Primordial Ooze

From Astronomy.com:

An occultation of the Pleiades star cluster (M45) by the Moon will occur during the evening of 2006 APR 01 (Saturday) and will be a nighttime event across the eastern half of North America and northwestern South America.

Since the crescent Moon’s apparent disk will be only 17% illuminated, this will make for a better photographic event than its immediate predecessors in this series. Additionally, the fact that the Moon will be waxing will enhance the ability to observe immersions (disappearances) of individual stars. This should be the finest opportunity for observers in eastern North America during the entire 2005-10 Pleiades occultation series.

The Pleiades are a beautiful cluster of stars that a lot of people think is  the little dipper, since it looks a little bit like it. However, the Pleiades are 2–3 times as long as the moon and not nearly the size of the actual Little Dipper in the sky.

This should be an awesome site, especially if you have some binoculars. Someone in my astronomy club offered up this star occultation for New York (times are in EST):

                        Disappears          Reappears
25 Alcyone          7:54 p.m.             8:55 p.m.
27 Atlas              8:40 p.m.             9:31 p.m.
17 Electra           6:44 p.m.             7:45 p.m.
20 Maia                      No occultation
23 Merope          7:24 p.m.              8:19 p.m.
19 Taygeta                  No occultation
28 Pleione           8:39 p.m.              9:36 p.m.

Watch for it tomorrow night!

Technorati Tags: astronomy, science, space

By Nick at 11:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

el eclipse anular por los suelos
Originally uploaded by TitusGroan.

By Nick at 8:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More information on this morning’s eclipse and an archived webcast of the event can be found on spaceweather.com.

Technorati tags: eclipse, space, astronomy, science

By Nick at 7:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Tomorrow, there will be a total solar eclipse. Various blogs report on it but here is a richly detailed description of the event:

On Wednesday, 29th March 2006, the shadow of the Moon will sweep a band starting from Brazil, through Atlantic Ocean, Gold Coast of Africa, Saharan Desert, Mediterranean Sea, Turkey, Black Sea, Georgia, Russian Federation, northern shores of Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan; ending in Mongolia. The duration of totality will be less than 2 minutes near the sunrise and sunset limits, but will be as long as 4 minutes and 7 seconds in Libya, at the moment of greatest eclipse. The path of totality will be 180 kilometers wide at that moment.

NASA has an amazingly detailed graphic:

I simulated the eclipse, as experienced by an observer at these coordinates, using Starry Night astronomy software:

35 17.0N  029 20.2E
At precisely 10:52 Universal Time.

Notice the Iridium 31 satellite that passes by? I wonder if observers will notice that? I wasn’t completely happy with the simulation, by  the way. The moon never passes over the sun. Instead, there is some kind of instantaneous shutter effect instead. Watch it and let me know what you think.

A guy from our local astronomy club, just last week, decided to book a flight to Turkey and head off to the totality. His wife was like, “Just go!” as he hemmed and hawed about the opportunity. He wrote an e-mail today saying he had arrived in Turkey and was with many other eclipse enthusiasts. I hope the weather holds out for them.

Clear skies.

Technorati tags: eclipse, astronomy, science

By Nick at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey, I want to make something clear. I am not obsessing about our new pet, Cricket the Bearded Dragon (Photoset, Slideshow, RSS 2.0, Atom). I simply have something new to say about the cute little bugger.

Today we fed him grubs! Supposedly they are rich in healthy fats and protein and they are rumored to keep in the refrigerator for about a week. They hibernate, in theory. We started off with 5 in a little plastic container and two days later one of the five turned brown. I can only assume he’ll never make it into Cricket’s mouth.

The others were good sports. When they warmed up they started moving around in a little dance which Cricket took immediate note of. Gulp. No more grubs.

They look pretty disgusting, almost like maggots except maggots are way more disgusting. I know that you want to click that link. Go ahead. Here they are:

Here is a nice action shot of Cricket about to pounce on one of the pudgy buggers:

By the way, if you want to see some awesome-looking bearded dragons, check out this guy's site.

