source of considerable joy and happiness in our household, so for that I would like to thank the entire KC Chiefs organization. In these trying times, it may be simple escapism, but it’s not meaningless. As for the future, our next three games are against teams that are at or below .500, then we have our bye week. Dare we hope that we can go into that ninth game against Denver (the other team currently 6-0) at 9-0, quite possibly facing another 9-0 team?

One game at a time. But it’s great being a Chiefs fan this year.

Item The Fifth: Since the last couple of weeks seem to have had a lot of stress, let’s start the new week with some role models for breathing, relaxing, prioritizing, and keeping things in the proper perspective.

photo 4 smallJesse, asleep under my desk.

photo 3 smallJoey, asleep in her sunny bay window next to my desk.

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Filed under Cats, Critters, Dogs, KC Chiefs, Moral Outrage, Odds & Sods, Photography, Sports

September 28, 2013 · 20:14

Odds & Sods For Saturday, September 28th

Item The First: On Friday I tried to donate platelets at the local Red Cross Donation Center. To say the least, it didn’t go well. On Wednesday and Thursday I got e-mails and reminder calls, all of which instructed me to make sure I was well hydrated, drink extra, and so on. OK, no problem. Then when I get there they put in the needles (one in each arm) and tell me to sit tight for two hours. This raises some concerns. THEN they add this anti-coagulant to the return stream so that I can make it through the whole procedure. (This is normal operating procedure.) The problem is that this anti-coagulant is also an excellent diuretic. Lots of fluids + lots of diuretic = I’m not sitting anywhere for two hours without a catheter or adult diapers, neither of which was provided. Epic fail.

Item The Second: Make note of the name Nick Sloane. Mr. Sloane is the salvage master who lead the team of over five hundred experts to lift the Costa Concordia off of the rocks and slowly flip it back upright off the coast of Giglio, Italy. (Stories here and here, with a great time-lapse video here.)

Item The Third: I really liked the story I wrote this week for the Flash Fiction Challenge. I was on the fourth edit and getting really, really close to being done with it Thursday night when I realized that it was already 11:55 PM. I posted the story quickly with no further edits. Thinking about it more on Friday, I think the one thing that I would change is the last line. Instead of “That’s when I saw it.”, I would have it be, “That’s when I saw it – now I was in trouble.” More cliffery and hangery.

Item The Fourth: When I left for that appointment at the Red Cross on Friday morning, I was about two blocks from home when I realized that I had not double checked the gate to the back yard after the gardeners were there on Thursday afternoon. I did a quick trip around the block and got back just in time to see Jessie pushing the gate open, seeing me pulling up, and trying to go to full reverse to get back inside the gate before it closed behind her. She’s had another taste of freedom, and the road calls to her.

Item The Fifth: Three weeks into the NFL season, no one is particularly surprised to see the Patriots, Broncos, Saints, or Seahawks undefeated at 3-0. And no one’s too surprised to see the Jaguars at 0-3. BUT…

I’d like a show of hands of those who thought that in addition to those teams, the Bears, Dolphins, and my beloved KC Chiefs would be undefeated, and the Steelers, Redskins, Vikings, and Giants would all be winless at 0-3. In addition, the Chiefs are four point favorites for tomorrow morning’s game against the New York Giants. I like this. I could get used to this. Especially when by this time tomorrow we’ll be 4-0.

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Filed under Health, KC Chiefs, Odds & Sods, Sports, Writing

September 2, 2013 · 17:14

Odds & Sods For Monday, September 2nd

Item The First: A couple of times in August I wrote about favorite movies. Another to add to the list, “Iron Giant”. I don’t care how sappy the ending was, I still love it. I know that it belongs on this list because I came across it about a third of the way through the other night and ended up watching the rest of it. I think that was literally my definition of how a movie qualified for that list.

Item The Second: The Hugo Awards ceremony from San Antonio last night was supposed to be live streamed, but there were issues again this year. Last year everything worked fine right up until they started showing “Doctor Who” clips for the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) award, at which point some DRM-bot assumed that they were streaming pirated and copyright protected material and killed the feed. This year they took care of that issue, but apparently had problems with getting the signal out of the hotel and convention center so the feed was offline more than it was on. I think the longest period we watched without it crashing was maybe fifteen minutes.

