Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

I’m in the process of reading Malcom Gladwell’s book “Blink“. The sub-title is “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”. Anyone who knows me might claim that’s generally how I get by…(ha!) But in all seriousness, it’s an interesting read from the few chapters I’ve gotten through thus far. More »

I’ve long wanted a telescope. I always figured that what with where I live, the lack of starry nights here in Western PA, and my ignorance of the subject, I’d have to wait for some better time. A buddy of mine and I have been staring at the sky with binoculars for a while now and I just couldn’t wait any more. So…

I’m now the proud owner of a Celestron 8″ Newtonian. Now before anyone starts expounding on the merits of various types and sizes, remember that I wanted to get started fairly modestly, yet have some decent light-gathering ability. I think I’ve achieved that.

The simple fact: It’s just too cool. I love looking at Saturn, this being an excellent time of year to see it. Thus far, I’ve been able to make out striping on the surface, see ring reflections on the surface, and can see the Cassini division in the rings. I can also make out quite a number of its moons. Cool. Cool. Cool. Our own moon is really quite a sight at 200X. So much stuff there to see.

I’ve always been interested in planetery astronomy and have been keeping tabs on the Voyager project for years. Seeing what’s in our celestial neighborhood is fascinating. This summer, I’ll be looking into more deep-sky stuff. But for now, I’m having a blast (when the weather allows it) just looking at the nearby kinds of things.

Too cool.

I’ve gotten the basic installation of WordPress 2.0.1 done.  Things will continue to change, but I’m on my way in any case…

Wow.

Still, I have to say that I’m not terribly surprised, given that Borland has made similar bone-headed moves in the past (who can forget the more-innocuous-yet-still-stupid “Inprise” name change?). Having said that, perhaps their selling of the tool-sets will help those products. They’ve seemed to be faltering in their IDE focus in recent years, so perhaps things will improve under another owner. I sure hope so, since I’ve been a devotee’ of their various products for a lot o’ years.

I love C++ builder and was a Delphi user for a long time. And I can’t tell you how many different products I developed using Turbo Pascal… I truly, truly hope that this move doesn’t end up killing either Borland OR their IDE development tools. I kinda still have a soft spot for Philippe Khan…

I will be doing my best to update the site to the latest version of WordPress. It seemingly supports quite a number of enhancements, not least of which is better support for comment spam blocking. As my previous post mentioned, I’m receiving an inordinate number of posts from the stupid folks who love to bring you things like free poker, Russion porn, real-estate, and other such unwelcome crap. With any luck, the changes will begin to slow some of that. Time will tell.

So, if things appear goofed up for a bit, hang in there. I’ll get things running soon enough!

I’ve been getting so much comment spam lately that until I have the time and inclination, all comments will require moderation by me. I really hate to do it, but I need some better mechanisms for handling the load and I certainly don’t want crap appearing on posts that you all don’t want to see.

So for a bit anyhow, I’ll be weeding through the dross to find the good stuff. My apologies.