By Nick at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been growing more interested in making sure that my posts are making their way into the blogosphere the way they should. Perhaps I’ll get some more traffic if I at least ping the right sites and weave the right metadata into my posts.

I went to technorati and looked up how the categories in my posts get associated with their tags. The element I was missing was a “rel” attribute with value “tag” on the anchor “a” element for my categories.

If you look at the bottom of one of my posts, you’ll see a list of categories the post was made to, like so:

The old Movable Type macro code to generate this looked like so:

<span class="post-footers">Posted to <MTEntryCategories glue=", ">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
</MTEntryCategories> by <$MTEntryAuthorDisplayName$> at <$MTEntryDate format="%X"$></span>

I merely changed this to:

<span class="post-footers">Posted to <MTEntryCategories glue=", ">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" rel=”tag”><$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
</MTEntryCategories> by <$MTEntryAuthorDisplayName$> at <$MTEntryDate format="%X"$></span>

This should do the trick. This very post should properly post these tags to technorati. We’ll see.

By Nick at 11:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Cricket

I thought that I would update you on how Cricket, our Bearded Dragon, was doing.

We went to the pet store this weekend to get Cricket his favorite meal, live crickets. These crickets are very small, about as long as the diameter of a penny. Cricket (with a capital “C”) will eat 12–24 of these in a sitting. As I was waiting for the crickets, I noticed that the 2 bearded dragons that were caged with Cricket when we first bought him had grown much larger than our own beloved lizard. Evidently we must not be feeding him properly! The pet-store dudes said we needed to feed him vegetables and not just crickets. Oops. Plus, the more crickets we feed him the bigger he’ll get.

So, we fed Cricket 36 crickets that afternoon and he stopped binging after eating about 20. The remaining dozen ran around for the rest of the night. When we checked on things in the morning, some of the crickets were missing and some died. After all, I didn’t put cricket-food in the cage.

I’m also cutting up romaine lettuce every day. I hope he’s getitng a balanced diet but it’s so hard to tell. I guess I’ll just keep visiting the pet store and see how his larger friends are doing. Maybe, just maybe, Cricket will one-day catch up to them.

The Python

On a side note, one time I was at the pet store and my son was anxious to take a look at one of the baby pythons they usually have stored in one of the cages. Well, he was missing from he cage and we wondered where he’d gone off to.

One of the pet-store teenagers, we’ll call him Gary, was standing in front of the cage attending a paper bag. I asked where the python was and he said that he was in the bag, eating. I asked if my son could see the python and Gary replied again that he was eating.

Slowly, I realized why he was being so “cautious.”

I turned to my son, all excited, “Giovanni, he’s eating a rat right NOW!”

Gary saw that my son and I were not bothered by the prospect of seeing a snake swallow live prey so he opened the bag. Boy was that cool.

By Nick at 11:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I mentioned on Friday that I was “so excited I can barely type” to go to a Belgian Beer tasting at the Chelsea Art Museum.

Well, I went and it was superb!

I’d have some pictures for you, but my blasted phone decided to reset again today and the pictures were held in what I affectionately call Ether-RAM. One power glitch and your data goes into the ether. I thought I had a handle on making sure the phone was always charged but I suppose I failed. Maybe the beer had something to do with it, nah.

I diverge.

So, the beer tasting as a three floor event. There were multiple rooms in the museum where you could not only appreciate the art, but you could appreciate the various beers being served at the many “stations” sprinkled throughout the museum.

The variety of beers were many in number. I did my best to try them all but I could only sample so many. Here are some of the beers I tried:

• Duvel
• Brewery Ommegang: Hennepin (I’m familiar with all of these)
• Maredsous 10
• De Layerth – Urthel: Urthel Hop-It (my favorite)
• D&V International: Grand Cru
• Unibrou: Trois Pistoles
• and others from the Brooklyn Brewery, the Southampton Publick House, among others.

