Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I took Lucinda to the JPL Open House today. We saw some exhibits about the history of the lab and space exploration. She liked the pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons, since we’ve seen them through our telescope.

The downside of it was that it was very hot and very crowded. Crowds are hard enough to deal with when you’re an adult. For a six-year-old, it’s even harder. Being less than four feet tall makes being in a crowd a trying experience. So we ended up not staying too long. Still, it was a fun time.

And one other funny thing we saw was a parking lot where not every space was marked ‘COMPACT’. What a novel thing…

Since I promised Lucinda I’d take her to the JPL Open House tomorrow, I can’t do the regular Sunday ride. So I went for a ride today.

I decided to do La Tuna Canyon with a little side trip from Sue Hough’s book Finding Fault in California.

I started out going across Altadena on Woodbury Road. Then that turned into Oak Grove. That section of Oak Grove is part of the old Foothill Freeway that was built back in the early ’50s. When the present freeway was built, it was demoted to a regular street.

For the last few months, I’ve been hearing geese flying over our house. Southern California is a desert, and there is usually no water for waterfowl to enjoy. But there is apparently a nice big lake backed up behind Devil’s Gate Dam now. So I think this probably accounts for the recent presence of waterfowl.

From there, I went up the hill, through La Cañada, and then down Hospital Hill into Montrose. Then I took Verdugo down into Glendale.

I took Glenoaks across Glendale and into Burbank. There, I saw a sign in front of Bubank High School. Their prom is tonight, and it’s being held at the Skirball Museum. I think that sounds like a great place for a prom. If my high school had had its prom at a place like that, I might have even gone.

The north part of Burbank is a bit more industrial. It’s under the flight path for Burbank Airport. But I like watching airplanes, so it was all right.

Continuing on up Glenoaks, I crossed the border from Burbank into Sun Valley. At this point, the area started to look distinctly more downscale. It became an industrial area with lots of auto wrecking yards and used car lots with big signs promising “CREDITO FACIL”. The low point was probably passing the landfill. They had a big pipe stuck in the ground with gas flaring off of it. It was giving off a very strange smell. Not really the smell of putrefaction, but not a pleasant odor by any means.

Finally, I got up to San Fernando and the McDonald’s at 1955 Glenoaks. There is a small fault scarp caused by surface rupture in the 1971 San Fernando Earthquake. They just landscaped the scarp and made it look pretty.

Next, I headed back down Glenoaks, back the way I came. San Fernando really had the feeling of having taken a wrong turn and ended up in Mexico. There were lots of street vendors with carts selling pieces of fruit and grilled corn and such. That was also where I saw one of the “Los Angeles, CAMexico” billboards that people have been getting all riled up about. It was kind of strange. But that’s part of what I love about L.A. I can be a world traveler without going far from home.

At one point in Sun Valley, I happened on a street lunatic. He was standing on a corner yelling at nobody in particular. The light was red, so I pulled up and stopped. He looked at me and said, “Hello, sir” in a very pleasant voice. I smiled and said hello back. Then he turned back to facing nobody in particular and started screaming, “L.A. LAW!!! I’M A LAWYER!!!” Then the light turned green and I left. Have I mentioned lately that I love living in L.A.?

Also, I happened to notice KAOS Auto Parts. I had to stop for a picture, even though Siegfried wasn’t there. Agent 13 was probably hidden in the mailbox in front of the building.

After all this fun and frolic, it was time for the trip over La Tuna Canyon. This is a nice four-mile uphill ride through a part of Los Angeles that feels more like rural Nevada. Near the top, I passed a few other bike riders. I said something like, “Ain’t we got fun?” and they just laughed. It was also about here that I ran out of water. It was hot, so this was a problem.

Cresting the hill in La Tuna Canyon, I went down Honolulu Ave into La Crescenta. That was where I saw a sign for “Lauren’s Party” at a park entrance. I thought, “if they are having a kid’s party in this park, they must have a drinking fountain.” So I stopped and refilled my water bottle. Now all was right again for the rest of the trip home.

I went back up Hospital Hill and down past Descanso Gardens and back into Pasadena. It was a very nice ride.

53 miles.
cycling

It’s a warm and still night here in Pasadena, so I got out my telescope. Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon are all up in the early evening right now. So Lucinda and I went outside and set up the telescope.

We had a look at Jupiter first. The air is very still tonight, so even though it’s a bit hazy, the seeing was quite good. I was able to run 200x and still get a good image. I was able to see the Great Red Spot, which crossed the meridian at 8:03 PDT.

Saturn was nice, too. It’s not completely dark, so I was only able to see three of its moons. But it’s still fun to look at.

The moon is a crescent, which allows for lots of nice shadows from the mountains and craters.

So, in the interest of making an experiment, I got my camera out. I don’t have a fancy camera, or even a way to actually attach it to the telescope. I just used some packing tape and taped it to the eyepiece. Then I set it on no-flash-night-mode and a 10-second timer. And here are the results. You can’t see the cloud bands or Red Spot on Jupiter, but you can see the four Galilean satellites. You can’t see any of Saturn’s moons. But the craters on the Moon came out pretty well.