Disappointing, to say the least. Let’s hope that the folks in London can get a better handle on this, or that I’m in London and can just live-tweet it to folks myself. On the other hand, and to emphasize something that I didn’t make clear yesterday talking about Worldcon, all of these conventions are run by unpaid volunteers, fans who give a LOT of their time, energy, and often money to make things happen so that the rest of us can enjoy the con. I might be disappointed and on occasion I might offer suggestions about changes that could be made to make something run better. I’ve even volunteered to do the work to make things better – the lack of west coast filking is one of the reasons that my friends and I started ConChord. But I won’t be snarky and/or critical. For better or for worse, it’s work being done by volunteers on a shoestring and they’re doing the best that they can.

Item The Third: Despite the problems seeing the Hugo Awards ceremony, I was not displeased by the results of the Hugo voting. John Scalzi won the Best Novel award for “Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas”, which I liked a great deal. I was very happy to see Stanley Schmidt get the Best Editor (Short Form) award at last, as well as a Lifetime Achievement award from the LoneStarCon 3 committee. I was very happy to see a “Game Of Thrones” episode win the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) award instead of a “Doctor Who” episode. (Sorry, I really like GoT but never got into “Doctor Who”.) It was great to see Seanan McGuire and her cohorts at SF Squeecast win another Hugo for Best Fancast.

Overall I was not terribly unhappy with any of the results. I also noted that creating this blog and getting involved with Twitter has made me much more aware of the range of the nominated works and artists. I hope that this means that next year I will be even more involved and knowledgeable. In other words, expect more books to be read and more reviews to be posted here. You’ve been warned.

Item The Fourth: This afternoon came word that one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction, Frederik Pohl, passed away today at the age of 93. There’s a detailed obituary on the Locus Magazine site. Mr. Pohl was not just an author, but also a fan, an editor, an agent, and a past president of SFWA. He won Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards for his writing, as well as Hugo Awards for his work as an editor. He wrote volumes of short stories as well as novels, with his career stretching back to the 1940’s.

I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever saw a Hugo Award up close was when I ran into him holding his at that very first convention I went to, Iguanacon II in Phoenix in 1978. He won Best Novel for “Gateway” and I remember him as being very gracious to a very wet-behind-the-ears newbie who wanted to take his picture. He will be missed.

Item The Fifth: In the last hour or so we’ve heard that Time Warner Cable and CBS have decided to mutually declare victory and cancel their particular little multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporate pissing contest that has left us peons (i.e., “customers”) as pawns caught in the middle. I wish that this “inconvenience” to the consumers caused by both sides would mean that both CEOs and management teams would be getting their multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses dinged this year, but who are we kidding?

More importantly, since it’s becoming increasingly clear that we live in an information-based society and the corporations that have monopolies on delivering that information seem to be operating in 100% loose cannon mode, it would be nice to think that the FCC and Congress would do something to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. “Protecting the public trust” and all of that.

Again – who are we kidding?

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Filed under Entertainment, Fandom, Odds & Sods, Science Fiction

August 23, 2013 · 20:00

Odds & Sods For Friday, August 23rd

Item The First: Is there some corollary of Murphy’s Law that says that you will see typos and stupid mistakes in emails and blog posts in the first ten seconds after you hit the “Send” or “Publish” buttons? Twice in the last month I’ve told WordPress to send out the emails to everyone to let them know there’s a new post here and a heartbeat later yelled “SHAZBATT!” (or something much like that) and looked for an “Undo” button. (There isn’t one.)

Even worse, I’ve also sent out two email cover letters on job applications with simple, stupid typos in them. This happened after I had read them, re-read them, walked away from them for a while, checked them for a third time, blessed it, and hit “Send”. Of course, doing so instantly labels me as an idiot and is incredibly frustrating. The first rule of job hunting is to avoid typos and look professional at all costs. There are a hundred people battling for each job and it doesn’t take much to kick your resume out of the “review” pile and into the trash. Making your first impression one where the potential employer thinks you’re not big on details and can’t communicate well puts at least two strikes against you immediately.

I like ranting about freakin’ idiots much more than I like being a freakin’ idiot.

On the other hand:

Every Time You Make A Typo

Item The Second: I wrote about Kickstarter and mentioned that in the near future there will be an opportunity for actual equity investment by crowdfunding as opposed to “contributions”. Here’s an article from the Hollywood Reporter talking about how this will effect how television shows and movies are capitalized. It indicates that the new rules for “equity crowdfunding” will be going into effect near the end of September for “accredited investors” (those individuals with a net worth of over $1M and over $200K per year income) and sometime in 2014 for “unaccredited investors” (those with a net worth of less than $1M but more than $100K) with limitations on how much one can invest.

