
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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 15 March 2010
Latest
Update: Sunday, 21 March 2010 13:30 -0400 |
10:34
- I'm starting heads-down work today on the new edition of Building the Perfect PC.
As Barbara said, we'll soon be flooded with PC components. Or at least
I hope we will. It's been a few years since the last edition, and many
of my industry contacts may have moved on or forgotten me.
YouTube
sent me a invitation to apply for partnership yesterday. I guess
hitting 2,000 subscribers and 50,000 views must have triggered it.
Until now, they were offering ad revenue sharing on specific individual
videos that met whatever criteria they required. That hasn't always
been obvious. Some videos that have more views haven't included the
revenue sharing button, while others with many fewer views have. At any
rate, I always ignored those revenue-sharing invitations because the
only thing they offered was to share revenue if I allowed them to run
ads with those particular videos.
When I checked my account
yesterday, there was an invitation to apply for general partnership.
That offers many advantages, not least the ability to customize one's
channel page, which I really want. So I clicked on the Apply button and
filled out the form to request partnership. One odd thing. There were
two checkboxes at the bottom, with a red asterisk next to them that
indicated they were a required field. The first checkbox was that I
agreed that ads could appear with my video and the second had something
to do with promotion. I tried marking only the second checkbox, but
when I then clicked the Submit button it returned me to the form and
said I hadn't completed a required field.
Eventually, I marked
the permission to run ads checkbox and it accepted my submission. On
the summary page that followed, one of the summary items was that I'd
given permission to run ads, as though that were an optional choice. I
still think it may be optional, so I'll look into that once they
approve my partnership application, assuming they do. If it turns out
the ads aren't optional, I'll hold my nose and let them run the ads,
although I'll still encourage everyone to run an ad blocker so they
won't see them.
10:24
-
The plumber is supposed to show up some time today to repair or replace
the sewage ejection pump in the basement. That pump was installed
nearly 20 years ago, so I'm inclined to replace it, but I'll see what
the plumber suggests. He repaired it in 1999, and it's run fine ever
since. It doesn't get much use, because it serves only the downstairs
bathroom and the former-guest-suite-kitchen-now-laboratory. Barbara
also wants me to have him replace the outdoor hose faucets and raise
the one on the front of the house a few inches.
I'm
re-familiarizing myself with the PC component market. A lot has changed
since we did the current edition of the book, not least the growth of
the Mini-ITX form factor. I'm particularly looking forward to building
one or two Mini-ITX systems that can be configured as an appliance PC,
home server, media-center front-end, NAS, and so on. It's always fun to
cram as much functionality as possible into as little volume as
possible. A passively-cooled Intel Atom-based system with an SSD may be
my next den system.
08:58
-
Jerry Edwards, our plumber, came out yesterday and replaced the sewage
ejection pump in the basement. He also repaired the hose taps, front
and back, but didn't need to replace them. So, a couple hours' work and
$767 later, everything is working again. I'd told Jerry to put in a
good pump. The old one was installed in 1991, so it lasted nearly 20
years, which Jerry said is about four or five times the average
lifetime for one of the cheap sewage pumps sold at Lowe's or Home
Depot. I hope the new one lasts as long as the one it replaced. It
should, if weight is any indication. The thing is constructed of thick
cast iron, and reminded me of a floor safe. When I tested it, it took
only 2 or 3 seconds to completely empty the reservoir.
Wow. Here's reason enough not to buy an iPad.
If the battery dies, it's going to cost you more than $100 plus tax and
a week to get a functioning system again. Oh, and they don't return
your original iPad, so you'll need to make sure you've backed up all
your data. And the iPad warranty specifically excludes the battery.
I've never understood why anyone would buy something like this, with a
battery that's not user replaceable, if only because you might need a
second battery to extend run time.
09:16
-
Dentist visit yesterday for fillings, but I'm fully recovered. He asked
whether I wanted silver or composite fillings, and I knew immediately
that he asked because silver filling material is an amalgam of silver
and mercury. Mercury has been demonized by the popular press, starting
30 years ago or more with the reports about high levels of mercury in
fish, and a lot of people are simply terrified by it. When I questioned
him, Dr. Miller said that the silver-mercury amalgam was a much
superior filling material and was essentially permanent, while the
composite material was much less durable and might need to be replaced
after a few years. I told him to use the silver.
Speaking of
illegal levels of mercury in fish, I remember a news article back in
the 1970's about a fisherman who exceeded the daily catch limit.
He was busted by a game warden, who ordered the fisherman to open
the trunk of his Monarch and found it filled with fish. The warden
wrote him up for, and I am not making this up, "Illegal levels of fish
in a Mercury."