Lucinda lost her second tooth tonight. She’s now lost both of the first two teeth she got back when she was 5 months old. She’s really quite pleased with all of this, and she’s been on the phone to Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Larry and so on to tell everyone about it.

I discovered today that some guy on Myspace was hotlinking one of my photos as the background for his page. That is pretty seriously lame. I’m kind of annoyed by hotlinking images, but I think it’s all right if you’re linking the picture to post it to a blog for discussion or some such. But to link it as the background to your page? Like my web server is a utility or something? So I added myspace.com to my blocked referrers list.

I mean really… If he wrote to me and asked if he could use the picture, I’d say sure, just make a copy of it. If he just made a copy of it without telling me, I’d probably never even know. But to just hotlink it? So he can use my bandwidth and server capacity that I pay for?

http://www.400monkeys.com/God

Of course, I have to put in another plug for Julia Sweeney’s show “Letting Go of God”. We’ve seen it twice, and it’s great fun.

Today’s bike ride was Gene’s ‘Horizontal Bomp’ ride. Mostly flat, with just a few little hills.

We started out east through Arcadia and into Monrovia. Then we turned south and went down to Temple City. From there, we went west back across San Gabriel and San Marino and then up Los Robles back into Pasadena.

We stopped for a snack at Il Fornaio in Old Town. I had a mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwich, which is my favorite thing there. While I was eating my sandwich and Steve was drinking his coffee, everyone else was working on Spencer’s bike. He just got a new bike, and he wanted to raise the handlebars up a bit. So of course, everyone had to get in the act.

After that, we went west a bit more, down into the arroyo. We passed Idealab. I’m always a bit surprised to see that it’s still there. We crossed under the famous Colorado Street Bridge and down past the Rose Bowl. They were having the swap meet there today, and there was a sign pointing the way to the valet parking. Now maybe it’s just me, but ‘swap meet’ and ‘valet parking’ are two phrases that, unlike a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, just don’t go together.

Anyway, from there, we went up the hill out of the arroyo, up to Windsor Road. There, we passed the house with the plastic cows in the yard. Then we continued on up the hill all the way to Loma Alta. We took Loma Alta up to the top of the hill on Lake Ave, and then we took some of the side streets across Altadena. We passed a classic example of a debris basin at the mouth of Rubio Canyon. We also had a look at the big landslide on the Mt. Wilson toll road. It appears that people have made a little foot trail across it now, but aside from that, there hasn’t been any substantial work done on clearing it yet.

We then headed down the hill on Altadena Drive back to the park. It was still pretty early, so I noodled around Pasadena a bit just to get in a few more miles. That was where I passed the corner of Summit and Mountain. Then I finished up by taking Mountain back across town.

50 miles.
cycling

This isn’t really of great interest to most people, but I wanted to write it down just so I would remember, and also just in case it might help someone else in the future.

I just did a major version upgrade of FreeBSD on my home machine. And the printer no longer worked. It’s an old Laserwriter on the parallel port, and when I tried to print to it, the jobs just stuck in the queue and the printer blinked like it was getting data, but nothing ever came out. I also noticed the following message in the system log:

May 3 22:47:43 moe kernel: Interrupt storm detected on “irq7: lpt0”; throttling interrupt source

I did some searching in with the Great Oracle (a.k.a. Google) and found this:

http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=93e0c4fc7f1cb345f9a52787035dd76c&threadid=12015&goto=nextoldest

This contained the answer. I had to edit /boot/device.hints and insert this line:

hint.ppc.0.flags=”0x20″

And voilá! Now it works.

Chuck is trying to start a new meme:

Go to Google. Paste whatever’s on your clipboard right now into the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Report your result — IN YOUR OWN BLOG.

Well, you gotta be explicit in these things. Memes are like religion. They don’t spread themselves. Somebody’s gotta stand on a soap box and shout about it.

Apropos of nothing, this reminds me of my old friend Stu’s joke about religion:

“Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I think religion is more like cocaine. It makes people paranoid, it makes them crazy, and it makes them give all their money to sleazy characters.”

Anyway, so here are my results:

I got:

Your search – mailparams where pid=274; – did not match any documents.

The only thing that made it funny is that there was a text ad on the side of the page that said:

Sponsored Links
Learn PID Control
Self-Help Training Manuals
Help You Master PID Control
SimpleSolvers.com

I’m curious just what ‘PID Control’ is.

I was looking at my site statistics, and I saw some referrals in the logs from a livejournal site that I didn’t recognize. She had hotlinked one of the images in my photo gallery. I’m on record as being annoyed by hotlinking, but I’ve not found a fully-reliable way to prevent it, so I just let it go. She also had this ‘Are you a Republican‘ quiz linked there. With a score of 86%, I’m guessing that this is someone I wouldn’t get along with.

Anyway, I scored only 6% on their scale. So my soul is safe. But the little cut-and-paste code to display the badge and link back to their site was broken. And I’m not going to spend my time debugging somebody else’s silly blog toy.