2005
Satellite Operators Devolving
A while back we upgraded to a HD TiVo for our DirecTV setup. I’ve been loving the new TV (amazing!) and everything has been working pretty well. My only complaint is that broadcasters still seem to be working the kinks out of their HD broadcasts. It’s not that uncommon for the sound levels to be off, for some reason almost always affecting the center channel, and then come back. But I’m sure this will all be smoothed out before too long. I still had one step left to finish though. We needed to upgrade our satellite dish to a triple-LNB dish. We previously just had a dual-LNB oval.
I called up DirecTV and ordered the “Sat C Upgrade Kit” and scheduled a visit. They asked when I wanted to schedule the visit and indicated they could come the next day. I was a bit surprised they could come so fast, but pleased to have it done quickly. The next day the guy shows up looking for our part. Turns out DirecTV was so brilliant as to schedule the guy to come the next day when they had to ship me the part! On top of that, the guy didn’t have any spares to do the work since he was there, so we had to reschedule.
We got the part, and I also took the liberty to order a mount for my ChannelMaster 4221 over-the-air HD antennae. He returned and put the upgrade kit on the dish and mounted the antennae. I was at work so I’m not sure exactly what he did, but when I got back there was no signal from satellite C. Nothing.
I tried to call the installation company to get it fixed. No surprise, they can’t schedule anything. I had to go back through the 800-number maze at DirecTV and schedule another entire visit. He was supposed to come yesterday morning. After rescheduling twice for that day, they finally showed up at 5pm. We had plans to go to dinner, but I really wanted to get this thing done right. The guy had to put up a whole new dish and run new cables down because they were too short to reach the new LNB. He was here for over two-and-a-half hours!
Our story ends well, everything is working really well now. But it required three house visits and probably ten phone calls to get done. Why is it that providing service to your television devolves into this horrible customer service nightmare. Oi!
Happy Birthday!
Today is my lovely wife’s birthday! Happy Birthday!
I learned very quickly when Tammy and I started dating that her birthday is a Big Deal™. Don’t get me wrong, I like my birthday and all. It’s fun to get together with people, celebrate another year and maybe get some cool gifts. But for Tammy it’s an entirely different level. I joke with her that it should be declared a national holiday.
How about a birthday haiku.
A birthday for you
Another year for fun, love
And then, a birth day.
Edward Tufte
Yesterday I attended Presenting Data and Informtion taught by Edward Tufte. A number of people that I work with had gone to this one-day session and come back raving, so I finally decided to attend this myself. After attending I can see why they were raving!
If you are unfamiliar, Edward Tufte is one of the leading world experts on visualization of data. I’m pleased to say that not only is Tufte an excellent academic, he’s also a wonderful speaker. He could do a radio program in no time flat. He’s got a great presenting style. I thought the class was going to give him a standing ovation at the end.
I’m not going to repeat the class contents here, I could not do it justice. Check out the website and see for yourself. If you ever have to give presentations, I would highly recommend attending this session.
D.I.Y. Mosaic
Tammy and I have taken a couple of mosaic classes in the past. It’s a surprisingly approachable and fun activity. It’s amazing how you can turn pretty mundane things into these amazing looking mosaics. Today we went to Mosaic On A Stick. Mosaic On A Stick just opened about 6 months ago and they sell mosaic supplies and teach classes. Additionally, they have an open workspace where you can just come in and work for however long for a fixed fee. It’s a really nice place and the people that run it seem great.
Try it out! You will enjoy it.
Attached To Baby
I got a great email today from someone that used to work at our company. I haven’t seen her for years, since she worked with us. We have emailed back and forth, mostly about baby stuff since she has one and we are expecting one. Anyway, her email today was telling me about her new website/business.
Without further ado, check it out at Attached to Baby. It seems that in addition to running the business she’s also a model in a number of the pictures. 🙂 Buy some stuff!
