Day 359, I dunno, it might work

It would be great to have a telescope and get a decent view of objects in the night sky.  But it's often cloudy, there are trees, there are very bright LED street lights, and so the useful and usable field of view is often restricted to one that is very narrow.

So as a cheapskate work around let's use binoculars.  They don't occupy as much space when not in use, they are relatively portable, and they are cost-effective and can gather a lot of light if they are a decent size - these are Celestron Skymaster 20 x 80.  These bins allowed me to see Jupiter and four of the moons while balancing them on a wall, which was brilliant, if only I could have taken a photograph.

So let's try some half-baked antics with the bins and a camera to see what we can pull off.  Thus far it has been a pretty unimpressive test against some trees at the back of a garden a couple of roads away.  The real test will come when there's a clear night with a decent objective to be seen in the narrow field of view available.

Not sure tonight will provide anything, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars all are due to be below the horizon or behind houses.

Taps watch, waits for darkness, some day, maybe tomorrow.

For official/internal use only:
7677
0-9

Day 358, Like a big wooden pie

No idea.

Pie?  Wooden?

Big wooden Pi, that's it.

Sometimes things move very slowly.

Sometimes the things that move very slowly are me.

On other occasions the slowly moving things may be other people.

But if it is me moving slowly, ultimately I'll arrive with a greater impact due to my superior mass.

Although my circumference is not so great that complex calculation is needed.

Even though my mass divided by Pi is 29.921129301276325

There is no hidden meaning, it is what it is.



For official/internal use only:
6666
0-9

Day 357, Elaborate spoof sees car owners doing a bizarre dance

Changing battery on a car key-fob ought to be a straightforward process.  However there are dire warnings that the device will lose pairing with the car and it will no longer be possible to automatically lock/unlock the doors, or worse still it won't be possible to disable the alarm.

So with trepidation and a massive amount of Googling this is the narrowed down list of instructions on how to deal with the battery change process.

It isn't clear which one of this selection of processes will be the actual one, so let's try them all just in case.

Fully prepared to do some sort of Strictly Come Dancing style co-ordinated door opening and closing, window upping and downing, pedal depressing and releasing, I make my way toward the car.  Having taken the precaution of disarming the alarm in advance of this procedure I feel confident that if I fuck it up and have to do it one hundred and thirty seven times I won't be disturbing the neighbours as well as being a dancing fool.

Well, that was easy.  The battery replacement went without hitch.  The buttons all do as they are supposed, and none of the above instructions need to be carried out.

So.  Are the instructions just some sort of elaborate practical joke, or have people really had to carry out this ridiculous performance.  If so there really should be a better way, this is the 21st Century for goodness sake.



For official/internal use only:
5656
0-9

Day 356, A riposte too late, comedy of witless comments

Staying on a farm in a northern state in early 1980s US of A it wasn't uncommon to be asked questions such as:

Do you have valleys in England?

Do you have color TV in England?

Isn't your money funny?


Perhaps these were jokes, perhaps they were serious, they were definitely tedious.

If only I'd had the presence of mind to say:

Yes we have of that, and we also have these things called cars, they're like a sort of horseless carriage.

A photograph of your authentic Amish using traditional transport, somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio

The French call this type of missed opportunity l'esprit d'escalier, and normally it happens much sooner within a 35 year period than this late offering of staircase wit.


For official/internal use only:
4645
0-9

Day 355, You know the score

Everything they say is true.  Why would anyone want to pull the wool over your eyes.  Let's trust them.  They wouldn't want to manipulate you for monetary gain, after all, when has anyone ever done that?

Picture containing the word 'score'

Don't believe a word of it.  They are lying bastards.

Takes off tinfoil hat and drinks the koolaid.

For official/internal use only:
6747
0-9

Day 354, World of desks, monitors, multitasking nonsense, oops

There are three keyboards here.

And in this case that also means three computers.  The eagle eyed will spot a fourth keyboard and computer but they aren't commissioned yet.

There is no such thing as multi-tasking, no matter what anybody tells you.  Not for men, not for women, not for computers.  In the case of computers they do things quickly enough that it appears that the interleaved processes are happening simultaneously - on a good day at least.  Unless of course the computer has multiple CPUs and where tasks can be scheduled separately on each, even then these tasks are interleaved with many others.

With humans though it turns out that when we attempt to multi-task what happens is it takes us longer to complete the set of tasks than if they had been worked on in separate blocks of time.  We would be better served by maintaining focus.  And we would be much less likely to cock up.

I currently have the "cow of shame" (not quite visible here) due to being the person that most recently cocked up.  The cow is a token that we pass around, it's a lighthearted mechanism for reducing tension and I don't feel at all bullied by it.  No really I don't.

Multi-tasking doesn't work.  That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

It's also true.

But wait, that's no answer.

Ok, you might say that humans can do all sorts of stuff simultaneously.  Our autonomous nervous system is controlling, monitoring, changing, managing all sorts of processes all the time.  The key there is that is autonomic, self governing.  So what about an activity where we are more involved, such as when we cross a road.  A situation where we are making a massive number of calculations about the speed and distance of approaching vehicles.  There is a tremendous amount of subconscious activity taking place, and this activity is using processing power of a sort, so is that multi-tasking?

No it isn't.

Like a computer with multiple CPUs the human can 'run' multiple tasks simultaneously, but not those of conscious focussed tasks where our attention is devoted to something.  For example when reading and listening to music, where one of the tasks is completely passive, you are missing huge chunks of what is happening when you are focussed on the reading.  And so this is the case with any selection of tasks.

So there it is, a rough and ready, comprehensive and conclusive argument.  Not even hindered by my usual 5 minutes of Google based research due to me not wanting to context switch from typing.

Don't judge me, this only had a 10 minute time block allocated to it, and I was distracted by Antiques Road Trip.





For official/internal use only:
7777
0-9

Day 351, +3 inadvertantly

Things occasionally just come together accidentally.

Staring out of the kitchen window at work.  I was looking at the back of the Georgian terrace opposite, considering the oddities in design changes that had happened to the buildings since they were built.  Altered windows, added skylights, changed chimney post, and lost gardens.

So I took a picture of them, to see if I could spot anything interesting about the alterations.  Inadvertently my finger pressed on the volume button on the phone rather than the usual button to take a photo.  What I ended up with was a brief stream of images.

Tut, I thought.  I'll delete them later.

But no, Google Photo got hold of them and decided to 'auto-awesome' them into an animation.  Not a great deal happens, at least not a great deal happens in a much shorter space of time than that of Andy Warhol's Empire, which would be a relief if it went on general release.

"Absolute quality" - Rotten Tomatoes (78%) average rating 7.2/10

However, it is now making me feel nauseous.

Goodbye.

For official/internal use only:
7777
0-9