Item The Third: Speaking of errors I’ve made, on August 18th I posted some pictures of what I thought was the California state capitol in Sacramento. I was posting quickly (on the road in Virginia) and looking at tiny thumbnails, not the best of conditions. Even at the time I had little alarm bells going off in my head, but didn’t listen to them because I was in a rush and working with more limited resources than I usually have. About ten minutes after posting I saw the full-sized pictures and realized that it wasn’t Sacramento.

No one has yet guessed correctly, so it’s time to just say that it’s the Colorado state capitol building in Denver.

Under the category of “Not Really An Error, More Of An Update”, on August 17th I posted a bunch of pictures I took from the plane travelling from LAX to DFW. The caption for the tenth image down says, “I think this one might be St Johns, but I would have to check a sectional to be sure.” Well, I checked the sectional and Google Earth (34°24’56.45″ N 103°13’09.42″ W) to be sure and it’s not St Johns Industrial Airpark in Arizona, but Cannon AFB in New Mexico, just to the west of Clovis, NM.

Item The Fourth: That spider web that so fascinated me is still there, and growing. Not only is that original, fishing-line-like thread there, but a much bigger web is being anchored to it, all intact despite days and days of the breezes whipping around the branches from the two trees that it’s strung between. I haven’t seen the spider yet, but if it’s sized like its web, I expect it to be the size of a squirrel. Anyone know where someone can get a fifty-gallon drum of DDT? (Asking for a friend.)

Item The Fifth: Peter Piper picked a peck of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills, how many pecks of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills did Peter Piper pick?

My friend Kevin McNamara taught me that in high school. Forty years later it rolls off the tongue, but to save my life I can’t remember where I left my iPad an hour ago.

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Filed under Crowdfunding, Flying, Freakin' Idiots!, Odds & Sods, Photography, Travel

August 10, 2013 · 17:59

Odds & Sods For Saturday, August 10th

Item The First: If you’re looking for another “Simple Astronomy” idea, try taking pictures of the Perseid meteor shower over the next couple of nights, August 10th through August 13th or so. (Even if you can’t do the photography, if it’s not cloudy you should go out and try to see some meteors. It’s fun!)

Simply put your DSLR camera on a tripod, turn the autofocus off, manually set the focus to infinity, pull the zoom on the lens back to get the widest field of view you can, set the exposure time to the longest you can get (or “Bulb”), and point it toward the northeast in a spot as dark and clear as you can find. Keep shooting (digital photos are cheap!) and see if you get lucky. And don’t forget to watch the skies as well as run the camera!

Item The Second: Earlier in August I wrote about favorite movies. Since then, of course, every now and then my brain kicks me in the ass and says, “How could you possibly have left this one out?!” OK, so add these to that list for me:

  • Blazing Saddles
  • RED
  • Hunt For Red October
  • Airplane!
  • When Harry Met Sally
  • Patton
  • Hudson Hawk
  • All That Jazz
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
  • My Big Fat Greek Wedding
  • Bill Cosby, Himself
  • Chicago (Hey, Chris, here’s my musical!)
  • 1776 (And another one!)
  • October Sky
  • Father Goose
  • Little Big Man
  • Contact
  • Tootsie
  • Deep Impact
  • Phantom Of The Paradise
  • Crimson Tide
  • Time Bandits
  • Defending Your Life
  • The Hallelujah Trail

Item The Third: After making my impassioned plea for someone to make an updated, new, and improved version of Outpost, my favorite old strategy computer game, it occurred to me that there’s another perfectly good thing that someone could raise money through Kickstarter for.

There are many crowdfunding campaigns to get small, independent films going. We’re also starting to see some bigger projects campaigning. Spike Lee is trying to use a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1.25M for his next movie (the campaign may or may not make it, closing August 21st), and the fans of the Veronica Mars television show raised over $5.7M earlier this year to bring the show back.

So why can’t the creators of “The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension“ ask the devoted and passionate fans of that movie to raise the starting funds for a sequel? Sequels were obviously planned. After the final credits rolled there was a card telling us to look out for “Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League”. So let’s get it made!

Who’s in charge around here?

Item The Fourth: In the last “Odds & Sods” (item #1) I mentioned a great video by Ken Murphy. Now Phil Plait has mentioned it in his Bad Astronomy blog on Slate. He has a lot more information on some of the really subtle stuff that can be seen in the video and some other ideas for similar projects that can be done.

