The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • A bunch of random stuff

    We all had a very good time at the concert last night; it was nice to take a few moments out of a busy holiday season to enjoy good music and family. There were several impressive portions of the concert – two of which were an 11 year old violinist and the St. Andrew Society. The St. Andrew Society featured some 12-14 bagpipes and another 12-14 drums. We were sitting in the very front row, so being less than 10 feet from their very intense sound was absolutely amazing.

    At the concert Ana and I ran into our highschool physics teacher, Mrs. Langford, and learned that she’ll be retiring at the end of this school year. She’s not sure what she’ll do with her time off, but it will probably include some particle physics research in St. Louis. Her research sounds very intriguing and I hope to hear more about it in the future.

    On another note, Ana has finished the quilt for her grandmother and is delivering it to her today. She spent the last 18 awake hours hand sewing on it so that it would be completed by today and it looks great. Congratulations Ana!

    Today we are heading to Champaign to catch the Illinois vs. Valparaiso basketball game, should be a lot of fun and we’ll probably be picking up some BW3s while we are there.

    As you may have noticed, I have disabled comments for the time being. I tried enabling them again for a short time yesterday but was again flooded with spam. Hopefully the next release or so of Serendipity will have better/working spam protection. Who knows, I’m just tired of the crap.

  • Electricity

    Today I put in the second of three new circuits in the basement. I feel bad that I had procrastinated so long, but there really wasn’t a driving need to get it done since the computers were all put on the first.

    This one went pretty quickly, and it worked correctly on the first try this time – ground fault protector and all. I’m very pleased.

    Tonight we are heading to dinner and the symphony for a Holiday show with my family, we’re really looking forward to it.

  • Tinsel

    Last night my cat was walking around the house and Ana noticed some tinsel hanging off his tail. Except when she went to go pull it off, she found that it was hanging out of his butt! Doh, stupid cat eating the tinsel!

  • Plone

    A while back I posted about software called Plone. At that time I didn’t have a use for it, but that has changed. I am setting up a Plone for my astronomy stuff and have just finished moving my observation logs over from Wiki.

    If you want to get an idea of how I’m using it, check
    http://home.ejinnovations.com:8080/astronomyplone.

    New observation logs are located at
    http://home.ejinnovations.com:8080/astronomyplone/Members/eajhnsn1/observations/

  • Decorations

    It has been a while since I’ve last posted, not a whole lot has been going on. Last night after work, Ana and I went to a few stores and purchased all the necessary Christmas decorations we’d need today. We also picked up our Christmas tree and decorated it before heading to bed last night.

    Today has been very busy but now all of the outdoor lights and decorations are up, and there are only a few remaining things to be done inside. Tonight is LRS’ annual Christmas Party so we’re getting all cleaned up for that.

    The rest of the month looks to be pretty full. Next weekend we are hosting Ana’s work’s Christmas Party (just her division, not all 500+ in her building!). The weekend after that we are heading to the Illinois Symphony Orchestra for their Holiday Pops concert with my family. Should be very enjoyable.

    Pics of the decorated house coming soon.

  • Sunspots

    Courtesy of Spaceweather.com, here’s a comparison between the size of earth and the size of some current (small) sunspots.

  • Orville Redenbacher’s Cinnabon Popcorn

    We tried a bag of this stuff tonight. When we bought it were both a little worried that it may taste horrible (cinammon and popcorn? hmm) but were intrigued nonetheless. This stuff tastes great! Highly recommended if you have a sweet tooth.

    In ebay fashion: “A+++++!! GREAT PRODUCT!”

  • Leonid Meteor Shower

    The annual Leonid Meteor Shower is set to begin tonight and extend for several nights. It figures that it’s supposed to be cloudy all week so I’ll miss them just like I missed the eclipse last month. A few years ago Ana and I went a few miles outside of Champaign around 3am to watch and it was a spectacular show. I recommend if you have the chance, check them out.

  • Success!

    Today was a busy day, setting up all of our decorations. It was worth it though, we heard many great comments about how our house looked fantastic. The music/sound effects created a very spooky atmosphere – a group of neighbor kids playing in the next yard over thought our house was haunted. Much fun!

    Full pictures can be seen in the gallery.

  • Webcam

    Tonight I made a very quick test run of using a webcam with my telescope. Lots of people have been very successful in creating awesome photographs with their webcams, but I was pretty skeptical. I’ve been waiting to make a way of connecting the webcam to the telescope until I knew for sure it was actually going to be worth the trouble. After taking a quick shot at the moon, I must say that I’m very impressed and quite excited with what I may be able to do with deep space objects such as nebulas and the like. You can see the very shakey (since I was holding it up to the telescope by hand) video here, it’s a 3MB+ and in Windows Media format – I don’t have any software to go from avi->mpg here.