This is great. It’s awesome to see people putting out their own shingle and taking a chance. I hope she’s immensely successful. Now, I need to go figure out what carrier we are going to get.
Baby Stirs
We are now in the 35th week of the pregnancy. Of course I say we in the modern husband way that really just means Tammy is in the 35th week. I’m cheering along! We’re entering into the time where the alien is stirring. You can see the baby reaching out, punching, kicking. There is no need to feel, you can just sit there and see it!
The clock is ticking down!
Intranet for Home
A couple of weeks ago I deployed my first intranet application for home.
If your not familiar, an intranet application is just a website that you
cannot get to generally on the web unless you have specific credentials.
I was combing through my documents one afternoon and realized that I had
a ton of little text files with notes on them. Things like information
on my cable modem and home network to reminders about trips I'd like to
take.
It dawned on me that this is just screaming for a Wiki. So I deployed OpenWiki in a restricted website that is only accessible in our house with the right authentication. I was able to better organize information and move a lot of other information onto it, like what is our contract number with the plumbing people.
Pretty fun. I named the site Spiral. The idea being that it is a big spiral notebook for all in the house to share.
Name Voyager
Tammy and I have been working with the name issue. The responsibility of giving another person the moniker that they will carry for their entire life is daunting. I got a pointer to NameVoyager from a friend. Go to the site and then launch the Java application. It’s very well done, and shows cool information about the popularity of names over time.
Forget-me-not
I’m horrible at remembering certain things. At the top of the list is remembering to change the filters in the heater. I have no idea when I did it last, none. Finally it hit me that I can easily have my computers help me out. In about 5 minutes I created a quick Scheduled Task that will send me a reminder every month! I’m using blat.exe to send the email via a command prompt.
(If you just see a big blank space below this you are using Internet Explorer and have a fairly narrow window, make your browser wider. Not sure why the style sheet does this.)
I am sharing this immensely obvious solution since I think others may find this worthwhile as well.
Photos From New Mexico and Colorado
I just put up some selected photos from our trip to New Mexico and Colorado. Enjoy!
Add photos originally from nGallery on archive.org.
New Laptop, Sony VGN-S360
While we were on our trip we swung into a Ballio’s electronics store. We don’t have these in Minnesota. While there we checked out there laptops. They had great rebate deals on all of the Sony laptops. I’m not an immediate fan of the Sony laptop, entirely because of their use of software to control things that I think should be done in firmware (screen brightness, speaker volume, etc.) Anyway, the price was great so I picked up a Sony VAIO VGN-S360.
This unit will replace my extremely venerable Fujitsu S-4542 that is now over four years old (read: ancient!). I’m liking the new unit a lot. I’m excited since it’s 80G hard drive will give me plenty of space to load a ton of astronomy software to use in the field. Plus it has enough horsepower to deal with digital photo manipulation in Photoshop on the road, another great feature.
Vacation Is A Wrap
Tammy and I just finished a really great meal at the “too trendy for a pregnant lady and her husband” restaurant NoRTH in the Cherry Creek area of Denver. We made our reservations when we were here overnight before continuing to New Mexico. Tomorrow we depart, very early, to drive back home.
Our trip has been nice however the weather was not cooperative with us. Our days in Santa Fe were intended to be filled with gallery browsing. The average temperature in Santa Fe is supposed to be around 60 degrees right now. However, we were greeted with temperatures just under 40 with nasty winds. Yes we are from Minnesota and this isn’t that cold, but, this is vacation and shivering between galleries with inadequate coats is not what I call fun. We decided to go to Albuquerque on Thursday which turned out to be a great idea. We went to the Albuquerque Aquarium and Botanic Garden. Both were surprisingly good. We also did some shopping at REI and spent some our membership dividend (thanks REI Visa card!).
I’ve been suffering from a pretty bad cold ever since Wednesday. I’ve been on Dayquil/Nyquil as well as any other things that help but I’ve still been hit pretty hard. I just hate getting sick on vacation – it’s so miserable. I’m still sniffling with a box of kleenex next to me as I type this.