Item The Fifth: If you would be so kind as to bear with me while I vent (although you will be forgiven if you bail and ignore this section), the gremlin body count continues to rise like a smothering tide. With every two steps forward (item #5) there seems to be one back. I’m trying to consider it to be a cha-cha:

Cha-Cha

  • As previously reported, about two weeks ago we bit the bullet, dealt with Time Warner Cable’s “customer service”, and got our cable television problems solved. It was good for about four days, then went right back having the same problem, showing up as a really low-power signal with most channels blacked out because the digital cable boxes just weren’t seeing enough signal to decode. The earliest they could get us back on the schedule for another look was six days later — but mysteriously the problem went away “on its own” after three days. I’m guessing that this time it wasn’t just us having a problem, but something broken that was affecting a much wider area. If TWC got multiple complaints, they expedited the repair for the whole neighborhood.
  • Our washer & dryer are about a dozen years old. I’m not sure how long the “durable” in “durable goods” is supposed to be, but the washer went belly up mid-load last weekend with a strong smell of rubber burning. Probably a belt broken or slipped, which is something I’ve repaired in the past on older machines. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to get to the innards of the thing to do anything on my own. Meanwhile, the dryer works, but has something wrong with it that makes it very, very noisy when running. We’ll get both of them checked out on Monday to see if it’s a $200 repair or $2,000 for new ones.
  • My “MomDude-mobile” minivan had been getting more and more reluctant to start over the last couple of weeks and it was finally time to let the dealer tell me if it was the battery, the starter, or an electrical problem. I could have changed the battery myself if that’s all it was, but the symptoms made me suspect that it was something more complex. The good news is that they said it was just the battery, and that was relatively cheap to fix. The bad news is that now, a week later, it’s running really rough at high speeds. At 165K+ miles, I’m feeling that it’s on thin ice, but I don’t really need or want monthly payments on a new car right now.
  • In the last month I’ve had the DVD burner in not one, but two DVRs go belly up on me. The old Panasonic DMR-EH55’s were great for recording things on a big hard disk and then burning them off to DVD, but when the DVD drive dies you can’t just drop in a replacement, it’s all a proprietary unit. And they stopped making the proprietary replacement units years ago. So now I have hundreds of hours of stuff that I want to burn off to DVD, but can’t. Time to get creative and see if “my smart can be better than their stupid”.

Did I piss off someone who had some extra curses to sling about? Did I cut off a warlock on the freeway? Take the last bag of chips off the shelf just before a wizard could grab them? Let the dog poop in a witch’s front yard without cleaning it up? If so, how do I figure out who it is and apologize? (If it’s God being pissed about that whole “not been to church in forty years” thing, I might be screwed.)

FYI, I found that “cha-cha” picture on Facebook and traced it back as far as an Instagram account for “violetflame7”. If anyone has more accurate credit information, let me know and I’ll post an update.

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Filed under Astronomy, Movies, Odds & Sods, Photography

July 24, 2013 · 09:55

Odds & Sods For Wednesday, July 24th

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.

Capture

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.

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Filed under Computers, Freakin' Idiots!, Odds & Sods, Space, Weather

July 17, 2013 · 15:36

Odds & Sods For Wednesday, July 17th

Item The First: That was an interesting little exercise out at the ISS yesterday! In case you missed it, a spacewalk scheduled for six and a half hours got cut short after a little more than an hour due to a dangerous condition with one of the space suits. The suit worn by Italian/ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano started to leak water (probably the water used for cooling, but too early to be sure yet) inside of his helmet.

The problem is that water in microgravity doesn’t act like water here on the ground – see this video and this video for recent demonstrations from Chris Hadfield of how water acts on ISS. Loose water tends to float around, clump into balls, and cling through surface tension to surfaces.

Surfaces like your face. Since you’re in a space suit in the vacuum of space, you can’t just wipe the water off. So the water will spread over your head and face. And fill your ears – which left Luca almost completely unable to hear his radio. And fill your eyes – which left Luca almost completely unable to see. And cover the inside of the face plate – which meant that even what he could see out of his eyes was blurred by the water on the helmet glass.

By the time they had recognized the problem, aborted the spacewalk, and got Luca back into the airlock, they had a couple of reports that the water was getting into his nose and mouth. They later reported that there had not been a significant amount of water (YET!) there, but did admit at a press conference that if the problem had gotten worse without getting him inside and the helmet off, drowning could have been a possibility.

Do you still think that space travel is boring and routine just because we’ve gotten pretty good at doing a nearly impossible thing? Think again. It’s not that space travel is ever going to be easy or routine. It’s just that the people we have doing it are really, really good.

Item The Second: I ranted a while back about the freakin’ idiots at the AQMD wanting to shut down the beach fire pits because of the “air pollution” they cause while I wondered about how much pollution there could possibly be, especially compared to the regular brush fires we get here.