I must admit I started to lose track after a while. The Urthel Hop-It was certainly my favorite. It reminded me of an IPA, which I’m currently fond of.

The food too was great. They had some amazing little meatballs that reminded me of Swedish meatballs but these were larger and rumored to be soaking in… beer. Mmmm. Also, there was some amazing pulled pork served with cole-slaw and sandwiched in some tasty whole-grain bread.

Later, they served assortments of chocolate ranging from pure dark to milky caramel-filled wonders.

I wish I had some actual photos, but all I have are these scans. Enjoy!

By Nick at 4:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Tonight, The Ale Street News is hosting The Ultimate Belgian Tasting at the Chelsea Art Museum here in new York City.

An amazing array of World-Class Belgium Beers will be presented in a format which will appeal to the finest palates. The novice will learn and the expert will rejoice! The tasting will be held in the Chelsea Art Museum - Home of the Miotte Foundation, in New York City. Our guests will be surrounded by and welcome to tour a fabulous Belgian Art exhibit throughout the museum being conducted on the same evening. Brewers from Belgium will be in attendance as well for you to meet and speak with. Make your plans now to attend this memorable and wonderful event.

I’m so excited I can barely type.

By Nick at 11:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Emily Robbins over at How to Blog has had a frustrating experience with TypePad:

I have been having some seriously frustrating conversations with the tech support people over at Six Apart. I’m hoping that they will eventually do right by me, but as it stands right now I’m ready to pull my hair out.

TypePad currently does not support 301 permanent redirects, or any modifications at all to the .htaccess file.

This prevents visitors who have bookmarked your site from knowing that it has been moved to a new location, unless you manually update each and every post to provide the link for the current URL (which is what I have been doing).

As she states, you really should try and get your own domain name before you start blogging. Furthermore, it goes to prove how lesser companies use FUD to keep you planted instead of constantly innovating and providing more exciting features and services.

I found her blog as I searched for good comparisons between Movable Type and Wordpress. There are a bunch of very dated comparisons out there but nothing that is proving very useful to me. I’m a fairly experienced Movable Type user but I’m considering Wordpress for a new blog I’m starting mainly because my web hosting company can install and update it by default.

The major value-add for this support is the ability to respond to security threats. As Emily mentioned in her post, a recent threat was found in Wordpress 2.0.1 resulting in 2.0.2. My webhost already has a simple link allowing me to update the blog. If the feature-sets were comparable, that single advantage would push me over the edge.

I’ve collected a lot of useful comparison info so I might go and write up my own shootout.

By Nick at 5:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This weekend I competed in my first Tae Kwon Do tournament, the 2nd Annual Hong-Ik Tae Kwon Do Championship.

This is a local tournament held at Queens College in the Fitzgerald Gym. It was expected to draw about 800 competitors from ages 5 to 50 (or more). I don’t know what the final head-count was.

The way these things work is they divide the competitors into various divisions. The attributes defining each division is basically as follows:

Sex, Age, Belt, Weight

Age is more of a factor when the kids are young and weight when they get older. I’m not still exactly sure how that works. The competitors are also divided into belt categories. These are usually colored, bodan, and black belt. “Bodan” is “almost-black” and the talent pool is not quite as competitive as the black belt division.

The tournament allows you to compete in three events: form, board-breaking, and sparring. Sparring has many rules associated with it but the most important one is no punching to the face. Tae Kwon Do is almost entirely kicks. Face contact is not allows for colored belts but allowed for the black-belt divisions.

I competed in all three events. I competed as a black belt and there were only a half-dozen competitors in my age bracket. It’s hard for guys my age to make it out and train, let alone compete. They usually have families and other interests that soak up their time. Somehow, I keep making the time to train but from what I’m told, I can never expect a great many competitors at these local tournaments.

I won silver in form and gold in breaking.

When it came time to spar, I had a single competitor in my weight-division. I’m about 5 ft. 5 in. and weight about 175lbs. This is definitely on the heavy side. My competitor probably weighed the same but he was an even 6 ft. in height. I won that match without too much trouble. He was kind of slow and I started to get plenty tired as I took advantage of every opening. I think the final score was 12–1 but it’s all a blur.

