Blogwonky

Tomorrow morning Yuko will be travelling on an aeroplane. So today she said that, in case the plane crashes, we should have a romantic dinner, as it would be our last night together. So we went to La Zucca…

It’s called La Zucca because of the pumpkins which adorn the ceiling…

Food pictures below… It was very nice indeed…

We recently got an email from our ISP (Optus) asking if we wanted to participate in a trial of a new ‘Speed Pack’ - a faster Internet service. Naturally, we said “‘yes’ Optus”.

The dude came this morning to swap our modem for a fatter and faster one. Here’s a picture…

And a closeup…

The Optus dude ran a speed test to see if the upgrade made a difference. Before the change, the test showed a download speed of about 9Mbps. After the upgrade it was about three times faster.

This was not as fast as the dude expected, so he suggested connecting the computer directly to the modem - bypassing the wireless router. When he did that the speed went up to about 100Mbps - about ten times faster than the first test. However, we had to revert to the router to be able connect our many computers.

Despite this, we are happy with a 3x speed increase.

Yuko is going to Japan in about a week for a surprise purpose (which will be revealed when she returns). She had to go to the city today to pick up her JR Rail Pass for use in Japan. She therefore needed some small change to pay for parking at Lane Cove (the free parking area has too short a time limit). She offered to buy a box of coins from me for $5.00. I agreed, but I think I got ripped off!!!!

While Yuko was out I went to the telescope shop to see whether they had any dobsonian scopes I might be interested in. They had one on display (below), but I’m leaning towards the model one size up from this. I had not heard of this brand (Saxon) before, so I decided to do some googling on it before making a decision.

The Saxon 10 inch collapsible

In the evening, I went to the general meeting of the NSAS. I had been wondering if they ever received my membership application (and cheque) which I mailed two months ago. But tonight the first item on the agenda was whether to accept me as a member. A vote was called and it appeared, from a show of hands, that a majority of those present voted in favour. This is democracy in action!

The NSAS Observing Night and sausage sizzle was scheduled for tonight, and by late afternoons the weather looked good. I therefore went to the supermarket to buy sausages. But when I got home, Yuko immediately opened the packet, cooked a sausage and ate it!

Sausage Disappears

Fortunately I still had enough for the night.

I arrived at the site - North Turramurra Golf Club - at about 5.30 pm, just as it was getting dark. Most of the scopes were already set up. I didn’t take my own scope because it’s so tiny that I would be humiliated. I also wanted to look at (and through) some bigger scopes to help me in deciding what kind of scope to buy when I upgrade.

Various Scopes

In the world of telescopes it’s all about size. One dude brought his 16 inch instrument (below). This is probably the biggest a telescope can be while still being ‘portable’. Portable in this case means that it will fit in the back of a large station wagon.

I spent most of the evening looking at objects through this scope and another smaller one nearby. The dude who owned it was eager to let anyone play with it and point it at anything they wanted. This allowed me to get a good feel for using it.

We got good views of the Moon, Saturn a whole bunch of globular clusters and a couple of nebulae - mainly in Scorpio.

The mother of them all - the 16 inch Dob

After about an hour of observing, we stopped to eat sausages…

The Sausage Sizzle

I took a few ad-hoc pictures by just holding my camera to the telescope eyepiece. The results (the Moon and Saturn) are below. Of course, Saturn looked much better through the eyepiece than it does in this picture.

It was very exciting indeed!

After breakfast at Firefly, we drove over to Eastwood to visit the Korean shop. Yuko likes to go there to buy things that are almost like Japanese. In fact, it has everything you need…

I wheeled the trolley while Yuko filled it up with Korean goodies. This means we will be able to eat Gyoza and Suki-yaki in the next few days. It was very exciting indeed…

This is Rocky…

Rocky used to visit us frequently when we lived at Greenwich many years ago, but has rarely been seen in our Riverview garden. However, Yuko has attracted Rocky with fruit…

Yuko attaches fruit to a tree

Of course, her motivation was purely photographic…

A couple of days ago, I wrote a love song and sent it to a man. Or, to be more precise, I wrote new words to an existing song, and sent a video of it to a man.

I should mention at this point that I am not gay - not that there’s anything wrong with that. But there’s this dude on YouTube called 01davethecouchguy, who was celebrating reaching  tally of 2000 subscribers and he asked his subscribers (of which I am one) to send in video clips saying how much they love him.

He then edited all the clips together and posted the result on YouTube. Such collaboration videos are quite common on YouTube, but it’s the first time I’ve contributed to one. Today the video was published.

I appear at about 1m40s into it, and again briefly right at the end…

I was planning to attend my first observing night with the NSAS tonight. They usually hold two of these each month on Fridays around the time of the new moon. However the weather did not look good for most of the day, and when I checked the web site at about 3pm, it said that observing was cancelled for tonight.

However, I was also shocked to see another posting on the web site which mentioned my name! Fortunately it was in favourable terms and related to my video from the night of the eclipse. I finally finished editing it and posted it yesterday…

Our nature strip has been deforested…