I made a backup of the blog, both the HTML pages and the images. Burned
it to a CD and put it away. Since I post from either the laptop or the
desktop, and occasionally my father's computer, the images and text
pages aren't complete in any one spot, except the online server.
Everything since March 2002, hopefully, though I think there is some
stuff missing from the early days.
Update: Actually, upon review, none of the images made it to the backup CD. And now I am out of CD's. Bah.
Don't you hate it when you run a billion dollar missile cruiser
aground, on your first voyage in her as Captain, right in front of
everybody? Article and comments can be found at the USNI web site.
Friday
- the rain continues, rather a lot of it. More, honestly, than I
expected - I assumed the forecasters were exaggerating. Not so, not so.
Looking at various Antelope Valley weather stations we seem to have had
about 1" of rain.
Phoebe, and the open back door.
Phoebe, at 18 pounds, has the heft to shoulder open the door from the
outside, if it's left ajar or only kept closed by an old phone book.
Then he sits, inside, staring out over the
lintel as the central heat runs continuously. Eventually I notice and
close the door, at which point one or both cats will want outside again.
Thursday 5 February
2009
Thursday
- well, it actually did rain, so it was back to Lancaster.
It was an interesting book, somewhat slanted in favor of Cook. In the
end one is led to the general conclusion that Peary almost certainly
didn't achieve the pole, and despite Henderson's favorable portrait,
that it is unlikely that Cook did so. The actual evidence for either
achievement is sadly meager. Both were competent and experienced arctic
explorers, neither had a witness capable of scientifically assessing
the attainment - Cook with two illiterate Eskimo, Peary
with Matthew Henson. Neither man ever produced the raw sextant
data that they 'reduced' to calculate they were at the pole.
If they weren't
at the pole, then the first men there were, according to the Wikipedia
North Pole Article,
airmen on the airship Norge flying over it, and either a Russian
aircraft landed team in 1948 or an American aircraft landed team in
1952. So Cook and Peary's probable falsehoods delayed the real
achievement by nearly half a century (aided by the fact that once it
was realized it was just ocean ice at the pole some of the glamor
faded) and robbed the actual mid-century explorer's of the glory.
You know, however, if I even find myself on a trip to Annoatok,
Greenland,
I plan to bring along a metal detector and look for Cook's cached box
of raw data and instruments, entrusted to, then buried and lost by
Harry Whitney in 1909.
Wednesday 4 February 2009
Wednesday
- They are predicting rain tomorrow, and through the weekend, so it
looks as though I'll have time to...work on other stuff. It's nice to
do a bit of office stuff for a change.
The last few weekends, since Christmas really, I've been
working
on turning the spare bedroom into more of an office. Put a desk in
there, brought up some old cluster CPU's from the garage, but the mass
of debris in there (the bedroom) is amazing - it is barely
possible to move, let alone assemble and get the cluster operational.
Time for an early spring cleaning - those old XT's and 286's are bound
for oblivion, along with a pile of other archaic and obsolete stuff.
Of course, the cluster is made of four ABIT BP-6's,
running dual
Celeron 300's (overclocked to 400Mhz)...which some might consider
obsolete. Heh.
Anyway, the AV dump has a toxic/electronic waste drop off, so maybe
this Saturday is good for that.
Over the weekend I stopped at 'The Dollar Store and bought another 2009
calendar. For fifty cents, why not? I mean, it was already
February, so I didn't need
the missing
month of January...
Tuesday 3 February 2009
Tuesday
- Warm today, borderline hot, 83F at 1:00pm by the car thermometer,
which is actually fairly accurate. And considerably warmer down in the
channel.
Interesting factoid: was talking to a local after work. He
mentioned that the channels there worked well, but that the little
puddles of standing water in Hummingbird Creek didn't exist until after
the Northridge
Earthquake of 1994. I didn't see much damage, but I wonder
how much of what I did see was caused by that one event?
Hummingbird Creek, by the way, is not the bucolic idyll it sounds like,
but rather a boring concrete trapezoid (at least where I was).
Monday 2 February 2009
Monday
- back at work, a reasonable day. Sunny.
I discovered in the evening that some of Friday's data is missing, and
will have to be done over. Including a missed piece from last July.
Sheesh. There is just a point or two in a file that should contain - and
did contain,
at one point - hundreds. Well, it'll go quick, the points are marked,
and the videos and pictures are taken, and I have a hardcopy notebook
of what I saw. Still...
Sunday 1 February 2009
Sunday
- I had thought I would watch the Super Bowl with my brother, but he
didn't call, and didn't answer my calls, so perhaps he was out of town.
So, I watched the Cardinals lose the game. At that level of play you
can't afford to make mistakes, and the Cardinals made too many.
Worst part? It cost me 50 cents, to my Dad.
I understand my other brother lost really big money, $1.00, to Dad.
