Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
I considered purchasing an XM radio to bring into work for a nice music selection, but worried about being able to get any reception since I’m on a North facing wall. Rather than buy one and find out, I have since started using the XM Radio Online to listen and it is working out nicely. The quality is very good, as well as the selection.
I do with the same set of channels were available, I’d love to sit and have CNN on to listen to all day. Oh well, this will have to do.
I was able to finally get outside under good skies for the first time in over a month. I grabbed a few shots of Saturn that turned out pretty well, larger than my past pictures of the planet.
Click to go to the gallery for this and a couple other new shots.
I made the call today and signed up for class. It starts in 2 weeks, should be fun and interesting.
Looks like I’m probably going to attend an astronomy course that the University of Illinois at Springfield is offering this spring. It’s called Survey of the Universe, and meets only once per week, but sounds like something I may really enjoy.
Ana already called around to get the details, all I need to do is call back and give them my cc number. I think she’s trying to get me out of the house!
Last week I pushed Ana to get the same keyboard I purchased for both home and work. Her place of employment (most of you know where, but I shall not mention them) locks their machines down beyond belief, so she needed to send in a request to have the necessary microsoft keyboard driver, IntelliType Pro, installed.
Today she was told she couldn’t use that keyboard because “approved ps/2 keyboards do not require device drives in order to operate”. Sound stupid? Yep, it is. They couldn’t even flat out say “no, your device isn’t supported. you can’t use it.”. It’s a USB keyboard and they had to dance it with their BS, pseudo-passive-aggressive garbage.
A special congratulations to Jay and Katherine, who were married on Saturday!
Several months ago now, I purchased a Canon Powershot A510 for use in astronomy. I selected it because of its Manual mode which allows me to control most everything about the camera. Overall, I’ve been very happy with its astrophoto capabilities, as can be seen in my photo gallery.
I have since started using the Canon over my other camera, a 4.1 MP Sony, for regular everyday use. The color on the Canon is significantly better and that outweighs the resolution difference. The canon has really been an awesome camera, but I have noticed one problem with it that really bugs me. The red-eye reduction on it stinks. I have more pictures that have demon-eyes than I ever have. I never had a problem with the Sony in this area. Very frustrating!
That’ll just push me more and more toward the DSLR I really want 🙂
Took a little time today to upgrade the blog to the new WordPress 2. I wonder if my spam problems will improve at all…
Along with my site move, I took time today to package up my Ambient Orb Service code along with a brief explanation of how to write custom data providers. Hopefully someone else will find my code as useful as I have found it, as demonstrated by the Clear Sky OrbProvider I have been using for a few months now.
Source is available too!
I finally took some time today to really start the move to a Plone powered website. The old www.ejinnovations.com is no more.
Ideally I’d like to learn a little python so I can pull my blog posts from WordPress and have them displayed in Plone. We’ll see if I get around to it.
The Johnson Blog 