We went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park on our way from Santa Fe back to Denver, it only added a couple hours to our drive and was pretty impressive. As you drive towards the sand dunes they seem somewhat unimpressive, but as you get closer you realize just how immense they are. It is a real trip to be standing on these huge dunes in the middle of Colorado. After the sand dunes we had to drive over a mountain pass which took us up around 9,000 feet. Coming back down I could not get my ears to pop due to my sinuses. Finally, after many attempts my right ear popped but my left refused. It hurt and drove me generally crazy! It didn’t pop until we finally got to the hotel in Denver, hours later, and I laid down for fifteen minutes. Colds suck.
We spent this morning checking out galleries in Cherry Creek. We got a couple of pieces, including some close-out Bill Hickman items at one of the stores that we liked a lot here, Art Z!, which is going out of business. We then went to the Denver Zoo for the afternoon which was nice, however the Denver Zoo seems to be one of those zoos that was built when they just put animals in a concrete cage. To their credit they’ve been obviously working to make it better for a long time, but they still have a lot of room to go.
Gotta get some sleep for the drive tomorrow. In addition to the usual time hit we will take moving from mountain to central time we are also going to get hit by daylight savings time so we will lose 2 hours in time shifts. Tomorrow will be a long day.
Final Night at Star Hill
The weather in the mountains here is very erratic. On our final day at Star Hill we woke up to snow falling with high-winds and bright sun! Odd combinations. It was very windy, gusts over 40 mph the entire day and cloudy. The clouds departed as night approached but the wind did not, which made for a very cold night.
I met Phil at the observation deck at about 8:00 pm and there was no way I was going to do CCD shots tonight. It was just too cold, and Phil noted that the wind would certainly shake the telescope causing blurry images. So we just setup the camera tripod and I took wide-field pictures of the sky all night. No telescope viewing tonight.
The sky was great, however, the wind was problematic. As I took the pictures they looked really amazing on the view screen however when I downloaded them you could see the wind had shook the camera and the stars were blurry. Instead of the great pinpoints of light I had captured yesterday I was getting these blobs of light. In miniature the pictures look amazing, in full size they look blurry. Very disappointing. I took a 32-minute star trails picture that did come out pretty good, probably the best shot of the night. You can see the library and the dome in the bottom part of the picture.
We leave this morning for Santa Fe and bid farewell to the stargazing. I’m really glad we came here, even if the weather was not very accommodating. Mainly it was great to get 3-nights of personal attention on using telescopes and doing everything astronomy related with a pro like Phil. I now feel much more comfortable with my own telescope.
To Infinity And Beyond
We just finished our first night of viewing at Star Hill. Phil, the owner of Star Hill spent the night with us on the observation deck. We had the Meade LX200GPS 12" for the evening.
Star Hill is located north of Las Vegas, NM. To say it is off the beaten path is an understatement. You spend the final 2.8 miles getting to Star Hill on a dirt road that is extremely rutted and in our case very muddy from recent snow. They had 3 feet of snow two weeks ago and while almost all of it melted there is a lot of standing water. If not for the all-wheel drive in the Audi there is no way we would have made it. As it was we came extremely close to getting stuck. All four wheels spinning, mud flying onto the hood at one point – not the type of driving you do on a regular basis.
We met Phil at the observation deck at 7:30 PM. I went down first since Tammy was still getting things situated in the cabin. The first thing I noticed was the carpet of stars when I looked up. Living in the city we forget what is right there above us. At the Star Hill there are no lights, except the red porch lights on the cabins, and tonight not a cloud in the sky. Star Hill is at 7,200 feet of elevation which is great for observing, the higher the better. We had around 90 minutes until moon-rise which would wash out all but the brightest objects. In the darkest of the evening around 8:00 PM you could see clearly with the naked eye the Milky Way band. At one point in the evening while staring up I saw a satellite fly through it’s orbit, again just with the naked eye.
