Originally uploaded by mwhybark
The surface of the moon, shot through a 10″ Meade telescope via the time-honored “hold a camera up to the eyepiece” method.
Audio not as shot. Just FYI.
man, what a great day
I haven’t felt this happy at five o’clock in years.
I began the day ready to head to a contract call, but they cancelled (booo, but no hard feelings). That left me with a few more hours in the day, and my initial plan was to start working on some tax-and-accounting stuff – our 2010 income will be complicated and the more I get done the earlier I get it done the better it will be for everyone concerned.
However, as noted earlier, I recently added an ISP option to our internet access and have been walking though the streaming options on our DVD player, one of which is the primarily HD rental resource Vudu. I was actually excited by the service the first time I explored the UI – I mean, the film listings link to Wikipedia, for godssake, and they have a bunch of Criterion classics available in HD (No Jeanne d’Arc, hèlas). Testing, however, had revealed that SD was likely the best sustained resolution.
Ever since the nearly-two-week old launch of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, I have had a jones on to do a viewing and readthrough of the film and script.
CONFIGURING
Your attention please:
I am tinkering with the blog with the intent of republishing every bit of my decentralized online activity here, from Twitter posts to Facebook comments. Until I have effectively adjusted the ways in which this content is republished here, the blog and RSS feed may prove annoying as shit. Feel free to yank the RSS feed for the blog from Google Reader, I’ll advise via Google Reader when things settle down. I will probably delink blog and Facebook for the meantime as well.
More sooner!
Biweekly music playing with Joe and Greg. Yes please.
Runways
couple weeks ago, I went for a long walk in Sand Point and came across a ‘new’ trail, which appeared to simply have been bulldozed back down to the WWII runways. It was very SF, like seeing what landscape engineering in an orbital or trans-system ship. Come to think of it, the little village right next to the radomes at Discovery Park has the same feel.
testing
check check is the robot on? do the robot. binary solo!
argh
Which cat is it that is not properly using the litter box? How can I isolate for and test this? Lock one at a time in the basement, maybe?
Yelling
I awakened this morning from a dream in which while at a darkened coin-operated video-game arcade, I took a series of calls from competing IT salespeople which culminated in IT salesperson A yelling at me for even considering speaking to IT salesperson B. I told him to get fucked, as one might well imagine. Still, what an odd dream.
It’s not that I haven’t actually had the experience of managing competing IT sales contacts. It’s that I never found that experience especially striking or difficult, so it really surprises me that the motif would surface in a dream.
I was amused that the entire thing was set in a murky arcade. The arcade itself appeared to be set in a facility such as an airport, although devoid of people.
striped madras
in my childhood home and bedroom, the curtains and bedspread of my room were cool shades of blues and greens, and the occasional sweep of midnight headlamps across the wa’l is in memory blue as well.
my sister’s room and my parents’ room also had color-matched drapes and bedspreads, Suzy’s being pinks and mauves to my folks’ golden and yellow.
I somehow ended up with my sister’s bedspread and just washed it today. It, and those other, similar, lost pieces of cloth that accompanied it into our home well over forty years ago, are awfully cool and restrained. Modern. Made to last.
The blue sweep of those eleven o’clock headlights over the wall and ceiling of my room won’t outlast the chemical activity in my brain, of course. I’m not sure what it meant to me at the time, that I should keep it so clearly in mind. I do know that I had frequent and varied nightmares in that room and many others. I would guess that I found that luminous precession menacing and portentous.
There’s a late night state of mind I rarely find accessible anymore which I associate with observing those lights. I suppose I’m glancingly close to it as I write this, tonight.
Good and bad
Finally, we have higher-speed internet access: 2.x mbps as opposed to the former 256k dsl. Swapping out the access points and routers went very smoothly, thank heavens. The biggest stumbling block was dealing with the behavior of a mixed pack of Airport Express wireless networking devices. Thankfully they have settled down and give every sign of continued maintenance-free networking activity.
In practical terms, this means that Hulu is now functional.
I had a line on a near-mint large-aperture goto telescope, but in order to retrieve it I had to go to the Kitsap peninsula. After the windstorm overnight, the day was clear, warm, and bright, and I was looking forward to a ferry ride and a drive in the company of the pup. Alas, as I waited to drive onto the ferry, my car’s battery died. For the past couple of weeks, the car has had flaky electronics, and this was the last straw. On my way to the ferry, I had driven about twenty miles – the battery had received more than enough juice. It was apparent to me that if I got a jump and crossed to the peninsula, the probability of another non-starter event was very high, and so I waved off.
Tomorrow I take the car in to learn the expense entailed. That expense may very well curdle the telescope purchase.