Some of you may have noticed the comment spam attacks on my blog several times in the past month or so. I just blacklisted the repeated offender (220.93.120.39).
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Binocular Mount
The Binocular Mount I purchased for my tripod arrived today. I was pleased to find that it’s the correct size; it’ll be a great help when I’m outside looking at the stars (hopefully tomorrow night).
Not much is going on this weekend, so it should be pretty relaxing.
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Windev’s new home
It sure feels strange/silly having an emotional attachment to a computer. I spent a few hours this evening getting more software installed on the new pc, Vega. It took a while but it is now doing the automated nightly builds for Chef and has the development environment all setup. As such, I just carried Windev down to the basement with the other slower computers.
There’s still some data I need to pull off of it, but its job is basically over. The computer that got me through school, stayed up many late nights with me, and helped build numerous applications (including the quite profitable WakeUp! Alarm Clock) is now days away from being my new linux webserver. Adios Windev, you’ve been a trooper!
Like I said, it sure feels strange…
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New Memory
Exchanged my memory stick today. Got home and the new computer booted right up. After installing XP though, I found the onboard nic can send but not receive any data. Good thing I had a new 100Mb card laying around to toss in. On to the visual studio installation…
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Weekend
We visited Ana’s sister this weekend in Marshall, Il. Ana helped her work in a booth for the town’s fall festival while I spent the day doing some coding. What I built was a small utility for entering my telescope observation logs and exporting them to wiki-markup, in the format of those found here. I got tired of copy/pasting from old observations so the app should come in handy. It also looks suprisingly good for having been written in just a few hours. -
Computer Parts
This afternoon I decided I would buy the parts for my barebones kit that has been sitting for a month. So I went and purchased an Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo. Started to put it all together as soon as I got home, but 2 hours later I’ve determined the memory is bad and the store is now closed so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to continue. That just sucks.
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Solar Filter
Today was completely cloudless, so I rushed home after work to setup the telescope and try out the new solar filter and camera mount. The solar filter lets in roughly 1/10,000th of the light – pretty cool. This is one of the pictures taken, albeit a bit out of focus since I was hastily taking picture before the sun went down and it was pretty windy outside. Next time I’ll take more time and hopefully come out with some clearer pictures. -
September 6, 1979
Today is my 25th birthday. Ana suprised me with a few things for my telescope which include a solar filter and camera mount. I can’t wait to use them both, it just figures that today is a very overcast day.
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Electricity, part II
As mentioned earlier, I had purchased the wrong type of circuit breaker. Today we went back to the store and got the right one. An hour later, all the computers downstairs were plugged into their very own 20 amp circuit!
Within the next few weeks I hope to get to wiring the two remaining circuits.
In other news, we picked up a cheapo 20″ tv for our bedroom, I got tired of trying to see our small 13″ one from across the room without my glasses. We found the name, Konka, to be pretty funny so we’ve voked to never call it a TV… it’s Konka.
The Johnson Blog 