efaardvark

The last two weeks have been utterly crazy - kind of like the rest of the year so far - but this weekend I am facing the prospect of time off without looming deadlines ahead.  Something of a relief for a change.

Mom's been bingeing ST:TNG.  I've been playing, "I can name that episode in <x> lines".  

Being in a rush resulted in a dinner of oatmeal and a can of soda.  Not a good combination.  PSA.

Triple-digit temps, mom in hospital, ants in kitchen, power outages...  fairly disastrous weekend, all things considered.

At least we're not on fire.

Old enough to remember.   

Discworld coming to TV!  Awesome!
 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/28/terry-pratchett-novels-faithful-tv-adaptation-discworld

Cool liftoff (and booster landing) through the morning fog at Vandenburg for SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch this morning.
 

Going to be a long "day" Friday night.  They've got me down to work from 9:45PM Friday to 11:45AM Saturday (local) for the LUCY launch.  Why are these things always o-dark hundred, or the weekend?

Gotta like the Major...

So you thought photoshoping was messing with people's heads?  Take a look at what NeRFs can do...
 

I might actually get to work from home next week... finally!

Watch, next week they announce the vaccine.   

Just found out that Trigun is now on Crunchy! 

I may have to binge it sometime in the near future.   

Up way past my bedtime on-call for the (successful!) Chandrayaan-3 launch.

Got sucked into an old book, The Legacy of Heorot. 

Dusting can be so .. unproductive. 

They delivered the two new widescreen HD monitors and stacked them outside my office, but they didn't deliver the computer they're supposed to be attached to. That's just cruel.  

Been sick since last Wednesday.  Not covid according to tests but not fun either.  Recovering now but still pretty tired and last night's / this morning's level 1 event at work - supported remotely - didn't help.  Feel like I need to sleep for a week.

Ack thtbbft!

Just found out that Tonikaku Kawaii is going to be made into an anime by Kenjirō Hata, the same person who did Hayate no Gotoku.  AND it will be on crunchy in October.  Might be a bit diabetes-inducing, but I'm going to put it on my list anyway. 

Well, Beresheet went splat (crunch? <insert sound of lithobreaking spacecraft here>), but we still have the Falcon Heavy launch/landings to look forward to.

Totally me..

"New Horizons performed as planned today, conducting the farthest exploration of any world in history — 4 billion miles from the Sun," said Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "The data we have look fantastic and we're already learning about Ultima from up close. From here out the data will just get better and better!"

It is going to take a while to play all the data collected during the flyby down to Earth however.  Ultima Thule is as far from Pluto as Saturn is from Earth, and the data rates possible from that far away are in the low kilobits per second.  The many gigabits of data that were recorded on the spacecraft during it's flyby are going to take 20 months - nearly 2 years! - to all be pulled down.  The first low-res pictures are already coming down, with more (and higher-res) scheduled to finish downloading on January 2nd and over the next few weeks and months.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190101

Passed 1000 work units folded in Folding@Home.  Actually passed the milestone a little while back but I didn't notice until now since it just does its thing in the background. 

Next goal/milestone looks like maybe a score of 10 million points.  No idea what a "point" means in F@H terms but that's a lot of zeros so it's gotta mean something, right?    Currently at 8.6M so only 1.4M to go.  My "old" Ryzen 7 2700X can clear about 150k/day if I let it off the leash (and no GPU support from my RX480 unfortunately) so in theory that's only about 10 days.  If I actually use my computer for anything or if I have to throttle it back due to warmer weather then it'll be less.  Practically speaking it'll probably be more like a month.

Part of my cousin's thanksgiving decorations...

Contemplating an upgrade/refurbishment of the solar-powered lighting on the "back forty".  (This is Los Angeles so that's in square centimeters.)  There's no AC run out there so a number of years ago I installed a solar panel, battery, charge controller, and motion-controlled LED lighting system.  It has been working pretty well, but it is showing its age.  The battery is/was lead-acid (basically a motorcycle battery) and needs replacing and the LEDs were pretty dim from the get-go.  That's what was available at the time so I'm not complaining, but these days it could be done better.  I can reuse the panel and (maybe) charge controller, but I'm thinking a new, custom-built LiFePo battery (built out of 18650s or 26650s) and some modern, bright LEDs are definitely in order.  Maybe even some RGB lighting if I want to get fancy.