Oh yeah, that's me all right.

You Are A Non-Descipt Medieval-oid Peasant/Farmer/
Merchant From An Undefined Country Like
England, Or Something. You typically don't put
a whole lot of passion into researching your
persona, but you really enjoy being a part of
the SCA community.


What Is Your SCA Clothing Style?
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Lecture about Titan

Last night I went to the last seminar required for my internship for this quarter. It was the second in the astronomy lecture series hosted by Foothill College, NASA, SETI and the Astonomy Society. The lecturer was a fill-in due to a conflict of the original speaker. This guy works at NASA/Ames and was involved in designing a probe that landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Unfortunately, it isn't as interesting of a moon as Europa. It might have been if they got more pictures but the atmosphere is so thick that pictures of the surface are impossible from space. It has an atmosphere but that's mainly methane and CH4 whatever that is. (I don't know my chemistry). It makes for a very smoggy moon. Supposedly the moon is 50% water but it's -80°rees; celcius so the water is as hard as rocks. In fact the one picture they got from the probe after it landed shows a flat landscape littered with rounded rocks that they're assuming are ice. Due to bent antennae from the landing, they didn't get as much spectrograph data as they'd hoped. Between that and forgetting to send a "Turn on" message to a second transmitter on the probe as it landed, they lost a bunch of images and data.

One interesting fact is that the probe didn't land with a splash or a thud, it landed with a splat. He told us those were scientific terms, lol. It means Titan is a big mud ball, at least where they landed. He thinks it landed in a dry riverbed judging from the positions and roundedness of the rocks. If it's a riverbed, sometimes liquid methane flows. Can you say stinky?

The orbiter that launched the probe still swings by on its orbit taking pictures of the atmosphere. They had clouds on the south pole when they landed the orbiter in 2004. Now the clouds are gone. They expect to see clouds on the north pole in 16 years. They think the clouds at the poles are a summer phenomenon.

He was a funny guy with good jokes but the lack of pictures were probably the problem. That and the light over my section of seats had a bad case of the blinkies. I was getting a headache from the constant flicker, especially since I was taking notes and looking at my white paper a lot of the time. That was irritating along with the kid in front of me who looked short when I sat down but suddenly grew taller just before the lecture started and kept moving his head around blocking the screen so I had to keep moving mine around to get the spelling of the technical terms I needed for the mini-paper I need to write.

The kid didn't want to be there. It was obvious his dad dragged him. His dad was demanding he do the calculatons to discover the closest and farthest distances of Saturn to Earth. This is not a good relationship.

Ooh, and one benefit was a poster of Saturn! Cool beans!

I've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time...

Finally feeling well again! YAY! I went to Pilates yesterday for the first time in weeks and it felt GOOD! This time I didn't wait until my muscles were about to give out before I gave up the difficult level on an exercise and a couple of times I had to stop and wait for the others to finish exercises. They've worked themselves into some of the more advanced ones in my absence, but I kept up for the most part and today it doesn't hurt to breathe... yet. LOL

The first "rolling spine" exercise caused a painful part of my lower back to pop back into place. That helped the rest of the day a lot. My chiropractor had to still adjust a few vertebre down there, but not as many as she would have!

The bad thing about going to a chiropractic school for my care is that I have to keep changing doctors as they graduate. I get so attached to them and they're gone. I'm just now changing. Joyce, the one I had for the last six months is a few years younger than I and has a lot of the same problems. That made it really nice because she understands my extreme pain when parts of me are touched. Hopefully she'll come to LJ. I invited her! I want to know how things go with her. My original intern was planning to move to North Carolina so I'm completely out of touch with her.

As a goodbye gift, Joyce gave me a stretchy exercise band and even though I repeated the name of it after she told me, I can't remember it now. She says there's a website with exercises to do with it. It's about six feet long and four inches wide. Does anyone know what it's called? Maybe I'll also ask this in 100pounds2lose. Someone there might know since it's really good for those of us not easily able to exercise in traditional ways.

I was telling Andy at work about buying the 2520 router on ebay and he told me I wouldn't be able to use it. It turns out I need a different model. Guess I shouldn't have done it without talking to someone who really knows these things first. Unless I can find an adapter to convert one of the slow serial ports to ethernet, I either need a second router or a 2514 that has two ethernet ports. I thought the 2520 had two, but I guess I read the diagram incorrectly. Oh well. Live and learn. Once I get the 2514 (next paycheck) I'll have the ability to hook them together to practice router to router communications. Either that, or I'll see if my school wants to trade a 2514 for a 2520. If the serial ports are good on the one I bought (not messed up by connectors with bent pins) they might be willing to do that since most of their routers have been damaged. I won't need the serial ports here for my uses.