WEEK 47 2008
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Saturday 22 November 2008
Saturday
- the usual. An oil change for the explorer, some shopping, a visit to
the library. Over to a friends for a birthday party in the evening.
Friday 21 November
2008
Friday
- working, by myself. It had been cooling all week, but it warmed up
considerably. I think it was 85F or so. Ridiculous, for November. But
it was nice easy channel, all stationed off on Thursday, so production
was reasonable.
Then back on the road at sunset & home to Lancaster. I was really
tempted to stay, and get some sailing in, but chores awaited.
Thursday 20 November
2008
Thursday
- a frustrating day. The GPS mapper had issues, being unable to get a
lock. So it was mostly stationing all day, thousands of feet of that.
It'll look bad on a progress chart, but you can only do what you can
do. The other mapper was in the shop, so we just pressed on as best as
we could.
In the evening, thanks to a hint by the kind personnel at BBR I was
able to get the mapper working again. Essentially there is an option:
Reset Mapper, in the GPS utilities...
It was weird being home with nothing to do. It doesn't happen often,
and I sat around in an empty echoing house for a while, then went out
for a (second) dinner with my friend Dave.
Wednesday 19
November 2008
Wednesday
- another longish day.
I did see the ISS pass, with shuttle attached. Heavens Above had a
prediction, starting in the SW at 5:50, going to 76 altitude, and then
descending into the NE. Since sundown is about 4:30 this gave me some
time to take care of a couple of errands, then I headed down to the
beach at Oxnard, on the north side of the channel entrance.
I had a compass with me, and it showed SW as being perpendicular to the
jetty at the entrance - California's coast is only roughly NS, near
Ventura it is more EW. There was a dredge at the north entrance, lit up
like a riverboat, but it was reasonably dark on the beach.
The pass was cool. It started as a rather dim yellow spark, climbing in
the west, much dimmer than the planets in view. As it climbed it became
brighter and brighter, the aspect with respect to the sun becoming
better. Overhead it was nearly as bright as the planets, -2.6 was the
prediction and it seems accurate. Then it descended, becoming dimmer as
it dropped into the eastern mists, and faded out.
Tuesday 18 November 2008
Tuesday
- I forgot the power cord to the laptop (in Lancaster), so posting will
be delayed. I've just enough to boot, download and save the days data,
and turn off. Even that takes about 18% of the battery charge. I'm too
cheap to buy a transformer for four days of use.
Monday 17 November 2008
Monday
- back at work. It was a long commute in the morning, probably as a
result of the fires. Two and a quarter hours to Camarillo, instead of
the usual hour and a half. I could see the fires from the CA-14 and the
405 freeways, first as a glow in the sky, then the actual flames.
Remarkable.
Other than that it was just a normal day, unseasonably warm.
It looked like there were be a visible ISS pass, according to the
Heavens Above web site, but I didn't see anything. But there is a
better pass, almost directly over Ventura with a -2.6 magnitude, on
Wednesday.
Sunday 16 November 2008
Sunday
- An odd day. I started off with a fair amount of energy, but wore down quickly. But I did get a few things done.
My friends' boy had scanned in some field data books for me, hundreds
of pages straight to PDF, so I went through them, checking for missing
pages and misalignments. He did a great job, only three missing pages out of four hundred scans. This is less that a 1% error budget, actually much better than I
do. I explained to him that engineers don't expect perfection, what we
have are mitigation plans, that 'perfect is the enemy of good enough'.
The scanner has alignment issues - it rotates occasional images,
arbitrarily as far as I can tell; so whilst most are upright, some are
upside down, and a few are at 90 degrees to the vertical. I've only
Acrobat reader on my old Win2k box, so I couldn't correct/insert pages
- but I have Ubuntu Linux on the other box! So I picked, more or less
at random, PDFedit,
from the free repository and downloaded and installed it with Synaptic.
It worked great - and after my fixes everything looked great in
PDFedit, but I found that with Acrobat Reader the newly rotated
and inserted pages were cropped on the right.
Very annoying. It's clear that the entire image is in the file, but
that Acrobat's default frame is just the left side. Oh well.
My associate Tim has a full copy of Acrobat and can do the fixes, and
since I've already found and tagged the problem areas, it's not
that big a deal. Still, it's too bad OSS (Open Source Software) didn't
come through from me. Only the other hand PDFedit is still very much in
beta development, and it turns out that the Ubuntu package I installed
is 0.3.2 and well behind the current release of 0.4.1.
If you haven't followed software development, 1.0 is the "real thing", everything before that is "beta" or not-ready-for-prime-time software. A version 0.3 is really really green software in functionality, whereas 0.9 and such usually just needs cosmetic and grammatical fixes.
