Schierer Space

A snapped this little gem of Nate at breakfast time this morning.

Nate’s also learning to move around on his car.

Sorry no eclipse pics… completely cloudy here.

For some reason I uploaded all of these close-up flower images but failed to post that I had done so. Well, let’s just consider these floral shots a Valentine’s Day bouquet for the entire Schierer Space reading population.

A few samples, enjoy!

From the Embedded Muse newsletter issue 155 Joke of the Day:

An engineer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude infinite strings of incomprehensible formulas calculated with micrometric precision from vague assumptions which are based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive experiments carried out with instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of questionable mentality and doubtful reliability for the avowed purpose of annoying and confusing a hopelessly chimerical group of esoteric fanatics referred to altogether too frequently as technicians.

Nate’s lovely fountain imitation succeeded in getting my lovely wife equally sick. Nate started feeling better by Sunday morning, and K by Sunday night. I, unfortunately, am now running anchor on this lovely spew relay. Wheee.

Most of you also read the Bad Astronomer, but this was so fun to watch I have to plug it also.

Although somewhat visually reminiscent of the Brady Bunch theme song, this is a very nicely choreographed video.

Thanks to a quick transaction with Steven, K is up and running again. Since the mainboard, processor, video and well pretty much everything had changed from the OS perspective, I had to do a “repair install” with the WXP CD.
As much as this can be annoying, it beats reinstalling all of the applications and regenerating/restoring the preferences for all of them. It’s sort-of impressive to me that you can redo the entire driver database and still leave the look & feel essentially unchanged. Of course, the install disk pretty much returns everything to original, so you have to do umpteen cycles through Windows Update until it stops finding stuff that needs fixing.

To be fair, it’s been significantly less than 24 hours since I started (and I did get a little sleep) and she’s pretty much back up and running (on a more capable machine). Considering that poor little Nate has been hornking* up pretty much everything he eats for the last 24 hours, I wasn’t likely to get much sleep anyway.

As seen in an add email from B&H Photo: the Canon 1200/5.6L USM a mere $99,000.

For comparison, my relecting telescope is only a 1020mm, f10.

More info in their newsletter article.

Some excerpts:

At 36lbs, 33″ long and 9″ wide at the front element, calling this lens a ‘tele’ is like calling King Kong a monkey.
…
For the record, the Canon 1200/5.6L USM contains 13 elements (including 2 Fluorite) in 10 groups, stops down to f32, and has a minimum focus of 45.9′. As for filtration, 48 mm drop-in filters can be inserted towards the aft section of the lens barrel. And before you start kvetching ‘it’s not an IS lens’ keep in mind this hefty pup demands the sturdiest tripod and pan/tilt head you can muster up. An EOS Mark III mounted on this thing looks like a rear lens cap with handle bars. Folks, we’re talking big here… really big.

Make sure to take a look at the 50mm vs 1200mm comparison shots and the equivalent lens lengths for a crop body with the 2x tele-extender.

K’s PC bit the big one Saturday night. Maybe the mice ate it.

Instead of restarting properly, it would produce a long LOUD beep, pause for a moment to catch its breath, then repeat. Normally, the PC would emit a short friendly beep before initializing the video with all those helpful text messages. Each tone was at an ear wrenching pitch and lasted for something like 6.3 minutes (if we go by the book like Lt. Saavik). Of course the various websites listing the infamous and mysterious BIOS boot codes listed NOTHING related to a single long beep. Previously, after two or three pokes of the little reset button, something would behave as desired and the machine would be up and running.

Not so on Saturday where my troubleshooting efforts went something like this: (more…)