Voyager: Un-frickin believable

24 hour round trip for messages to and from the Voyager space probes.  NASA is still communicating with them… here’s the latest update on June 26, 2009!

Command Transmission & Verification Operations

Voyager 1 command operations consisted of the uplink of a Command Loss Timer Reset on 06/24 [DOY 175/1650z].  The spacecraft received the command.

Voyager 2 command operations consisted of the uplink of seven bracketed Command Loss Timer Resets sent on five-minute centers using 1.0 Hz steps on 06/22 [DOY 173/1442z].  The spacecraft received two of the seven commands sent.

NASA is sending retard-ese for an instruction set, and the spacecraft are still lucid enough to know they just peed their pants!

There just ain’t much you can coax from  ”grandpa” when all you got is “your timing is screwed up, please reset”, and the response is something other than “OK” 5 times out of 7.

Something else cool I noticed, is that they send in 1.0Hz steps…. probably because of the distance and speed causes an ever increasing doppler effect resulting in a “pitch” that might be too high or too low for voyager to consider intelligent signalling from earth.  hmph.  cool.

Canadian Mortgage Rates – Various Banks – August 2009

3 years ago, I got around 5.13% for 5 years.  I guess I should have analysed the market a bit better at the time, but when buying something as big as a house, you tend to play the caution card.  I liked 5.13 because it felt stable and low enough to survive whatever kind of upswing may have been coming.

Canada Mortgage Rates – August 2009

Considering 5.13% of the first five years of a $300,000 over 25 year mortgage and 5% down (real mortgage amount for $285,000 ) , the amount of interest paid in the first 3 years would have been $42,533.  The amount of principal would have been $18,223. Ouch.

Still, nothing happening.

I hope my blog doesn’t just sit there.  Please, let me find inspiration!

Nothing is happening.

I feel lazy, and I don’t feel like updating my page for a bit.

Careful. These Outlet Wiring Instructions are Wrong.

Today I went to the hardware store (LOWES) and bought a 10-pack of decorative electric outlets.  I picked the “Pass & Seymour” brand.  I pretty much know what I’m doing with electrical, but I always like to read instructions.  That’s when I got stymied.  I sat there for 10 minutes comprehending what it said.  I put down the tools and hit the net.  30 minutes later and I could only come to 1 conclusion – the instructions shipped with it were wrong!

Normally, I’d suspect bad instructions to be from China, but these electrical outlets are stamped “Made in U.S.A.”.  

Take a look … do you see anything wrong with the illustration?  

First off, you can see that the plug appears “upside down”.  Actually, this is normal – and it makes sense.  Sometimes a power cord has sufficient weight to “ply” it away from the wall socket, exposing a small portion of the prongs.  I suppose it’s better to have the ground exposed, than the two contact points that carry the electric current. 

The real culprit here is not the orientation of the outlet, but rather the positioning of the prongs in relation to the ground pin.  Normally, the larger Neutral slot should be on the lower right, and the smaller HOT slot should be on the lower left (in the upside-down mounting).

 

 

Now take a look at the actual outlets themselves, and you will see how it should be. 

Ordinarily, bad instructions results in having to take things apart.  In this case, it could result in a DIY’er burning down the house.  I think Pass & Seymour better consider a recall… 

 

Does anyone know what kind of butterfly this is?

Hi Everyone;

Just wondering if anyone knows what kind of butterfly this is? I’m really quite sure it’s not a monarch.

Location: Markham (Toronto), Ontario, Canada
Date : September 17, 2008 @ 3pm EDT

Click the image for better resolution.

What butterfly is this?

Update:

I sent an email last night to a butterfly professional.  Here’s the response:

It is a Compton Tortoiseshell butterfly. I photographed a few of these a week
or two ago.
They are very similar to Coma and Question Mark butterflies.
Gord

Thanks Gord!  Look at his great site about butterfly watching in Ontario site at : http://www.web-nat.com/Butterfly/

Save Money, Do Your Own Plumbing!

This article isn’t exactly about numbers, but it can be.

The background story is that the 1-1/2″ ABS drain tubing from my kitchen was sheared off in the drain pipe in my basement.

