Beginning just before noon there was a power outage, which lasted until
about 5:00pm. It was local, there were workman out on the poles on
Avenue K nearby, so I just went out and did various things. Visited the
library for one thing.
In the evening there was a bit of work to be done, the CORS stations
had loaded their data for Thursday and I did a differential correction
on the GPS readings. This was made a bit harder by the fact that the
station(s) I used to use had changed their names. What I thought was a
connectivity problem was really me trying to access data files that
never existed in the first place! Bah. Anyway, corrected to about 2'
horizontal accuracy and looked at on Google Earth they are ... not very
close. Google Earth is WGS84, but there is some sort of projection
problem going on. They are, where I can see distinguishing objects, up
to 20' from where the image puts them. I think the image is wrong,
but...
While looking up something, I can't recall what, I ran across a link to
a book on electromagnetism at Amazon. What struck me as remarkable was
the description of the book's content, which stated that the motion of
an electron in an electromagnetic field was not fully understood. I had
thought that electromagnetism was completely understood, essentially a
closed book. Apparently not. I'd post a link, but the power went out
and I've lost it, despite Firefox's backup capabilities. Ah well.
I've been thinking of retiring my old Win2K box. It's slow, a bit
noisy, and not particularly secure any more - Microsoft isn't patching
the OS any more. I could replace it with a Linux box or my old XP
laptop. I essentially had replaced it last year, with the Mint 7&8
box, but that crashed and I reinstated the Win2k box until I could get
around to replacing it. Ubuntu 10.10 works well enough. The XP laptop
has s/w that I've purchased, MatCad, Quicktime Pro, a few native
windows programs that I use, MobileMapper and Arcpad, which I could
probably put on the Vista laptop. I'd want to scrape the laptop and
reinstall XP, it's the original install and is slow and irritating
these days.
There is a Firefox tool that will allow synchronization of bookmarks,
which I could use between the old PC, the new(er) laptop, and whatever
new desktop I use.
And then there was the startling performance of my friends new Win7 PC,
down in San Diego. This was an inexpensive middle-or-the road box for
home use, and it ran my work flow script 8X
as fast as my "new" laptop. Quad core rather than dual, Intel ICH5
rather than Turion, and desktop rather than mobile. Impressive, it
tempts me to get a new desktop machine myself. Quad core, or maybe six
cores, or even 8!!
Decisions, decisions.
Mostly I'm just avoiding dealing with taxes...
Friday 25 February
2011
Friday
- back in Lancaster. Getting some chores done...
Book #20 was Live Free or Die,
by John Ringo. This is actually the first in the Troy series, I read
the second last week... Not bad, just modern space opera, good for a
few hours of distraction. There is to be a third. Giant human death star versus hordes of alien invaders...
Thursday 24 February 2011
Thursday
- out in the field with D,
doing some non-native species inspection and mapping. Fun stuff, it was
(mostly) like getting paid to go hiking. My heel held up well, and we
managed to get the complete four miles or so done before dark.
The georeferencing worked fairly well. One image was skewed - I suspect
that I grabbed the wrong point and it warped things, but it worked well
enough.
Then we discussed the day, calculated some initial results, had dinner
(a very late lunch actually)
and a coffee, and hit the road home to Lancaster. It's been a while
since I was home :-(
Wednesday 23
February 2011
Wednesday
- met with a representative from the client, then spent most of the day
looking into how to handle the lack of certain information from them.
I also looked into georegistering (georeferencing) images for use on
the mobile mapper. I saw it done a few years ago, but didn't really
have a use for it, but tomorrow we'll be in a fairly rural area and I
thought it'd be nice to have an image to show us where we are relative
to some other points. It isn't hard - I used Manifold for the process,
but you can do it with a lot of other programs.
Tuesday 22 February
2011
Tuesday
- in Ventura, meeting with various people about various things. Getting
ready to do some field inspection stuff. We made a quick trip out to
the site to get an idea of what we are up against.
Monday
21
February 2011
Monday
- I helped assemble some shelving in the morning, then it was off to
Ventura in the early afternoon. No major water in the boat when I got
there, so the bilge pump and/or the drain fix is working.
Sunday 20 February 2011
Sunday
- taking it easy, down in San Diego, visiting friends. It's been a
while.
My friend has a couple of daughters. The oldest is outgoing and has
never been shy in the least, but the younger was always quiet around
me. In the past, after several days of visiting, I might get her to say a few words.
That's changed - now she's as talkative and extroverted as her sister,
and we had a good time. It's interesting to see them develop, they are
bigger and smarter every time I see them. They recently got Netflix in
the house, via the Wii, and the two girls have already mastered the use
of it.
In the morning we took in a movie, Barbie: A Fairy Secret,
free at a local cinema. It wasn't as bad as I thought it'd been, rather
humorous in fact, with a nice moral to the whole thing.
Another thing we did was to cruise down to Shelter
Island, so that I
could visit the West Marine flagship store there. I wanted to talk to
the riggers, and get some idea of costs on rebuilding the standing
rigging. Not too bad - they want $2.45 a foot for the 304 stainless,
and the end fittings are about $6 each. When I asked about 316
stainless the rigger checked the price and came back with $0.85 per
foot...almost certainly an error! They can do lifelines as well, but
I'm not sure I want to keep the current uprights - they are 24" high,
which is too low - just the right height to trip you and send you over
the side, actually! But I suspect decent sized SS stanchions might cost
a bundle. I could have them fabricated, but I'm not sure who could do a
good job - you want the weld to be as good, and as rust resistant, as
the stock metal.
The paparazzi, they're everywhere, I can't avoid them...
Picture of
the Week
Photo
Notes: Yawl on
SF, ca 1999, taken from the Coronado 25.