My second match was against a pretty big guy. You can see him in this picture, he’s the big one in the center (the guy on the left is from my school). The guy I fought had about a lot of weight and height on me but since there was no one in his division, they had me fight him. I was told this was a friendly match, meaning a loss would not count against my win in my own division.

What the hell.

After watching the video, I could plainly see that we were pretty evenly matched. However, I was certainly intimidated and when he back-kicked me in the face (by accident), I lost my will to fight so I bailed on the rest of the fight. Afterwards, once I realized my face wasn’t really pulverized like I thought, I regretted giving him the match. It was my first competition so I’ll check that up to experience.

I still got a gold medal, which felt pretty good. I can’t wait to do this again, hopefully 30lbs lighter!

You can see all of the pictures in my Flickr photo set or slideshow.

By Nick at 10:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Learn how to design the trendy futuristic looking buttons as seen on Mac's! These buttons are great for website layouts, and many other kinds of graphics. This is an adobe photoshop tutorial.

By Nick at 11:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For I hath angered them…

By Nick at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past 6 or so months, I’ve made it a personal goal to start reading more. I’m not just talking about technical books such as Foundations of Ajax,  The Zen of CSS Design, and Working with Visual Studio Team System (no more than a big marketing piece). I’m talking about self-help and nonfiction books like Winning, de Bono’s Thinking Course, and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I have a few books on my to-do list which I hope to read as I keep the momentum. That reading list roughly includes First Things First, The Tipping Point, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (which I should have read a long time ago), Crossing the Chasm, Getting Things Done, Rules for Revolutionaries, and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

That last book, Guns, Germs, and Steel has been talked about by my friends a lot. As such the name Jared Diamond has been floating around in my head. As I browsed the links tagged by some of my friends via del.icio.us (what? you’re still not using del.icio.us?!), I came across a recent talk by Jared Diamond entitled How to Get Rich over at Edge.

Whoa, three paragraphs and I’m just now getting to the title of this post.

In this talk, Mr. Diamond uses the lessons of history to describe why some groups of humans succeed and why some fail. The primary point was rather simple and I think everyone can agree is more or less common sense. That groups of humans succeed when they face competitive forces and that they are not isolated from their competitors. At least, that’s what I got out of it. The best part of the talk, though, is not so much the lesson but the journey in getting there. As you read  the talk, you learn about the German beer industry, Japanese food processing, how Japan had acquired gun technology and how the samurai, fearing the great equalizer of the thunder stick, restricted the use of guns over time until firearms became extinct by the time Commodore Perry came to Japan in the 1840’s. This is a great quote

What happened was that the Samurai, the warrior class in Japan, had been used to fighting by standing up in front of their armies and making a graceful speech, the other opposing Samurai made an answering graceful speech, and then they had one-on-one combat. The Samurai discovered that the peasants with their guns would shoot the Samurai while the Samurai were making their graceful speeches (Link).

How funny is that?

By Nick at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Nick at 9:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don’t normally make draft posts, but I’m doing it because I always thought BlogJet couldn’t do it. I recently wasted an hour of my life testing w.bloggar (don’t waste your time) and when I finally saw the post, all of my newlines were lost. I can probably tweak the blog to fix that but why bother?

UPDATE: BlogJet posts as draft just fine.

By Nick at 1:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On March 6th, the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) tipped south, opening a crack in Earth's magnetosphere. Solar wind flowed in and bright auroras appeared over Scandinavia.

I should have posted this last week. You can check out more pictures at the spaceweather.com website. Here are a few nice ones. I swear if I saw this in the sky I would run away like a little girl.

By Nick at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Geekdom is not limited to technology enthusiasts and D&D players.