We spent the evening with different stars. We visited the Orion Nebulae, a couple of different star clusters, got a view of Saturn that was stunning. Phil dropped in a 9mm eyepiece (resulting in over 32x magnification) with Saturn and you could even make out some of the Cassini rings, and around it you could see some of it’s moons. I wondered which one was Titan. It’s mind-blowing that we have a spacecraft on the surface! We checked out some binary stars (star pairs that orbit each other) and also looked at a number of other galaxies.
Phil and I chatted about astronomy and Tammy ducked into the library that is off the observation deck. The library is heated, which is why Tammy was going in there, and also has a PC with software to help with star maps and a ton of books. Phil has been doing astronomy for decades and has run the Star Hill for two of those decades. He has more knowledge of astronomy in his little finger than I have all in so I try to learn some things and not sound like too big of an idiot. He’s patient.
We waited for a bit, checking out other stars, for Jupiter to rise where we could see it. The Moon was quickly beating Jupiter to rise but Jupiter is bright enough that we could see it clearly even with the moon-rise. The view of Jupiter in the eyepiece was amazing. You could clearly make out the bands of Jupiter and even see a handful of it’s moons in the view.
We called it a night around 9:30 PM and returned to the cabin to play some Boggle before going to sleep. I think Boggle has to be my favorite game, anyway. The temperature had dropped to freezing, we’ll wear warmer clothes tomorrow. We have the 16" SCT reserved tomorrow along with the SBIG CCD camera. I’m hopeful to get a couple of pictures through the 16" to commemorate our visit. This will only be feasible with the help of Phil since astrophotography is daunting to even advanced amateurs, which I am not. I’m also going to try to get some shots of the Milky Way band with my SLR.
Stargazing Night Two
We spent the daylight hours today looking around northern New Mexico. We went in a big triangle from Las Vegas, NM to Taos, then over to Santa Fe and back. The day was peppered with two complications. First was altitude. With Tammy being pregnant she is not supposed to exceed 7,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation. If you are a low-lander as we are, going higher than this deprives you, and more importantly the baby, of much needed oxygen. We really don’t know more than this and as we drove to Taos crossing the Monte Cristo mountains and definitely higher than 8,000 feet we were worried. All is fine I’m sure, we only crossed the range for 20-30 minutes and then dropped back into normal levels. But, that doesn’t keep first time parents from worrying, worrying and worrying.
The other issue that introduced fun was the caked on mud from yesterdays experience getting stuck. The wheels on the right hand side of the car were way out of balance due to caked on mud and required a power hose and chiseling with a screwdriver to stop vibrating like crazy.
Taos was a cool city. I had the best quesadilla I’ve EVER had for lunch. Wow. The town square in Taos was interesting and had a number of galleries including a piece that we would have loved but for the price. We returned through Santa Fe, avoiding another crossing of the mountains. We also got to preview where we are staying when we head to Santa Fe in a couple days, and it looks great.
We returned to the Star Hill right at dusk. The sky looked really bad as
we approached, very cloudy. But there was a break in the clouds as night
came and we still got some good viewing, however it never got as good as
last night. Phil met me on the observation deck and Tammy decided to
stay back and read. She's decided astronomy is not her hobby. "It's just
a bunch of stars!" she says. I told her how it's so amazing that this
star millions of light years away is throwing photons into space and
then we're here on earth capturing those photons into our eye! Isn't
that cool? She didn't agree. 🙂
Tammy’s Comment: The quote that Jamie has me saying makes me sound a bit more shallow than I’d like. I’m not sure that I ever said those exact words anyway. Not that anyone cares but me, but I must clarify why I am not a telescope-liking gal. I thought that when you looked through a telescope, you would see what you see when you look at pictures that people have taken of the night sky. But, this is not the case. What you see instead is stuff that looks very similar to the stuff that you see when you look at the sky with your eyes. I understand that you are seeing different stuff, stuff that you can’t see with your naked eye, but it doesn’t look much different. Add to that the fact that it’s cold out and you just stand there and it takes awhile to get each thing into focus and once you finally do, it’s somewhat difficult to look through the eyepiece as you have to be at a very specific angle, and I much prefer just looking up at the sky. The only exception I would make is for the planets. You can see them when you look at the sky, but they look like stars. When you see them through the telescope they actually look like planets. They still don’t look as cool as they do in the pictures, but they look good enough that it’s worth looking through the telescope to see them.
