Eyepiece
Here’s the business end of one of the telescopes at the Chabot Science Center. Part of my famous Machinery series.
Fine weekend, as usual. It’s been cold, cold, cold – almost down to freezing at night and only in the 40’s during the day. Brrrr!!!
Anyway. Got a few things done. Didn’t get others done. Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve were here on Saturday, which was nice. Good visit. No news from Loyal Reader Number Three in the employment department – he’s still waiting for that letter.
Otherwise, all is well. We went to a church building in Tracy on Sunday evening to have a look at their first annual creche exhibit. An okay start, but they have a long way to go before they’re competitive with the big guys in Palo Alto. The good: there were some very nice creches there, they made an attempt to display them nicely, and they had a great bookmark, modeled closely after the one from Palo Alto. The bad: there aren’t enough creches to reach critical mass yet, the displays were lacking the supporting material to really make them classy, and there was no significant attempt to do lighting well, other than strings of Christmas lights artistically placed on the tables around the displays. The ugly: the proselyting-to-display ratio was way too high.
All in all, though, I think it was a good start. They need to grow fast, pay more attention to supporting details, and be sincere, and I think they’ll have a wonderful display in a few years.
Let’s see, did anything else happen on the weekend. Oh yeah, the really great news: the water rocket launcher is working! We tried it out with our flight-model bottle, and it stuck on the tube as badly as the one we tried at our recent campout. I swapped the o-ring with a smaller size, and that did the trick. We’re back in business. Of course, we destroyed our air pump at the campout, so we still have equipment problems. I used the compressor to pressurize it for our Saturday tests, but that’s a little bit of overkill and I fear it could damage something. So we need to either get a new bicycle pump or figure out how to limit the compressor’s pressure.
I’ll say one thing for the compressor – it sure pressurized that launcher fast.
I got all the websites but one transferred over to Godaddy on Saturday. The remaining one is written in Ruby on Rails, and it’s a more complicated transfer, what with multiple servers required to be running all at once. I think I’ll wait until Loyal Reader Number One (who is the author of the site) gets home later this week and solicit his input. We’ll get there.
Todays food attack news: A sandwich assault. Can you get any lower than that? Also today’s great Christmas idea: lousy gift wrapping. I need this. I’ll bet I could find a Loyal Reader or two who could do the work, though.
Time for home evening. See you tomorrow.