For those interested, here’s what I was able to see on the first night out with the new telescope.
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WordPress (obviously)
If you’re here, you probably notice the new blogging software. I’ve had too much of a problem with spam comments in Serendipity and have caught some flak for disabling comments – so here’s WordPress. I did a quick and dirty import of the old data and, as you can see, a lot of html encoding problems were involved. I’m too lazy, so they are staying that way.
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First Light
I’m just in from taking my new telescope out for its first light. Wow is it ever impressive. With the 4.5″ reflector I have, whenever I pushed the image up to 200x it almost always came out blurry and very dim. Quite the opposite with the 8″ – they’re extremly bright and sharp. I’ll be writing up a summary of things I looked at this evening and post a link sometime tomorrow.
My dad stopped by for a while to check out the view, so I gave him a quick tour of Saturn, the Pleiades, Orion Nebula, and the double Castor. After he left my neighbor was out on his deck and we ended up chatting for a while. I offered him the chance to look through the telescope and he seemed very excited but was busy at the moment. He said he’d definitely take me up on the offer another time he sees me out.
Well, time to get to bed. I’m glad I was able to get outside tonight, it’s supposed to be cloudy for the next few days
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Arrived!
My new telescope has arrived! Pictures can be seen here. It took a little over 3 hours to get all setup and the mirrors aligned from its apparently bumpy ride across country, but it’s awesome! I’m about to take it out now and get the finder scope aligned and take it for a test drive. Note me holding my old telescope in one of those pictures. Yeah, this one’s big 
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SkyView Pro 8
I ordered my new telescope yesterday, the Orion SkyView Pro 8″ Reflector. I was planning on ordering in a week or two but they had a nice 10% off sale that was too hard to pass up. This will be a vast improvement over my current beginner’s scope which is only 4.5″ in diameter. Needless to say, I’m excited.
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Accomplishment?
It’s odd when you sit down and spend an evening watching many hours of recorded television and walk away feeling as if something was actually accomplished. Truly bizarre.
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Lazy
I’m feeling pretty lazy today, but it’s a nice change from the past 3 weeks. The business trip went fantastic, installation went much smoother than any of us imagined it would.
The weather’s pretty crappy right now, 10 degrees (F) with a wind chill of -10 thanks to the 40mph winds. It’s supposed to get clear tonight, which I was excited about; but not if it’s that cold. My telescope has been outside just once in the past 3-4 weeks because of the weather.
Last weekend I purchased a pair of 802.11g wireless cards to upgrade our wireless network here at home. Prior to this, our linksys cards had software that managed the wireless connections – and it did a very poor job at it. With the new cards, I haven’t had my connection drop once! Not to mention the speed boost. Very pleased.
Next up is to track down a cheap scanner to replace my malfunctioning one. That sounds like an easy task until you realize everyone thinks you want a scanner/printer/fax/copier/dishwasher combination.
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Windshield
Got my car back today, had it in to get a new windshield. Over the weekend it was hit by a rock while driving and shortly thereafter a large crack grew across about 2/3 of its length. The new one sounds kinda funny when I hit bumps, but hopefully that’ll go away once it settles into position more.
Other than that, not much has been going on here. Lots of work in preparation for a business trip to install a solution we’re building. Hopefully all will go smooth and the last 2 weeks of hell won’t be for naught
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Radio Shark
One of my Christmas presents from Ana, the Radio Shark, was delivered yesterday. This is one cool piece of hardware, you can definitely tell the company designs it for Apple machines. I’ve tried it out a couple times and it’s great. The software leaves much to be desired, but hopefully they’ll be able to update it in the future.
Tonight we’re having both families over for New Year’s. We’ve gone and purchased a set of folding chairs to help the seating situation, and rented a couple nintendo games (Mario Tennis and Mario Kart) to keep us occupied. Lots of cleaning to do now, but it should be a fun evening at home.
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So THAT’s how Google does it
First time I’ve run across this: how Google’s search really works
The Johnson Blog 