Observatorio de la Ballona

Dennis Prager has recorded an excellent short lecture on the basic issue current political discourse is facing. And he hits on the crucial issue: More government means less for the individual. Watch.

So we’ve all had days where we think things have gone poorly. I think the owner of this boat feels that he has had a fairly bad day today.

This is on Dockeiler Beach, just south of the Marina del Rey harbor entrance (you can see the breakwall behind the boat. This shot was taken about 2pm.

Aground

I’ve been under the weather the last several days and have been trying to take it easy. So I have taken the opportunity to do a little web searching.

I have been looking for a good open source HTML / PHP editor that runs on Windows for a while. I like Bluefish, but it does not run on Windows without Cygwin. I know that I should just set up a Linux partition and work from there, but I have found it too hard to go back and forth. And almost all the key software tools I use (The Sky, NexRemote, MaximDL, FocusMax, etc.) run only on the Windows platform. So I want a Windows or, ideally, a multi-platform tool. I believe I have found it in Eclipse.

I heard about Eclipse at work, where our Java developers would like to move to it as the preferred IDE platform. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs (integrated development environments) and has been primarily focused on Java®. They do have an IDE for PHP and the tool also understands HTML. I downloaded and installed it and it has been very easy to use. The HTTP context help isn’t great, but it is good enough so far. Finding the tool got me inspired to clean up the site.

All of the main pages (not the blog, gallery, or wiki) of the site have been updated to load the sidebar from an external file. The top bar is still static, as I would have to write some PHP to get that to load more flexibly, but that is on the table. Each page now also shows when it was last updated. I also have, with the help of the validator in Eclipse, made sure all the pages are XHTML compliant. I made major updates to the Equipment page, adding links to the products and putting software into categories.

I also updated the banner in the Astrophoto Gallery. The default color for the title text was too dark, so that is lighter. I also replaced the delivered background image from the theme with a bit of Mare Nectaris. It’s a bit more personalized now.

Perhaps now I’ll personalize the wiki. Or perhaps clean up Schlei.com

We went to the final regular season concert for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Disney Hall today. There were three more modern (1900+) pieces that were nice, if a little more avant garde then our preference, but still enjoyable.

One of the pieces was Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto. This is a new piece, composed in 2007, at its first performance by the Philharmonic. It being the last performance of the season, they introduced three retiring performers, each of whom had been with the orchestra since the early 1960s. The retiring french horn player commented that we needed to be tolerant of new music, such as the Piano Concerto to be performed that day. He said “Remember your favorite keys: C, F sharp, G. You’ll be hearing all of them. At the same time.” Very amusing.

Even more funny is the paragraph from Esa-Pekka’s own description of his piece:

Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds I (my working title)

I imagined a post-biological culture, where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore. Composing intelligence creates music that somehow relates to an area that long time ago [sic] was called the Balkans. All this is accompanied by bird-robots.

I take it he was being funny and it was a light hearted piece, but that description made my jaw drop.

It dawned quite cold this morning (at least cold for us Southern Californians): 23° F. Frost was everywhere. It was quite pretty.

The grass was all covered in frost.

The grill got chilled

The house was dusted with frost

But the view down to the lake was very pretty

One benefit of having an eight-month old child is that you tend to always get up early in the morning, even on the weekends.

I just returned from a trip to Singapore and India. Overall it was a very productive trip and I got to see some cool things.

One was the Singapore zoo, which has a part of the zoo open at night with what they call the Night Safari. It is a great way to see the animals as they are awake and active at night. But that’s not the topic of this post.

Flying between Bangalore and Pune, we flew on Kingfisher Airlines. It is owned by the same company that makes Kingsfisher beer — kind of like flying on Budweiser Airlines. Domestic airline service in India is very good. Most flights are between one to two hours and there is full hot meal service in coach. Easy to get spoiled. The airlines compete on service. On the flight from Hyderabad to Bangalore on Jet Airways, the flight attendant took my jacket when I was sitting in coach. Very nice.

Kingfisher offers good service and good in-flight amenities. One of those amenities is a video screen in each seat. They have a variety of channels with entertainment and an in-flight map. But what was very cool was channel 2. It had a live feed from a camera on the front of the plane. You could watch as the plane taxied and took off. After take-off, the camera was pointed down and you could see the countryside move by. That is the coolest in-flight video I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but this month has been crazy as the holidays wrapped up and I headed off the the Far East. In fact, I’m in Singapore as I write this.

But that’s not the point of the post. We’ve taken the plunge and hired an architect to design changes to the drainage at Osage and complete plans for a roll-off roof observatory. We hired Tom Jungbluth. He has shared many good ideas and we are looking forward to seeing the plans.

We had some dirt/mud come down into the driveway in the last storms. I don’t know what this week has done and there is heavy rain forecast for this weekend. We are as prepared as we can be.

