efaardvark

Got another shirt. Similar design to another one that I have but slightly different logo on the front. Gotta have one of each, right?

Pretty much the same here. I started watching Americanized anime like Mazinger Z and Speed Racer back in the '60s and '70s when I was in gradeschool. I didn't even know what "anime" was back then. It was all Saturday morning cartoons. My interest has waxed and waned over the years depending on life events and anime content. I'm more interested in science fiction for instance so the current fantasy / isekai everything phase has a tendency to not hold my attention very well. My interest got a boost in the '80s when a HS classmate started doing voice acting. There was a good (IMHO) stretch back in the mid '90s when stuff like Ghost in the shell came out too. Hasn't reached that level since but I still find interesting stuff from time to time. Enough that I'm still here. If I haven't wandered off by now I kind of doubt I ever will.

It's getting close to that point in the season when I do my 3-episode sampling. So far I've put Nyaight of the Living Cat, Solo Camping for 2, Food for the Soul, and Ruri Rocks on my list. Probably others as time permits. Anything else that strikes people as noteworthy this season? Also, I saw that the reincarnated vending machine got another season. Really? I'm not usually one to judge a book by it's cover but .. isekai? Reincarnation? As a vending machine??? I gave the first season a pass but maybe I missed the joke? Should I go back and take a look?

Hay fever is killing me. Some sort of plant spore floating around en mass that’s messing with my nose and eyes. The stuff is also settling out everywhere, collecting on windowsills and in little balls in quiet corners and generally making a pest of itself.

Horse with no Name

Got a little electronic gadget to show the power going into my portable power station. The power station has about a 1kWh capacity and can be charged from solar but the input is only good for 15 amps. I can get up to 4kW from the solar panels on the roof. At 24 volts that’s up to 167 Amps but unfortunately the power station only shows the input in Watts. It doesn’t break it down to Volts and Amps. I can't tell when I'm getting close to (or over!) the 15 Amp limit. The power station does have input current protection so I'm not real worried about blowing something up but knowing when I'm hitting the amps limit will tell me things like if and how much solar power I'm wasting and from that give me an idea if maybe I should think about getting an extra battery for the power station and how big it should be. Or maybe just tell me that it wouldn't be worth it at all. So I got a little gadget to put inline on the wire connecting the panels to the power station to let me monitor things in a bit more detail.

Getting very close to done on the “hide the internet cable monster” job. The cable carrier parts were delivered yesterday evening so today I put the cable runs in place and routed the cables along them. Big improvement in looks from before. Still need to replace a couple of the longer cables with shorter ones and attach the corner/joiner cover pieces to the cable carriers. I also need to cover up the hole in the wall where the Ethernet cables from the rest of the house converge / emerge. The cover that used to be there was cracked and barely holding together so I’m going to need a new one. Not a big deal but I don’t have one on hand so it’ll mean a trip to the hardware store or ordering one online. That corner has been behind a workbench and hasn’t seen daylight for a couple of decades too so cleaning and painting the wall and rug are now on the todo list. (Not necessarily in that order. ) That project will happen one day but today is not that day. It’s Sunday evening and too late to start something like that now.

Sounds like what @Nobody described could be an ova called Kowarekake no Orgel, aka The Broken Music Box. The robot's name was "Flower". It's a bit of a tearjerker.

Welcome!

Got three more mission lapel pins from work. One is for SPHEREx. My iphone totally fails to do it justice. What looks like an orange blob in the background is actually some sort of holograph of millions of galaxies. You can move your head around a bit to change the view and the background will move so you can see the bits that were previously hidden behind the foreground artwork. It makes the pin look like you are holding a small portal looking out to somewhere in deep space. Extremely cool effect. Another one is for the 10th anniversary of SMAP. And the third is for NISAR. The text at the bottom is a bit hard to read but it says "NASA JPL ISRO". Anyone here from India?

Saw a deer and her fawn on the lawn in front of my office today at work... I've got some home improvement supplies coming as well. Supposed to be here today but they didn't make it. It's ok. I'm not ready anyway!

Just a sandwich.. ham and cheese and lettuce and pepperoni on wheat with mustard and mayo. Had some lettuce left over that didn't look like it'd last much longer so I made a small salad to go with it. Bacon bits and ranch dressing on the salad, with a sprinkle of grated Parmesan on top. Diet cherry pepsi to wash it all down. Basic but yummy.

I christened one of the new shot glasses.

I will have eaten them all before then. That does remind me though.. I need to buy more eggs.