Phil set up a sidereal camera mount and I took a number of shots with my
camera, no telescope involved. I captured a few constellations with 4 to
8 minute exposures. It's stunning what you can get just by pointing a
camera in the sky and leaving the shutter open. Mostly I used my 14mm
full-frame fish-eye which did great. I also captured Jupiter and it's
moons using a 100mm telephoto. We decided not to do the CCD and stuck
with the smaller 12" SCT instead of the 16" on the count of the clouds.
We'll try tomorrow night for the larger scope. I think I may just skip
the CCD and use my camera with a T-mount instead. The CCD imager is
pretty touchy, requires a ton of time for focusing and then must be
hooked up to a laptop. Much easier to just put my camera on the
telescope. Of course all of that depends on me finding a T-adapter in
Santa Fe which may be trickier than I would like.
The first image above is of Orion with the Milky Way band in the background. The second picture is of the bucket of the big dipper.
Getting There
We drove yesterday for just under 14 hours to get to Denver. We had driven this route before and we both swore we did in in just over 12 hours but there seems to be no way that that could be the case. We arrived in Denver around 9pm and made our way to the Cherry Creek North area. We discovered this area when we were here on our honeymoon and really liked it. Right now we are just on a quick rest stop though, spending the night and then heading this morning to our farthest destination in New Mexico at the Star Hill Inn. Another five hours of driving, plus or minus, in for us today.
We are heading shortly to the Eggshell restaurant for breakfast and then head out of town. Yesterday’s massive bout of driving had the positive side of giving plenty of opportunity to play Road Sign Math. Amazingly, we only grabbed two valid winners, I’ll post them later. Road Sign Math is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. I hope to find a winner in each state we visit.
The Children's Blizzard
I just finished reading David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard. If you grew up in the upper-midwest like I did you will find it enjoyable and interesting in a way that readers from other locales, at least in my opinion, will not be able to connect with.
First off, you need to read this book in the winter. Winter is leaving us now so if you are just finding out about it and really want to read it either do so quickly or put it on your list for January of 2006. Reading this book in the sunny days of summer would take an edge, a bitter reminder, away from the story. Secondly, I would suggest reading it in the winter and in a nice warm room with a good blanket. As you read about one of the worst blizzards in the history of the plains and the death that was left behind you would be well served by being nice and warm.
While reading The Children’s Blizzard I kept on thinking back to reading Young Men and Fire by Norman MacLean. Both authors seem to have an ability to describe the most mundane details or dry topics in a way that genuinely captures your interest. They share the ability to write pages of text regarding developing weather conditions that somehow grab the reader. Similar to Children’s Blizzard, Young Men and Fire is best read in the right place. For me, it was largely in a tent while camping in the woods. Perfect.
The similarities for me didn’t stop there. Both of these books recount a tragic event. Both of them describe events that only happened because of amazingly rare and unlikely combinations of events. Both of them go into amazing detail on the events that happened just before and just after the event. Both of them are very well written. Both of them leave you feeling pretty lucky.
Children’s Blizzard is about the worst blizzard to ever hit the plains. It struck in January 12 of 1888. It is called the Children’s Blizzard because it struck across the majority of the plains in the middle of a day that started in the 20s to 40s. Hundreds of children in country schoolhouses in Dakota and the rest of the plains were forced out into the blizzard. Hundreds of those same children died in a storm that was so intense that it dropped the temperature 40 degrees in 4 hours and had steady winds in excess of 50 miles per hour. A storm so intense that some cattle suffocated to death because the snow filled in their nostrils and they were unable to breath!