By Nick at 5:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Cricket, the newest member of our family:

and this is his food:

Cricket is a Bearded Dragon. We got him last week but I waited this long to mention it because I didn’t know if he’d last the week in our crazy house. We’ve been feeding him a soy supplement all week but today we treated him to live crickets. The little guys didn’t stand a chance. Cricket ate them all up in about 60 seconds. Cricket is an omnivore, so we expect to feed him lots of leafy vegetables, too.

I took the pictures you see here with my Sony DSC-R1 camera with a special adapter lense which makes focusing on small/close objects easier. I didn’t do more than point the camera and shoot after that. Flickr has all of the EXIF details if you are interested. I have a lot to learn about macrophotography so please excuse the faults in these images.

By Nick at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Here is another interesting graphic that represents the feed readership from when I first started using FeedBurner until now:

It looks like I’ve been using FeedBurner for a little over a year. I don’t know what I’d do without these stats. Actually, I don’t really to anything with them but amuse myself so I suppose I don’t really need them at all.

By Nick at 2:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I made some minor changes to the CSS on the site, not that any of you actually visit the site. I’m using Blue Crush by Lilia Ahner (Six Apart). However, there were some things about the theme that I didn’t care for. For one, there was a gap between the module headers and the left edge of the beta element. I closed this gap. I also got rid of the asterisk.

I couldn’t have done this editing without the Web Developer plugin for Firefox. This plugin gives me a lot of options for CSS styling, manipulating images, checking browser compatibility, and a whole lot more.

(click to enlarge)

If you were curious as to how people get here, here is my latest readership breakdown as a pie chart:

Here is a breakout of the actual feed readers used:

Finally, what kind of web browser are you using?

By Nick at 2:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You may have noticed an explosition in feed entries. Sorry about that. No, I haven’t edited previous entries with BLOCKQUOTE. It is really unfortunate that every time I fiddle with my feedburner settings, every entry in the feed is detected as “new” by my aggregator. Chances are your aggregator behaves the same way.

Instead of re-reading all of my posts, which I know you’re dying to do, why don’t you add yourself to my frappr map if you haven’t already?

By Nick at 1:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Don’t ask me why I just figured this out now.

There are areas of the HTML spec that I simply haven’t covered yet. I’m not a “web” developer so I guess this is to be expected. Discovery is a daily exercise for me. However, I do like to respect standards and I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on CSS and standards-based web design. A few months ago I read The Zen of CSS Design Visual Enlightenmenet for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag.

One of these areas of recent enlightenment is the HTML tag BLOCKQUOTE. BLOCKQUOTE is meant to be used to cite someone else’s words or to otherwise reproduce text found elsewhere. You can even add a CITE attribute with a URI to the originating source of the information. Most default browser implementations style a BLOCKQUOTE as an indentation, but this is not a guarantee. A CSS designer is free to make BLOCKQUOTE do whatever they want. Perhaps the text is instead italicized. A lot of people use BLOCKQUOTE simply for it’s indentation capabilities and are thus misusing the element.

However, as some authors have used BLOCKQUOTE merely as a mechanism to indent text, in order to preserve the intention of the authors, user agents should not insert quotation marks in the default style.

The usage of BLOCKQUOTE to indent text is deprecated in favor of style sheets.

It’s even worse when your tool misuses the element!

Once I read about BLOCKQUOTE, I wanted to see if my favorite blog posting tool supported it. I use a really good (but not perfect) tool called BlogJet((Hey, I just noticed that BlogJet automatically inserts the URL when I type it in… sneaky).

It turns out that BlogJet(grrr) uses BLOCKQUOTE when you indent text. I’ve been indenting text for years using this feature and every time I’ve thus been using BLOCKQUOTE. If you find me going back and editing all of my entries to get into conformance, you know I’ve gone off the deep end.

By Nick at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Very well done! Turn up your speakers:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0–

By Nick at 7:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently the sidebar for vista will not support WPF ... the new UI technology in Vista! How do I say this, this is insane. Digg this story if you think that this is a mistake ... send the Microsoft Gadgets team a clear message.

read more | digg story

By Nick at 7:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)