This site will look better in a browser that supports Web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Archive of August, 2008

1993
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
Su	M	Tu	W	Th	F	Sa
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31
September
October
November
December
2009
2010
2011
2012

The Bermuda Apartment

August 27, 2008:

In the last month or so I've bought two edible Nylabones for my dog to gnaw on. Each has utterly vanished within 72 hours of purchase. She's not taking them outside and depositing them; I'd notice if she did that and make her drop it. She's not eating them; they're far too sturdy to go out like that. But every time I don't notice them for a few hours they just go poof. All I can think of is that the Nylabone people are teleporting them back to the factory, repacking and reselling them.

Thinking Long-Term

August 25, 2008:

The New Horizons probe was launched toward mostly-planet-like-thingy Pluto in January of 2006, and got a nice warm-up when it hit up Jupiter for a gravity-powered boost in February of 2007. Since then I've been reminding myself to say something when it finally got to Saturn.

Then I forgot to check for... about five months, and it crossed Saturn's orbit (Saturn was nowhere nearby) on June 8th. That puts it just under 11 AU from the sun and more than 20 AU away from Pluto.

After getting to Jupiter in 13 months, Saturn's orbit was another 16 months. Its next orbital crossing, Uranus, won't be until March 18, 2011 -- two years and nine months after Saturn. From there it will cross Neptune's orbit some time in 2014 before arriving at Pluto in 2015, nine and a half years after its launch.

Given that no probes have been sent specifically to Uranus and Neptune, and that the RTGs on the Pioneer spacecraft are dead, the only functional spacecraft farther away are the two Voyagers. (Voyager I is now just under two thirds of a light-day, 0.61 ldy or 107.306 AU, from the sun now, having been launched in September of 1977.) New Horizons is the fastest thing we've ever launched, traveling at 18 km/s relative to the sun.

But still -- it's a decade from launch to primary mission. Just like with Voyager, I'm pretty sure JPL hired people fresh out of college, just to make sure they'd still be in the industry when it came time to wake the probe up and put it to work.

And I had an "oh wow" moment when I realized that barring anything really bad I'll make it to four years at one job come next spring.

Links:
· New Horizons home page
· New Horizons current location
· Objects Escaping the Solar System at Heavens Above

Smart and Stupid, All At Once

August 22, 2008:

Due to a slightly lower interest rate, I switched to using my Discover card earlier this year, right before Katsucon in February. Except for a couple instances at the con of people not taking the card I did well for several months, and not too long after Katsucon I took the Visa card out of the quick-access part of my wallet.

Until I went to Otakon and ran into two more restaurants that don't take Discover. I apologized to my friends as they covered those meals (I paid them back later of course) and muttered a few non-complimentary things under my breath about the restaurant industry in the Charm City.

Then I flipped open the other part of my wallet the other day to swap in my newest Smithsonian membership card. And right there behind my driver's license was... the damn Visa card! Apparently, back in February I had a moment of brilliance -- brilliant in this case being "slightly below average intelligence" -- and stashed the Visa away just in case the Discover didn't work somewhere.

Followed immediately by my forgetting that I'd done so.

But the story does have an upside: Not one hour after relating this story to a friend of mine, I offered to cover the check at a sushi place. The nice lady behind the counter told me they don't take Discover, and I casually whipped out the Visa and paid. Of course, I'll probably forget all about this in a week or two, so if you see me whining and complaining in a little while about such-and-such place not taking Discover, be sure to point my dumb ass right back here.

Dammit.

August 18, 2008:

I was hoping that my work pants were fitting a bit tightly because I fail at laundry. Unfortunately I'm doing that just fine and they're snug because I'm back up to 195 pounds. Guess it's time to start the diet again for real this time. And maybe even exercise, though I'm not sure how the dog is going to react when I get down on the floor and start doing sit-ups.

Things My Brain Thinks of to Avoid Working

August 15, 2008:

I want to find a way to make my car's odometer display in hex, just to mess with people. (Current mileage: 0x3E82. And the time is now 0E:06 on 7D8-8-0E.)

Confirmation Bias of Sort

August 08, 2008:

I'm not sure what the concept is called, but basically I'm talking about the fact that when you shovel something new into your brain you start seeing it more often because it stands out now. I never noticed how many Hondas (and now VWs) were on the road until I bought my own. Now whenever I see a black VW with a satellite antenna I check the license plate to make sure my car hasn't been stolen. (So far, so good.)

And now that I've had to dip my toe into the world of character encoding I see that more frequently too. Well, actually, I see it less frequently but it stands out more because when I do see it I know why it's there.

Ever see a blog entry, or even an online article, with this mishmash in it: â€” ? That's a long dash (—) with two errors in it. First off, it got sent into the content management system as UTF-8 but interpreted as characters. Then when it got spit out, the final character was interpreted as a curly-quote instead of a non-printing character because the browser assumes you're looking at a page made on Windows.

â is character 0xE2
€ is 0x80
” is really 0x201D but in Windows it shows up as 0x94

Convert those into binary and you get 0b11100010.10000000.10010100 -- a UTF-8 three-byte character. Strip out the markers and you're left with xxxx0010.xx000000.xx010100 which reogranizes into 0b00100000.00010100. In hex that's 0x2014, in decimal it's 8212, the code for a long dash.

Curly quotes, when typed correctly, can get misinterpreted as well, they show up as â€? (the question mark is part of the wrongly-encoded character and may show up as an empty box instead).

I'm just moderately amused that one character that itself gets done wrong from time to time manages to show up in another character done wrong thanks to using the wrong character set. I wonder if a character ever shows up in its own UTF-8 encoding. Could set up a neat little infinite loop there...

I Think I Need To Return a Merit Badge or Something

August 06, 2008:

From Facebook:

Jason broke a couple of knife-safety rules this morning. Ow.

In order to keep my dog from barking too much, even though my note-leaving neighbor has turned out to be an insufferable douchebag, I leave her with a treat when I go to work: Cow ears that she can gnaw on for about half an hour.

Well, Monday I grabbed a giant ear. I think that someone must've been cross-breeding cows with elephants or something. Not wanting to leave my dog with the canine equivalent of a dozen Snickers bars, but with even less nutritional value, I decided to cut the thing in half.

The two rules I broke were: Not cutting away from my body, and not securing the thing I was cutting. The knife bound like a saw (dried animal ears are tough) then skipped out and I jabbed myself in the webbing between my left thumb and index finger. The cut's about an eighth of an inch long, and probably only that deep, but damn it hurt.

Sentences you don't usually hear yourself say: "That's weird; it's not bleeding." ... "Oh, OK. There it goes."

So yeah, two knife-safety rules. And: Ow.