Many things were tried by the previous owner including crazy glue, abs cement, bondo!!! but nothing stopped the leak of weird kitchen drain liquid. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no way to fix this except to replace the entire Y-joint.

This weekend I got tired of looking at the neverending dripping creek in my basement, so I decided to rent a jackhammer, and fix that drain!

Unfortunately, the repair job wasn’t easy because the Y-joint piece (called an ABS Sanitary Tee apparently) had to be replaced in it’s entirety, which was buried 2 inches into the concrete, plus I had to get down a little further to get a clean piece of pipe to join to.

Based on plumber estimates, the total for a professional plumber would be about $400.00 CDN.

I spent

• $54.00 on the 4 hour rental of the small jackhammer from Home Depot
• $28.00 on a construction grade shovel (spade)
• $29.00 on ABS fittings : Sanitary Tee, 1-1/2″ Tubing, 1-1/2″ Coupler and Elbow, ABS Cleanout Fitting
• $4.00 on Bag of Cement (Half still remains unused).
• 5 hours of personal time including prep, work, and cleanup.

Materials I already had included

• Bucket to mix concrete
• Cement trowel
• ABS Cement
• Saw

Finished Plumbing and Concrete

Ancient BBS Receipt for our Atari 1040ST. Canada Remote Systems.

A nostalgic view from history (I call 1988 history).

Know how everyone pays for internet access? Back in the day, we used to pay for BBS access.

What’s a BBS? It’s another computer that you dial up to in order to download files, post messages (kind of like email between users of the same system).

The ATARI 1040ST was not exactly our first computer, but it was our first computer with a MOUSE! It was kicking the shit out of any machine any school-chum we knew had? Why?

1. PC’s were clunky, iron, and only in monochrome. We had 256 SCREAMIN’ COLOURS!
2. It wasn’t a video game system, it was a shit-kicking GUI OS (looking similar to the modern Macintoshes and Amiga’s owinng to the the Motorola 68000 chips that were used in Macs until the late 90’s)
3. 3.25″ FLOPPY!!!!! MEGA STORAGE (DoubleDensity)
4. It had F1-F12 keys that were angular !!!! F12 baby!
5. We had an AWESOME 300 baud cup-modem. Downloading a file? SHHHHHH…. quietly walk out of the room, and gently close the door behind you. For a few hours.
6. It had a kick-ass serial port that my DAD made a home-made serial cable for to retrieve his old word-star files from his Kaypro IV.
7. It worked with the daisy-wheel printer we had leftover from the Kaypro.

Our favourite games were “NeoPaint”, “Mercenary (with the X-rated credit, so dad would send us out of the room while the game loading credits were off-screen) and some kind of game , I think called “Mud Pies” where you used to run around throwing pies at everyone.

I think CRS was great, because it was the first time we got to communicate to the outside world with our computer! WOW! computers could use the phone lines. Amazing. They had all kinds of files (we kept our membership even when we moved over to a portable 286 laptop a little later on). They had local numbers in our region too.

Anyways, thanks dad for giving us a jump start.

It’s amazing what $65.00 in 1988 money would buy for a year.

Home Made Inclinometer

I made a DIY inclinometer for astronomy. This sometimes is called an “altitude measurer” and can be used to spot how high a model rocket goes.

Mine’s a little Newtonian, and I love it.

I printed out a picture of a protractor, stuck it on a board with tape, and now I can “sight” along the top of the board. That’s right, I can read the angle i am looking at from a string dangling on the side.

That string has a weight on the end. I have a plumb-bob that I like. NICE and heavy.

The string can pendulate, so you can slow it down. When it’s stopped, clamp the string in place along the protractor notches.

And that’ll give’r yer angle.

Here’s the graphic of the protractor. You can scale it and print it out on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper. When you attach it to the board, hang it down a bit from the top. Drill out a hole in the wood and slip a string through.

Click on the image to enlarge.

 

See my recent article where I used it: http://realworldnumbers.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/hunting-for-comet-holmes-at-home/

Here’s a link for another inclinometer from Make Magazine, but it just doesn’t look as sexy or as rugged mine.

Buenas Tardes mi cielo

Hi Gaby!