Visited the company store again. This time I came away with 2 NASA shot glasses and a “Dare Mighty Things” sticker. Banana for scale.

And here I just made french toast.

Making french toast out of cinnamon-swirl bread… (I debated putting this in the pancakes vs waffles topic. )

Opened a new bag of coffee this morning. It takes me a while to go through even a small bag so I buy the beans. (To avoid the coffee going bland by the time I get to the bottom of the bag I buy the beans and grind a new batch every week or so.) Anyway, this time I noticed a definite difference in the size of the beans. Compared to the beans from the bag I bought several months ago (right) the beans from the latest batch (left) are less than half the size. The ones in the last bag were smaller than the ones before as well. I don’t have earlier examples but from memory this brand used to have beans up to 2x or 3x the size of the ones in the last bag. So these latest are really tiny. They’re about the size of BBs! The taste is different too, and not in a good way. (Not just me.. there’s a known taste difference that correlates with bean size.) I might have to look for a new brand.

I wouldn't say stumbled. JPL was only about 7 miles away so it's basically a local business. They have internship and academic part-time programs too so that's one of the first places that everyone around here checks when they're looking for work, even if they're just looking for summer or part-time. Additionally I am and always have been a big space nerd* so I knew that Voyager was coming up on a big mission event that they'd have to staff up for. To not have at least checked to see if they had job openings would have been negligent. The job wasn't exactly rocket science either. When I say a trained monkey could have done it I'm not kidding. There was a set of 4 tape recorders next to a huge rack of reel-to-reel tapes and a stack of sequentially numbered pre-printed peel-and-stick labels. Data coming down would be written to the tapes at a peak rate of about 1 reel every 7 minutes. When one tape is filled the recorder it is mounted on beeps and the system automatically switches writing to the blank tape on the next recorder. The now-full tape automatically rewinds. At that point the monkey unloads the tape, slaps the next label on it, puts the labeled tape on the rack, takes down a blank tape from the rack, and puts the blank tape on the now empty recorder. Repeat this sequence for the 8-hour shift. If you need a bathroom break you have about 20 minutes before all the tapes on all 4 recorders finish writing. Every 10 tapes or so the monkey makes a pass over the heads and capstan of the recorder with an alcohol pad before mounting the new blank tape. 3 or 4 times a shift the librarian would come up to take away the written tapes, restock the rack with blank tapes, and add to the stack of pre-printed labels.. IIRC the pay was only about $5/hr, which was only a buck or so above federal minimum wage at the time. My workplace, ca. 1989. *My favorite game is Kerbal Space Program. 'nuff said.

Tech support for the Deep Space Network here. Really. NASA badge and everything. More precisely I'm in the data systems integration and test group for the TTC (Tracking, Telemetry, and Command) software used at the Jet Propulsion Lab to process telemetry from the various robotic spacecraft, landers & rovers exploring the solar system. After the developers are done developing and the testers tell us they're done with unit testing a new software release my group installs and configures it all in a flightlike manner on systems that parallel the actual realtime telemetry processing systems at JPL. We run it that way for a while and compare it with the data produced by the flight software, noting any discrepancies and testing out new features. When / if it checks out we also manage the upgrading of the flight systems and the transition to the new software. We're on-call basically 24/7 to troubleshoot any problems with the software and are usually scheduled to support critical events like launches, maneuvers, and landings. As for how I got here.. In between semesters at a community college I took a full-time, short term job changing reel-to-reel tapes at JPL for the Voyager Neptune encounter. (This was back in '87 so reel-to-reel was still a thing. along with punched cards, line printers, dumb terminals, etc. The Intel 486 processor and the Internet explosion were still a couple years in the future.) The job was work a trained money could do and was only supposed to be a few months. The encounter was a flyby event so after that the spacecraft would continue on to interplanetary (and eventually interstellar) space where nothing much happens. Once all the data from the encounter was transmitted to the ground the tape-changing would drop from one every 5 minutes to one every couple weeks. My job would end and I'd go back to school with a bit of tuition / book money in my pocket and several months of job experience at JPL on my resume. Eventually I planned to transfer from the CC to UC Irvine and complete a C&IS/EE degree there. But my boss liked my work & at the end of the Voyager job asked me if I'd be interested in a full-time job in realtime ops in the NOC there in the SFOF. Wasn't at all part of my original Plan but hey, NASA, so I took it. The pay was decent, I figured it would look good on the resume, it was good work experience, and if it didn't work out I could always go back to plan A. The next 40 years were a blur.

It's been a while but I watched the anime. Liked it, but not enough for a rewatch.