Intersection Logs

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:11:23 GMT

No, there's really not much point in sitting here at stupid a.m. waiting for the poor neglected daemons of the old and mostly superseded data system to serve me up the data with which I am not really awake enough to deal at the moment. (You know the old saw about the problem with standards?)

Shiny new embargoed data is getting unveiled in a NASA press conference at 2.15pm EDT on Wednesday, which is not actually tomorrow any more except possibly in Hawaii. It would be nice to be somewhat awake to enjoy that.

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Surfacing, briefly

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:54:24 GMT

Embargoed data: still shiny, though possibly upside down and/or back to front.
Sun; mostly blank but not entirely inactive.
Mt. Wilson; the 150ft tower is finally doing something other than hold up the webcam, at least when it isn't snowing.
FITS headers: still annoying.
Weather; still warm, but maybe cooler tomorrow. (See also: snow on Mt. Wilson.)
Allergies; still bad.
Downstairs neighbor: snoring.
New dress that came in the mail today; extremely blue; fits, but needs ironing. In fact, I should probably wash it and then iron it ...

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Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:59:58 GMT

If I'd remembered that banana bread needs nearly an hour in the oven, I might have started on it earlier than 9pm. It's been a while since I did any baking, but this is something of a special occasion. Weather permitting, around 10.26 ET tomorrow, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is due to be launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard an Atlas rocket. There's a better than even chance it'll end up slipping another day, but still. We've been waiting for this for years, so one more day doesn't make much difference. We're planning a small breakfast gathering in the conference room, with NASA TV streaming on the big screen, and I seem to have elected myself to bring goodies. If the launch does slip, I may have to do it again tomorrow, in which case I'll have to stop off for more eggs and sugar on the way home.

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Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:39:00 GMT

I love tiger eye, but it's hard to photograph under artificial light.

In other news, the office and campus are still quiet, and the solar cycle is still longer than it used to be.

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Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:33:20 GMT

It was a quiet day in the office today --- except for the fan noise from my workstation, which is stuck on the desk after the floor-cleaning until I can persuade someone to lift it down for me. Also, most of the building reeks of cleaning fluid. I spent most of my time holed up in the furthest downstairs corner of the library, which happens to have a nice table complete with power outlets and internet, working on the laptop.

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Monday

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:05:46 GMT

I seem to have survived my first day at the AGU, including giving the invited talk which was the main reason I'm here in the first place.

So the question may be, has the Sun actually been behaving oddly since the turn of the millennium, or is it just that the Space Age and the start of modern observations coincided with a period of unusually high activity which is now reverting to normal? (As soon as we figure out what normal is anyway.) This reminds me rather of the theory I've heard somewhere, that the American West was colonized during an abnormally wet period that set up unrealistic expectations for how much water would be available long-term.

I spent the lunch break wandering around the Yerba Buena gardens, a quiet little oasis of grass and trees and water in the midst of a precipitous concrete-and-glass desert. It was disconcerting to see magnolia and azalea flowers in December; mind you, they did look rather as though they were regretting it. It wasn't very warm, and afterwards the only time I felt warm enough to take off my jacket all afternoon was when I had just had a cup of hot coffee. (I was very relieved that there was hot coffee; the AGU has a habit of serving only beer (and maybe soda) for the afternoon breaks.)

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Random afternoon

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:26:21 GMT

My workstation at work had been making more annoying noise than usual lately: I thought it was just dust in the fan, but the computer guy thought hard drive bearings. He was right; in fact, when he broke it down it turned out that the internal RAID had lost or was in the process of losing two out of six segments. Fortunately one of them was the empty hot spare, so I haven't lost any data, but that was a closer call than I like.

There was a roadrunner scurrying around in the bushes outside the office window this afternoon, which was unexpected; the university corridor is usually thought to be too urban for them, and this isn't exactly a quiet week on campus. I didn't manage to get the camera out in time, sadly.

My application for the free upgrade to Windows 7 for the new laptop has been approved. I ordered the cheap upgrade for the desktop when it was offered, too, so by November I should be a Vista-free household again.

Edit: AAARGH!

New laptop downloaded updates, wanted to reboot. Fell over. Fell over again. In safe mode now -- and me without a clue what to do next, if CHKDSK doesn't help. Not what I wanted to do this evening ...

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