Yesterday, I was thinking about how much e-mail is like regular mail. When I was a kid, during summer vacation, I couldn’t wait for the mail to arrive, always believing that today would be the day that something really cool would appear. It never did. Mostly the mail consisted of ads and bills. I do the same with e-mail now. When I’m working on my computer, every time the e-mail chime goes off I’m immediately checking to see what came in, expecting it to be something interesting. It seldom is. Like regular mail, it mostly contains ads and bills. The only difference is that now I get to pay those bill instead of my parents paying them.
Al
I purchased a Husqvarna 525RC Brushcutter at the local Lowes today. I mentioned in a previous post how I had replaced the carburetor on an old brushcutter that I owned and was still having a few problems with it. I planned on troubleshooting it and hoped to find out what was going on with it but decided I really needed something now so I ended up buying the Husqvarna instead. The unit is solid, well built and a lot more powerful than the previous brushcutter. It vibrates a whole lot less than the old brushcutter and because of that it’s a lot more pleasant to use. Assembly was relatively easy but the instructions weren’t all that great. Lots of little …
I had an onsite job interview today. This was a follow up to a phone interview that took place last week. After completing the phone interview I was pretty sure that I had done well and was under consideration so when they called me in for a face to face I wasn’t really all that surprised. What did surprise me is when I got there, it appeared that they had pretty much decided they would already hire me and that this second ‘interview’ was more a chance to see the place than it was additional vetting. I was also surprised that it looks like if the details can be ironed out, I’ll be starting next week. The new place is …
Dentist appointment this morning. I had my teeth cleaned. The most painful part was paying for it out of my own pocket because I don’t currently have dental insurance. When I semi-retired last fall I looked into it but it appeared that after you got the insurance, you had to wait anywhere from six months to a year for most of the benefits to kick in. Didn’t seem like a good deal to me. I spent the afternoon installing a new carburetor on a brush cutter/weed wacker. I’ve had the thing for a number of years now and did little maintenance on it outside of changing the sparkplug. Last year it seemed sluggish, this year it seemed really sluggish. Sometimes …
My family says I’m cheap. I like to think of myself as frugal. It’s not that I won’t spend money or always go for the cheapest deal. It’s just that I won’t spend money on something that I don’t perceive as worth it. I’ll buy the top of the line if it gives me something that other products don’t but I won’t spend money needlessly for status or prestige. Sometimes that gets me into trouble. The other day our toilet seat broke. One of the hinges on the back snapped off. (Perhaps we should consider diets.) Anyway, it was time to replace it so I looked at the seats that were available at The Home Depot. Thirty dollars for a …
I’ve been busy refreshing my Python skills by working through the excellent udemy, 100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 2022 course by Dr. Angela Yu. I’m currently working on day 48 which involves scrapping the Upcoming Events section of the Python.org website using the Selenium WebDriver. In the example code, Dr. Yu shows how to write the output of the scrapping operation into a dictionary using a for loop but says that it also could be accomplished using dictionary comprehension. I decided that would be an interesting challenge and would help to reinforce my knowledge of dictionary comprehension so I gave it a try. I thought that it would be a fairly easy thing to do …
The Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula (lower left). Narrowband hydrogen-alpha, sulfur II and oxygen III data was acquired over two nights, processed using Pixinsight and the channels were mapped to the Hubble Palette. Not my favorite color combination but it does bring out a lot of detail in the image. Astrophotography is tough. Before you can produce anything of interest, you first need to learn how to use your equipment to acquire images and then you need to learn how to use the software tools to process those images. On the acquisition side, you’re having to master the use of a lot of different hardware. You need to understand and be able to set up a telescope, a mount, an …
Maybe, maybe not. To be determined. All I know is that for the last year or so, I sat in a little room, masked up and pretty much chained to an x-ray machine developing software for the company’s next generation system. The people there were nice, the product was interesting but I just decided I couldn’t take it any more. Most places where I have worked I’ve been able to shift my hours around a bit so that I could come in early and leave early, allowing me to have a little bit of time to do the things that I want. Unfortunately, at this place for a good portion of the year they held meetings from 5 to 6 …
Finally some good weather. Thursday, 6/17/2/21 I had a chance to get out and do some astrophotography. Since I have a relatively small telescope and live in an area with a decent amount of light pollution, I decided the target would be IC5070, the Pelican Nebula. At this time of year Earth is facing away from the center of the galaxy during the night so the targets are limited; mostly consisting of galaxies. Even though the galaxies are massive, the distance from Earth makes them relatively small and without a decent size telescope the images you can produce of them are not too impressive. On top of that light pollution makes them difficult to shoot. Nebulas, on the other hand, …
I posted the above on Facebook, but I’m putting it here too since I have no doubt it will soon disappear into the ether. It’s scary and disgraceful what’s going on in the world right now. A small percentage of the population is in the process of destroying freedoms and rights that make out country and civilization unique. Maybe they truly believe their making the world a better place but I suspect that for the most part they’re just a bunch of insecure losers with pathetic lives that get off destroying people for their own sadistic gratification.