Speaking of mercury, I'm getting ready to order
some chemicals, and as usual I'm struck by how different things are now
than they were back in the 1960's. There are a lot of formerly-common
chemicals that are either no longer available or extremely expensive.
Mercury compounds lead that list. You can still get most of them, but
they're extremely expensive. Even from the least expensive sources,
most of them now cost $20 an ounce or more. Back in the 60's, I used to
buy these mercury compounds for a few bucks a pound. Even taking
inflation into consideration, they now cost five or ten times what they
did back then. And that doesn't count hazardous-shipping surcharges,
which didn't exist back then. Nowadays, it'll probably cost you $100 or
more total to order just an ounce or two of mercury compounds.
And
the cost of severe poisons has gotten simply ridiculous. Back in the
60's, I used to order arsenic compounds, which were dirt cheap. In
fact, I could usually get what I needed cheaply at the hardware store,
where relatively pure arsenic compounds were sold as rat killers and
insecticides. Same thing for potassium cyanide and thallium sulfate.
All of them could be bought by the pound locally, and all had a skull
and crossbones on the label, which was considered sufficient warning.
Of course, people back then were assumed to be competent, which
assumption is no longer made. So, not only are these and many other
compounds no longer available in hardware stores, but most of them are
difficult or impossible for home scientists to buy even from specialty
chemical suppliers.
I've actually considered making a visit to
our local hazardous materials collection depot. I'm sure they
occasionally get stuff like unopened bottles of reagent-grade hazardous
chemicals from schools and businesses cleaning out old lab supplies. I
wonder if I could sweet-talk them into putting those aside for me to
look over. Probably not. There's probably lots of paperwork required to
track all this stuff, and it's probably illegal for them to give up
anything that's been given to them for processing.
08:35
- Fred Reed thinks there's another revolution on the horizon,
and I'm afraid he may be right. The last time states got tired of
being pushed around by the federal government, we had the Civil War.
And we now have not just one but many states that have passed or are
seriously considering passing laws that tell the federal government to
get stuffed. Health care is the hot button topic this time, but it goes
much deeper than that. Montana has made its residents and businesses no
longer subject to some federal firearms laws. California and other
states are considering legalizing marijuana. At least 30 states are, in
one area or another, considering laws that contradict federal laws and
regulations.
I wonder how long it will be before one or more
states pass laws to exempt their citizens from paying federal taxes. If
that happens, the excrement really hits the rotating ventilation device.
00:00
-
13:30
- As Barbara mentioned on her page,
we went observing Friday night for the first time in a long time,
driving up to our friends' Steve and Linda Childers lake house at Smith
Mountain Lake in Virginia. Conditions were excellent, with about Bortle Class 3.5 skies. That's about as good as it gets nowadays if you're anywhere near civilization.
At
Bortle 3.5, the general light pollution is still bright enough that
there's no problem seeing people, vehicles, and so on, but the skies
are stunningly dark and there are about 100 times more stars visible
than most people are used to being able to see. In fact, a lot of
people will have trouble pointing out familiar constellations because
there are so many more stars visible, cluttering up the sky.
Barbara
and I logged a dozen more Herschel 400 objects, all in Ursa Major.
After we'd gotten several of those, we moved on to the next one, which
should have been in the same eyepiece field as the bright Messier
galaxies M81 and M82. Those galaxies are bright enough to be prominent
in a binocular or optical finder, and they're easy to locate
geometrically from the bowl of Ursa Major (the Big Dipper). So I was
surprised when Barbara said she couldn't find M81/M82. Finally, she
asked me to come find them for her. I stepped to the eyepiece,
expecting to take maybe 5 seconds to get them in the eyepiece.
They
weren't there. I tried again, several times, and I couldn't find them.
Now, understand, these are objects that I've seen literally hundreds of
times, in everything from small binoculars to large scopes. I think the
first time I saw them I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and using some
opera glasses that my grandmother had given me. Even counting the very
first time I ever observed them, it never took me more than a few
seconds to get them in the eyepiece. But they just weren't there.
Barbara announced that someone had stolen M81/M82, and with some
embarrassment we asked Steve to get them with his scope and turn on his
green laser to point them out. We put our scope on Steve's pointer, and
sure enough there they were.
So, after some reflection, I think
I have the answer. Although the night was cloudless and transparent, I
think there was one tiny, opaque cloud covering M81/M82 at just the
time we were trying to find them. By the time we asked Steve to point
them out to us, that cloud had moved on. In support of that idea, we
subsequently re-found M81/M82 several times. (We were using it as a
guidepost or departure point to star-hop to other H400 objects.) At any
rate, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
by
Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.