8:40 - I ended up taking yesterday off. I visited my mother for a couple of hours in the morning, and then spent the rest of the day reading and doing some planning for our Messier Marathon. My brother came over from Raleigh in the afternoon, and headed over for a long visit with my mother while I swapped his laundry loads in and out. It was a boring day for the dogs, but they behaved pretty well. They were happy when Barbara got home, though. She spent the day at her sister's house and got home around 8:00 or 8:30.

I need to make the mom visit and then get back to work. I'm not going to make the 50% completion deadline on 12/31, but I want to get at least two or three more chapters in before then. That means I'll be working heads-down between now and year end.

11:01 - What is going on here? Google censorship? On my Journal page for Saturday, 16 November, I posted a response to a message from a reader. That response included a word I'd just made up, "Heimatsicherheitshauptamt", or "Homeland Security Main Office". Also on 16 November, Jerry Pournelle posted a message from me that included the word Heimatsicherheitshauptamt.

The following Monday, I wondered if I'd actually made up that word, or if someone else had used it first. So I did a Google search for "Heimatsicherheitshauptamt". That search returned only two hits, one my Journal page for 11 November, and the other Jerry's Mail page. I didn't think much more about it until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to run the search again to see if anyone had picked up on it. This time, Google returned zero hits. Nada. Nothing. Zip.

The subject just came up on the messageboard, and so I checked again. Google returned zero results, although a reader has this to say:

"I've searched high and low, Hotbot on "fast" search found an email you sent to Pournelle on this subject. So did Kartoo and Excite, however Google, Teoma, Inktomi, lycos, Alta Vista, MSN, Looksmart, Ask Jeeves did not. Interesting that you have been censored but he has not."

8:58 - Steve Childers emailed me yesterday afternoon to say he planned to head over to the soccer field for a short observing session. Barbara and I were both feeling better, so I asked her if she'd like to go over for a little while. Since AstroTruck wasn't packed, we decided just to take our 90mm refractor, a couple chairs, and so on. Paul Jones had gotten a 14mm Pentax XL eyepiece for Christmas. I knew he'd be itching to try it out, so I gave him a call. Barbara and I got over to the soccer field about 7:30. Paul showed up a couple of minutes after that. Steve and his son Sean arrived a few minutes later.

There were a few clouds and transparency wasn't great, but it was nice to be out under the stars again after a long period of clouds. Paul tried his new 14mm Pentax XL in our 90mm refractor and Steve's 10" Dob, and pronounced himself satisfied. Barbara added two Messier Objects to her bag. M1 was surprisingly easy last night. It was easy to locate, because it was within a degree of Saturn. What surprised me was that it was relatively easy to see. M1 has low surface brightness, and ordinarily under less than dark skies you can be looking at it and not see it. It didn't exactly jump out last night, but it was clearly visible in the eyepiece despite the haze and light pollution. Orion was well up, and as Barbara checked over her list she found that she'd never logged M78, a small nebula just off Alnitak in the belt of Orion. So she used the Telrad on Steve's Dob to orient it properly to the background stars, and there was M78. Again, it didn't exactly pop out at us, but it was clearly visible. I was surprised, as M78 is another object with low surface brightness, and I wouldn't have expected it to be visible from suburban Winston-Salem.

Around 9:00 p.m. we decided to pack up. That took only a few minutes. Toss the folding chairs, table, and tripod in the way-back, lay the scope tube across the back seat, and we were ready to roll. Ready to spin, I should say. We'd pulled off into the grass to park, as we always do. But the inch or so of rain we had recently hadn't drained, and we found we were sitting in mud. Barbara tried to back out, and just spun the wheels. So she decided to pull forward and make a swing around Steve's van. That didn't work, either, and we ended up stuck. So we put it in four-wheel drive and made it back up to the road. Before we drove off, I suggested we ask Steve if he'd like to try backing his minivan back up onto the road, but he said not to worry about it. He lives nearby, but even so as we drove away I had an image of him stuck in the mud. I hope he made it out.

10:05 - Barbara is off to the gym, drugstore, and mom visit. Barbara is starting her New Year deep clean today, so the Floor Ferrari® will be roaring and the dogs and I will have to keep clear. We were considering heading up to Bullington to observe tonight, but the forecast doesn't look great, so we'll probably not go. I'm still working on chapters, so that's probably what I'll do today. Not much else to report.

I did have one interesting experience yesterday. I'd taken a screen shot of /proc/ide/piix on the Intel/Red Hat box, and wanted a comparison shot of /proc/ide/via from the AMD/Mandrake box. I grabbed the screen on the Mandrake box, but then I was stuck. The image itself was fine, but I had no easy way to get it somewhere that I could use it. I played around a bit on the Mandrake box with Samba, fstab, and so on. I got it to the point where I could see the shared drive on my NT4 Server box, but I couldn't write the file to it.

I'm sure I could eventually have gotten it working, but (a) I don't want to break (or even reboot) the Mandrake box, which is my Internet gateway, and (b) I was in writing mode, not playing-with-Linux mode. So I fired up the ftp client on the Mandrake box, uploaded the screenshot image file to the ttgnet.com ftp server, and downloaded it from there with my Windows box. Kludgy, clumsy, ugly, and embarrassing to admit, but it did the job.

Incidentally, if you've sent me mail and haven't had a response, I apologize. I'm covered up at the moment, and my inbox is not a pretty sight. I'll try to get to mail as I have time.

10:05 - Dr. Keyboard, aka Chris Ward-Johnson, just posted an interesting piece entitled This is not a blog. And here I thought it was just me. Like Chris, I was posting an on-line daily journal page long before the term blog was invented and, like Chris, I don't consider my journal to be a blog. In fact, if someone refers to this page as a blog, I take that as an insult, albeit perhaps unintentional.

Blogs are generally silly, and in my opinion the word itself is ugly and demeaning. Obviously, there are exceptions. Some of my friends, including Paul Robichaux, maintain interesting and useful blogs. ESR has a self-described blog, and Eric is the antithesis of silly. But those are exceptions. Most of the other blogs I've seen are devoid of useful or interesting content. I think serious journal keepers do themselves a disservice if they refer to themselves as bloggers.

I'm doing the laundry and other regular Sunday chores, and will be off shortly to visit my mother. When I visited last night, I found her sitting in the dark, more or less. She has a light fixture above her bed that has two fluorescent tubes, one pointing up, controlled by a wall switch, and one pointing down, controlled by a pull chain. The pull chain switch was broken, and she had only the dim light provided by the upward-pointing tube. I looked at the chain and switch, but it was completely borked. Mom said it had been that way since just after lunch.

So I walked out to the nurses' station to tell them what was going on and ask them when it would be fixed. They said they didn't even have a report of the problem, which seemed odd since mom's aide had told her at 2:00 p.m. that he would report it. When I asked them when it would be fixed, they told me that mom would have to wait until Monday, because their maintenance staff didn't work on weekends. I told them I'd go home and get a lamp for mom, but they said that wasn't permitted because all electrical devices had to be examined and approved by maintenance before they could be plugged in.

So I asked them if their position was that mom had to go without light for two full days and be unable to read or do anything else to pass the time. They said that she had the upward-pointing one, and that was sufficient. I returned to mom's room and removed the diffuser panel from her upward pointing light, which at least made it a bit brighter, although not enough so for her to read. This morning, I'm taking tools along. There's a reflector panel separating the two tubes. It's secured by three hex-head nuts. I'll remove the panel so mom will at least have direct light from the upper tube.