I
discovered a very nifty program called Stellarium
- It's an open source planetarium program that
is designed for astronomers so they can hook up
their telescopes to a computer and locate stars
easily, and it's a full planetarium for your desktop.
You can set your location, the Earth rotates at
the same rate to stay where the stars actually
are in the sky, or you can adjust it faster or
slower, you can easily locate nifty objects, and
you can zoom in on nebulas and see what they'd
look like through a telescope.
-
October 29, 2007 -
Today
was chili day at KSHS. I was a judge for administration,
and there were eight contestants that we all diligently
sampled, took notes on, sampled some more, selected
our favorites, and then we went through it again
with the top four until there was a winner. Matt
also brought his Nintendo Wii which everyone loved.
-
October 28, 2007 -
This
weekend I went to Eunjoo's with Carrie and Jason
so Eunjoo could meet Jason... we went out to eat
and I looked at her new laptop which would start
to read a flash card and then it'd just vanish...
I couldn't figure out why. Earlier that day I
went to help Donna move, but mostly we were just
waiting for the lock guy to come. Friday Teresa
and I watched some BSG- we're mid-way through
the third season.
-
October 24, 2007 -
Technology
arrived on the doorstep today. I got a gigabit
network card with a crossover cable and another
hard drive. First thing I did was remove all my
network cables, junky old hub, and connected the
two computers with the one cable, Woohoo, 100Mbps,
ten times faster than what it was. Then I installed
the gigabit network card in Chroniton... Woohoo
1000Mbps!
-
October 21, 2007 -
I
ordered a new network card and a hard drive today.
Right now my two main computers are only communicating
at 10 megabits per second, which is the slowest
possible, so with the new network card and a different
cable I should be able to boost it up to 1000
mbps.
I
saw this Geico commercial on TV the other day
and thought it was very funny.
-
October 20, 2007 -
Friday
was my first day without Jesse as he and Reggie
are now in Hawaii. It was actually a
very quiet day- there were no server crashes,
the phone system didn't flip out, and there weren't
even that many calls. I started to upgrade to
Ubuntu 7.10, which it reported would take more
than a day to do- I knew it'd take a while, it
just came out Thursday, but my computer asked
if I wanted to upgrade- and I couldn't resist.
I also brought in my rubber band ball Friday.
I started to build it my sophomore year of high
school and now it's about basketball size- I don't
add to it much anymore, mostly I will just add
a new thin layer to the outside every couple years
so it looks good.
Saturday
Mary Lou, Bob and I went to the Greek food festival
at Marsha's church. It was the perfect day for
it and the food was great!
-
October 14, 2007 -
This
weekend I brought home a couple laptops to work
on. One was just a checkup sort of thing, it's
old, but it works OK for what it is. The other
laptop was brand new, but it got a virus that
messed up Windows and it wouldn't boot any longer.
I did discover a wonderful trick to recover data
off a computer when Windows messes up. Usually
I'd just pull the drive and put it in another
working computer, but with a laptop you can't
really do that as easy, so I used an Ubuntu live
CD to mount the drive and then copy the files
off with a flash drive.
I
noticed an interesting thing at work this week:
Internet Explorer 7 has been removed from Windows
Update for some unknown reason. Where'd it go...
Why did it go? I couldn't find a reason.
-
October 12, 2007 -
Teresa
and I watched the rest of season two of Battlestar
Galactica, so now we're ready for three, which
isn't out on DVD yet.
-
October 7, 2007 -
Today
I scanned a few images from a genealogy book Linda
Sprague loaned to me. Her son Lance found my website
while searching for his ancestor, my Great Great
Grandfather Christian Pfister. Linda volunteers
at work, so that was a very cool happening.
-
October 6, 2007 -
Teresa
and I have been working our way through BSG, and
we're now starting season 2.5 (they break their
seasons up into halves), but with so much TV watching
I've not done too much else that is worthy of
note.
Friday
at work I went somewhere where few get to go....
a neither region between the ceiling in the museum
lobby, and the roof... it's a most precarious
location and not easy to access. There's a small
hatch in the ceiling above the museum snack area
that you must push open with a tall ladder...
Then you scale the ladder up into the ceiling
and there is a one foot wide plank you must walk
that takes you from there all the way over near
the front door of the gift shop, which was our
destination and mission, to run a network cable
to the gift shop desk so we can put a computer
there. SO- you get near the gift shop front door
and there is an eight foot drop to a lower ceiling,
and there is another beam (just a two by four)
that runs about twenty feet over to where we need
to work. We didn't traverse the small beam, I
was nervous with the one that was a foot wide...
there are pipes and wires that crisscross everywhere.