I’ve been very paranoid about freezing. Over the MLK Weekend, I turned off the water, drained some of the pipes and shut off the well. It hasn’t been very cold since then, but the tail end of this storm might get cold. Part of the plan for the observatory is to get the trapped air tanks and other well-related items inside, so less chance of freezing.

There, I’ve done it. Maintained the current almost-once-a-month pace of blogging.

It’s been a hectic November and December. It seems as if yesterday it was the beginning of November, but now Christmas is just a few days away. We’ve traveled to Upper Michigan, spent a week in a class in Berkeley, baptized the baby, completed the capital budget, and now are almost at the end of the year.

I haven’t had a chance to do much astronomy, I haven’t had the chance to get the observatory up or put the new drive motors on the C-8 out here in Lake Riverside. Sigh.

But today has been productive. I washed all the windows, finally getting the grime from the wind storm in October off. Washing windows can be very satisfying. I use an Ettore washer and squeegee with a strong ammonia and hot water solution. I believe the key is the scrubbing action of the washer to loosen the dirt, then the squeegee takes it all away. And nice clean windows look very good. The whole view outside looks much sharper.

I learned my technique at the Grand Carnot, on Avenue Carnot in Paris. John Stubbs and I would have breakfast their each day on our way out to EuroDisney. Once every couple of weeks the owner would have the glass in the cafe cleaned. The cleaners would SOAP up the window and squeegee it off in a continuous sweep. I’m not that good, but I try.

I also took the first attack at the gophers who have returned to the yard. They filled the sprinkler cut-off valve area again, and started a mound next to the house. The valve area is clear again, and full of gopher pellets. The area near the house has been gassed. I’ll make another attack tomorrow. We’ll also pick up some hay to put over the pipes near the pump. Hopefully prevent freezing. Although the thermometer didn’t show below freezing last night, standing water outside did freeze, and it will be colder tonight.

After installing Autodesk Quick CAD on my new Lenovo R61 laptop, I started getting a weird error when booting up the machine. It reported:

br_funcs.exe -- Ordinal not found
The ordinal 39 could not be located in the dynamic link library zlb.dll

I Googled the message and the closest thing to a relevant link was something at Experts-Exchange. I signed up for the trial membership, and the solution offered (actually, the solution promised, since Experts-Exchange is a for-pay service) did not address the problem. This is my second bad experience with Experts-Exchange, it is a useless service, never go there.

The solution was fairly simple. Autodesk put an old version of zlib.dll (used for zipping and unzipping) into the /Windows/System directory. Shame on them. I searched the root disk for zlib, found a later version in a Lenovo directory, and replaced the file in /Windows/System. Problem solved.

Hopefully this solution documented here will prevent people from losing time (and money) going after the useless information at Experts-Exchange.

We arrived at Osage (this is, I think, the name of the place, to go with “Camp” as a unique identifier) this afternoon. My older daughter had a half day and I was able to get away from work early so it was a 3:45 or so arrival.

We noted that most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Three weeks ago, they were just beginning to turn yellow, now they are gone. The high winds that drove the destructive fires of the past weeks made a mark here too, although one hardly worth mentioning. We would soon see how windy it actually was.

When my wife went into the house, she commented on the condition of the kitchen. There is normally some dust on the counter when we make it out here, and I usually take part of the first evening to clean up the dust. This was an entirely different situation (altogether ). There was a visible layer of dust across the entire counter. My older daughter found the back bathroom covered in red dust. The Sun porch was inundated — every surface covered with dust. This is what 5 days of 35+ mile an hour wind can do when laden with dust.

There are other problems. The sprinkler valves in the yard have been leaking for a long time. So long you squish as you walk across the yard. The tree in the northeast corner fell down because the ground was so soggy. I used the truck to right it and a board to hold it up. The cover for the lawn mower, a gift from my father-in-law, is currently AWOL, taken away by the wind. The cover on the spa was pulled open (no water in the spa, so no drowning risk) and the lattice around the spa is broken.

I feel lucky. When we were here last I washed the kitchen floor, so the dust did not have grease to bind with. We just bought a new vacuum cleaner (a Dyson, we are very happy) and it has done a great job capturing the dust. We were able to knock out the worst of the problem on Friday night, leaving the weekend open. The tree is upright. No one has been hurt.

We are very lucky here.

The recovery activities did prevent me from getting the CG-5 set up. I have a new motor controller, and a new DMK firewire camera. I go to OPT tomorrow to get the final parts.

Finally the comet. Comet Holmes is easily visible to the naked eye. In Perseus, just below Casseopoiea, it is almost a star, but slightly fuzzy. With binoculars, it is a nice, slightly green, ball. As I always tell people when I am trying to get them to find a comet, it looks like nothing else in the sky.