On July 12th they voted and put restrictions into place. It’s not a total ban, but it still seems to be another idiot rule by idiot bureaucrats and idiot politicians who then have the gall to wonder why we think they’re freakin’ idiots (if they ever bother to think what the general public thinks about them in the first place).

Item The Third: In better news, after I wrote about the impending closure of the the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, I got a nice email from David Hunt, the Director of the Military Aviation Museum. He gave me an update and a link to a follow-up article, indicating that things aren’t quite as grim as first indicated. While the museum will be looking to sell a couple of its aircraft in order to raise some capital, there are no immediate plans to sell the entire collection, close the museum, or shut down the airport.

Great news! Still, if you’re in the mid-Atlantic area and you’ve got an afternoon (or a day) free and you like airplanes, go give them a visit! Tell the docents how great they are! Tell David I sent you! Buy some stuff from the gift shop to help out, they’ve got some great warbird Hawaiian shirts!

Item The Fourth: With a “like” by Otrazhenie on Tuesday’s Sacramento Roses post, WordPress now tells me that I’ve gotten 100 “likes” since I started WLTSTF. After three more people hit the “follow” button last night, there are now thirty-seven people following WLTSTF, and I think only three or four of you are folks I actually know.

I have no way of knowing if that’s good, bad, or otherwise, but it pleases me greatly just on general principles. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who read WLTSTF and take the time to comment, hit the “like” and/or “follow” buttons, make a Facebook comment, or otherwise participate.

I would probably continue to blather on just to hear myself think (and to get in some steady writing practice, which was the original reason for “draining the swamp”), but it’s ever so much more fun when it’s a dialogue rather than a monologue.

Item The Fifth: There was a quiz in Spanish class on Monday, as expected. I got 13/15, The Long-Suffering Wife got 12/15, which was great considering that she had missed class the previous work due to a work commitment. We also got to do the “Paul & Ronnie: A Cute Couple” show and further established ourselves as the class clowns. We also established that “It’s not easy being Pablo”.

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Odds & Sods, Space

June 28, 2013 · 22:21

Odds & Sods For Friday, June 28th

Item The First: That was odd… Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Hello? *insert feedback squeal here* Hello? On the one hand, it looks like a daily record for the site in visitors and views (17 visitors & 27 views, so it’s not John Scalzi’s “Whatever” blog, but it’s still a record) and all week’s been similar, but it looks like 90% of the traffic is going to the “Raccoon Rescue” post, and absolutely NONE of it to the story I posted yesterday. Hello? OK, moving on.

Item The Second: Speaking of the little raccoon family, they’ve been out and about around sunset every night this week, being quite bold about lounging around on the tool shed roof (on the west side of the house so it gets the late afternoon sun). I can stand in the front yard and watch them, but as soon as I try to get close enough for pictures, they scatter.

Last night in the late dusk I could have sworn that I saw there were three kits (raccoon babies are called “kits” I now know). A little research shows that raccoon couples have litters of two to seven, so there very well be more than the two I saw at the spa last week.

And if you want to know what they sound like, I found this. Imagine four or five of them roughhousing on the roof in the middle of the night, jumping off into the trees, chasing each other all over the yard, screaming that noise.

Item The Third: In other critter news, one of the local skunks has apparently had a very bad night tonight. We’ve got the house all buttoned up and the A/C going full blast and it still reeks in here, so it must have been close and a major event. I hope that Jessie doesn’t get any stupid ideas (AGAIN!!) if she has to go out tonight.

Item The Fourth: Why would the house still be buttoned up and the A/C going full blast at 22:00 at night? Because it’s still pushing 95F out there after reaching a high of about 102F, with temps pushing 110F over the weekend. At least we’re not in Palm Springs (119F), Las Vegas (117F), Phoenix (119F), Lake Havasu (126F). That is not a typo – One Hundred And Twenty-Six Degrees Fahrenheit is Saturday’s expected high in Lake Havasu, Arizona. Words fail me…

Item The Fifth: The June “earworm” comes from the new Natalie Maines album, “Mother”. It’s a nice album and I have been deeply in love with her voice for near on fifteen years since the first Dixie Chicks album hit like a bombshell. There are several very good songs, but the title track, her take on the Pink Floyd song from “The Wall” is just spec-freakin’-tacular. Can’t stop hearing it in my head, can’t stop twitching unnaturally unless I listen to it two or three times a day. Very, very tasty indeed.

 

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Filed under Critters, Music, Odds & Sods, Weather, Writing