I found it surprising that I had never heard of this storm. Hundreds of children died in the storm and hundreds died after due to complications from amputation and other “treatments” for problems from the storm. Fathers died while holding their child, the child surviving the night because of the weather-break provided by their dead fathers body. This is brutal stuff and I had never heard of it. Granted this is 100 years ago but this is a big thing and should still reverberate in the culture of places like North Dakota where I grew up. At the end the book goes into a bit of why this tragic event was forgotten in practically one generation. I’ll leave it for you to read and get all the details.
Grab a copy of this book. Light a fire and enjoy life on the “modern prairie”. Be happy you don’t live in a “soddie”.
Dead iMac G5
On Monday of this week I woke up and as I usually do after getting ready for the day went to sit down at the iMac that is off of our kitchen to check on email, visit some websites for news, etc. When I sat down I noticed that the iMac was off which seemed very strange. We don’t turn our computers off and on top of that I had just two days prior put a UPS on this computer so a power blip shouldn’t have had any affect.
Not sure what was going on I hit the power button and the power indicator would light up for a fraction of a second and then turn off. Tried again, same thing. I wondered if this UPS was a problem so I plugged it straight into the wall, no go. This is not good but luckily it’s still on warranty.
I did some searches and it seems like a failed power supply in a iMac G5 isn’t terribly rare. At least it’s common enough that Apple has posted instructions for diagnosing this on your own. I followed the instructions and verified that I needed to take it to an Apple shop and get fixed.
I dropped it off at FirstTech that afternoon over lunch and they called back that very afternoon to verify the power supply was dead. Here is the classic part. Apple doesn’t have any of these. Oh, and they don’t know when they will get any in. So, I called just yesterday and the status is still the same. My wonderful, fancy and expensive G5 sits on a shelf awaiting a new power supply from Apple. They have no ETA.
Why is it that Apple cannot figure out supply chains? They never have parts or enough of anything it seems. This has been a problem for them for years and years. Oh well, someday I will get my Mac back.
Make Minnetonka Bicycle Friendly
I recently received a flier from the League of American Bicyclists regarding the Bicycling Friendly Community campaign they run. I’ve been a member of LAB for years and plan to continue. I’m a member of many bicycling organizations but LAB is unique and in many ways the most important. The other organizations focus on rides and trails mostly while LAB focuses on Washington DC and policy. They are our voice (I’ll use the word lobbyist trying to forget the slimy implications) for cycling in America. In addition to getting some additional funding from me for this program, I decided to do a little grass-roots advocacy of my own. The letter below is to the Mayor of Minnetonka.
Mayor Anderson,
I will keep this brief since I’m sure you are very busy. I live in Minnetonka and am also a cycling enthusiast. In addition to being a member of the Twin Cities Bicycling Club I’m also a member of the national organization League of American Bicyclists (LAB). I love cycling in all of it’s modes whether for competitive racing, recreational riding for fitness or just commuting to work. The bike is an amazingly elegant machine.
I’m writing to you because I recently became aware of the LAB program Bicycling Friendly Communities. This program is an awards program that recognizes cities that actively support bicycling. I looked over the list of communities in the program and was surprised to not see Minnesota anywhere in the list (click here for list). We have a surprisingly strong cycling community in Minnesota given our winters and have a history of advocacy, in fact leading the country in miles of bicycle trails!
This brings me to the point of my letter. I would like to encourage you to nominate Minnetonka to become a Bicycling Friendly Community and be the first in Minnesota to achieve at least a bronze specification. I think it would be a reinforcement of the already strong bicycling program the city has as well as a road to additional ways to bring cycling into our community.
Sincerely,
Jamie Thingelstad