Three things lined up today, providing an exciting evening of aurora watching. Tickling of the ionosphere – with the peaking of the 11-year solar cycle, it’s been ramping up. But this week, K-index of 9 and blobs-o’-sun heading our way. Geomagnetic Storm! Darkness– normally these are seen in Winter because nights are longer. But there’s also an issue with light pollution. The state map is pretty much “anywhere there’s people.” ...
During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be helpful relating our experience. 73, Jim WT8P Email works for some specific situations such as contacting the entire class and sharing detailed information. There were occasions where my missives were too long and detailed. Some email clients (e.g., Outlook) make it difficult to find messages. Email is poor for any real-time event, such as a student who was on the air right now and looking for contacts. ...
Python searches a variety of directories for its libraries, something I had largely lived in peace with until I had to modify some legacy code to address a suspected timing bug. The overall task is to produce a set of charts for a customer. Python loads an Excel workbook, a time-series data set is updated from a third-party source, and a Visual Basic Excel macro iterates through the workbook’s numerous tabs, adjusts to fiscal quarters, and emits several dozen charts. It’s clunky, but what I was given to work with. Until recently, was functioning well-enough. ...
During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year after it was released. Cupcakes were served. FizzyCalc is used primarily to precisely project waypoints and convert among the most common geo-coordinate formats. Applied judiciously, it can help you in finding the center of a circle given points on its circumference or the intersection of three circles. (Latitude/longitude is a Cartesian grid superimposed on a spheroid earth. At my latitude, one minute west is far less than the one minute north/south. Thus, my tenth-grade algebra fails.) One of the reasons I wanted to port it is using a Windows virtual machine always takes … a … w-h-i-lllllllllll-e to start because, oh, merde, Adobe Flash has another security update – Reboot to make the changes take effect! ...
Despite a concerted effort to keep my inbox tamed, it’s now back above 30 undealt-with emails. While falling behind, I’ve noticed some recurring – and annoying – behavioral patterns. I’m sure the list is incomplete, so feel free to share! “The two-for” – a person who always — always— sends a second mail with the attachment they forgot to include the first time. I can’t tell if the person is genuinely a flake or if they’re just pining for the return of corporate instant messaging. One wants to post a sign on their monitor: always wait at least 30 minutes after eating receiving the first message before swimming responding. “I must copy my manager on everything” – the sender wants to ensure their manager knows they’ve made a token effort to be “proactive.” Note the air quotes. (It’s also possible the sender’s manager “wants to be kept in the loop for minutiae” (cough: micromanages) or needs a high message count to justify her Crackberry.) I used to whittle the Cc list down, but have since decided that it’s best to keep the list going. “I must copy your manager on everything, too.” – If I’m the sole entry on the “To:” list, the sender is implying I won’t respond to their request by overtly creating an audit trail. Their manager is copied, too, as if to say, “See, I warned them to check their blood pressure / Beware of the Ides of March / Soylent Green is people — but they did not listen.” What usually happens is my over-detailed, super-helpful response will usually elicit a walk over for the executive summary. “The Escalating Cc:” – two people in an email discussion have differing opinions. Instead of, like, actually walking down the hall and having a conversation, they start adding additional people to the discussion. Sometimes this will devolve into the passive aggressive tone. Paraphrasing an exchange that might hypothetically have gone out to an entire department: “I don’t want to blame anybody, I want to fix the problem.” [three sentences later] “[…] but Bobwas the last one to touch it. I will ask Bobwhen Bob****comes in what Bobdid to cause the system to become hopelessly broken.” ...
As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones. Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good. Usually these adjustments are anywhere from 50-500 feet, but that’s a lot when you consider the cache may be the size of a pinky and located in an area with a lot of hiding places. Like a forest, perhaps! ...
When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”1 It’s a little easier to make sense of this if you watch the video. Suffice to say, if it’s done correctly, as has been used by Michael Phelps[3,5], it confers an advantage to the swimmer. ...
Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle. Partly out of boredom, but mostly to mess with development manager at the time, I had asked one of the developers to swap out the splash screen. The product logo was thus modified: **Official** **Battle-ready!** Appropriate text was substituted, changing our tagline from “Enjoy the view” to “Today is a good day to PLOT!” Laughs were had, and it was removed before alpha testing several months later. ...
While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced. (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.) Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk is better marked. Were it busier, the traffic signal at point (1) would have a red left turn arrow (indicating no turn is permitted). It might also have a dedicated right-turn lane. Currently, the pedestrian crossing signal at point (3) indicates it is safe for pedestrians to cross No Way.Starting with a green light (1) and active pedestrian signal (3), the traffic sequence here might typically be as follows. ...
Last night’s ride home was a doozy because of the torrential downpour… easily the wettest I’ve been since RSVP 2004. The wind started kicking up around 5:30, knocking out power to the street lights. A tree had fallen across the road a mere 1/4 mile past the entrance to my subdivision. When I woke up, the yard is covered with a layer of pine needles. The back deck table and umbrella speared the grill. The sand box cover has blown off into the green belt behind us. The house across the street’s animatronic “Rudolph” festive lawn ornament was taken out by several stray branches. ...