WEEK 50 2008
Last
Week-
Sun-
Mon- Tue- Wed-
Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Picture of the Week
MAIN
PAGE
First Post,
17 March 2002
|
Six Years
Ago, This Week, 2002 |
Five Years
Ago, This Week, 2003 |
Four
Years Ago, this
week, 2004 |
Three Years
Ago, This Week, 2005 |
Two Years
Ago,
This Week, 2006
|
A Year Ago,
This Week, 2007
|
Saturday 13 December 2008
Saturday
- back in Lancaster. I have a lot of chores, but not much energy.
Hmmm. I fouled up, didn't upload last week's blog - Week #49 - and nobody noticed. Oh well, fixed now.
They
were predicting rain and snow this weekend, and it's cold and blustery
now. I wind proofed the swamp cooler this morning (which means I put a
large pillow in the vent). We'll see about the precipitation.
Phoebe,
who normally would not go out in cold weather, is having a ball
outside. Chasing leaves. Yes, my plump (nearly 20 lbs) cat is acting
like a kitten, ignoring the windstorm. I took some video, it's so
cute...
Friday 12 December
2008
Friday
- sick as a dog with a head cold, so I spent the morning working at the desk on a spreadsheet.
Distractions:
I've a room mate who has been evicted - he is crashing around
downstairs, apparently using power tools to disassemble his furniture.
The landlord is here with his wife, doing various small chores, with
the teevee on. It's a bit hard to concentrate. He did fix the light
switch in my room, that would turn on in the middle of the night, so
that's to the good.
I'll see if I can get some work in this afternoon, or perhaps just head up to Lancaster.
Thursday 11 December
2008
Thursday
- working. Not feeling too good today. It's either allergies or a cold coming on, probably the latter.
Wednesday 10
December 2008
Wednesday
- working.
I was a bit
unfair to Ben Bova the other day. He isn't a bad writer, really, and he
manages to get the science right, and to put a lot of the possibilities
of the future in space in his books. Water at the moon's poles, power
towers, lunar catapults, nano-machines, and more.
Tuesday 9 December 2008
Tuesday
- It is Monarch Butterfly season in Ventura, they are roosting on the
Eucalyptus trees around here. Neat. Not great clouds of them, but
enough to be remarkable. They seem more like flying squirrels than
birds, and faster than you'd think, soaring between the trees. I'll try
to get some pictures, but the Xacti isn't much of a detail camera.
Monday 8 December 2008
Monday
- back to work.
Book #50 was
Moonrise",
by Ben Bova. This was interesting, in a way. Bova is a rather
pedestrian writer, and this is sort of Dallas in outer space, but done
well enough that I listened to the whole thing. And the kid was
interested too. At first he just messed with his IPOD while I played
it, but he started volunteering to change out the tapes as we went
through them.
Heh. I felt a little bit like the uncle in the beginning of 'The Princess Bride'.
It seems there is a sequel, Moonwar,
that sounds a bit...steamier...than Moonrise. But it is
not in audio
format.
It's nice to hit the 50 book mark, I'm still pretty busy so I don't know that I'll hit even 51 this year.
Though there is that tempting short biography of James Monroe.
Sunday 7 December
2008
Sunday
- not much to say. I had a nasty headache that lasted into the
afternoon, but some chores got done.
One of the things I did over Thanksgiving break was to take some
snapshots and video of the setting moon. I played around with Quicktime
Pro, and managed to rotate the video, add titles, and even run a
filter. Not exactly user friendly software - essentially you could only
run a filter when exporting the movie. But it did work.
I was so busy playing with that video function that I didn't bother to
look at the stills. These were done with the little Sanyo Xacti CG6
laying on it's side on the deck railing. This is not, as I am sure
I've mentioned before, a low light or high resolution camera. Still it
managed to capture the setting new moon, including the dark side, which
I did not visually notice. Neat.
There was apparently a cool conjunction and occultation that I did not see, as I didn't know about it. Oh well.
