Mar 30

Well, that wasn’t all that bad. Still plenty of tweakage to go.


Mar 29

OK, that’s weird…

I must’ve seriously hosed this web site last night trying to halt the migration to Google’s servers mid-way through. My previous post doesn’t actually show up on the web site (and this one probably won’t either)… but I just had a reply to it land in my email inbox! Hmmm…. ::mumbles something technical::


Mar 29

Moving to WordPress, one way or another…

Not that there’s a lot of action here, but it seems I’m soon going to have to move this here blog away from Blogger.com and host using WordPress instead.

Blogger.com, not wanting to support FTP uploads anymore, would like us all to migrate our data over to Google’s very own web servers. Generally I trust Google more than maybe I should, but in this case I think I’ll just use my own web host, thankya kindly.

So that means I get to learn WordPress. And convert two blogs. By May 1. Yay.


Dec 13

Why Didn’t I Think of This Before?

Today at work I was trying to find a good, high-resolution scan of Isaac Newton’s original illustration of his cannon thought experiment from Principia Mathematica. There are a lot of small images, and hardly any big enough for our purposes.

Anyway, on an idle whim I tried just going straight to www.newtonscannon.com only to discover the domain name had not been registered.

Well, I fixed that right away.

No idea what I’m going to do with it yet. Stay tuned.


Jan 4

Cool Telescope Kit

Hey lookee, an actual post after lo these many months!

A few days ago I put together a cool little telescope kit from Japan, given to me by my boss. I’ve took some pictures while putting it together and have posted them here. It’s a surprisingly nice low-power scope, given the tiny little box it came in.


Aug 20

So last Saturday there was a star party at Warner Park to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately, the site is a little light polluted these days and the weather was a bit hazy, so not many meteors were seen. Lots of people got looks at Jupiter, and I turned my scope on to Albireo just to have something different for people to look at. About 10:00 the fog started to roll in, and by 11 it was getting really bad. But as some people were walking back down the hill, a car with headlights on drove up – and it looked exactly like a scene out of the X-Files – people silhouetted against a mysterious bright light shining through dense fog. One of the astronomy club members had a cell phone camera on hand. It’s tiny, but here it is:


Jun 16

So first thing this morning, my RSS reader picks up an aricle from Boing Boing which leads to here, which leads to here. Might as well skip the first two links, and go to the end, which tells you all about how to turn a $10 security peephole from Home Depot into an inexpensive fisheye lens. Real ones go for hundreds of dollars.

So I just had to go to Home Depot after work and try it out. Best picture I have so far:

Hopefully, more to come soon.


May 28

Microsoft Markets the iPod

No comment is really necessary here, other than that the Danny Elfman music is a nice touch.

This arrived in my inbox a day after another take on Microsoft appeared over at Daring Fireball, in which John Gruber dissects the following inane, meaningless ad copy:

In a people-ready business, people make it happen. People, ready with software. When you give your people tools that connect, inform, and empower them, they’re ready. Ready to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers. Ready to streamline the supply chain, beat impossible deadlines, and develop ideas that can sway the course of industry. Ready to build a successful business: a people-ready business. Microsoft. Software for the people-ready business.


Mar 29

Microsoftian Dilbertianism

Why hello there. Sorry I haven’t been around much lately. It’s been a slow several months in drewbert’s life.

Hell, who am I kidding, they’re all slow. Hence the title of my little corner of the the web.

Anyhow, here’s a good MacGeekery article about the state of things at Microsoft. It’s not particularly pretty.

As a Mac fan, I might be cheering at the slower-than-molasses development pace of Windows Vista, but the article makes a good point:

Apple exists to challenge Microsoft. Microsoft exists to give Apple something to compete against. It’s a battle of innovation vs. marketing and we’re slowly winning that battle but if there’s no one left to fight then I’d give Apple ten years before it gets as bad as Microsoft is today.


Feb 3

The Tick… on DVD?

My credit card waits in anticipation…