Celtore

I do make my bed every morning. I like it being tucked in and I know that I'll be too tired to bother if I ignore for it too long. If I do a good enough job, sometimes I don't need to remake the whole thing; I can just fix the sides.

Apparently an excerpt from the inn music from World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria starring the kazoo. I left WoW just after the Lich King expansion, but I heard this song on a random playlist and it was just too perfect not to have as a ringtone.

I usually put the ketchup on the side. If you're eating your fries in a basket or dish, all the ketchup will be concentrated on the top and very little will penetrate to the lower levels. Sometimes, vinegar is nice to put directly on top of the fries though.

HAPPINESS INBOUND!

Laid-Back Camp

Sakura Quest (Season 1)

Of course, there are probably others which are right up there too, but these are probably the most memorable to me right now. I love this kind of positive stuff.

I usually make myself a small snack, go upstairs to my study, let my parrot out and power up my PC.

Then from there, it's either derp around the internet for a little bit or fall asleep in my chair. Sometimes both. Well ok, maybe often both...

Actually, strike all that I said. Our provincial and federal political leaders are alright in their own ways. Sure Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford can be very annoying, but they're just doing their jobs to represent their party. It's not worth getting angry at the party figureheads for issues affecting the entire party. The same goes for the other parties too.

However, local politics is entirely different. Some of our local projects are beyond stupid and I bet someone's hands got greased very well to get them off the ground.

The last movie I watched was the My Hero Academia movie. It was a little on the slow side around the middle, but I loved the action scenes and especially the climax. I was a sucker for that stuff when I was a kid too, I love it when the heroes finally get their act together and absolutely wreck their foe(s). Digimon did that a lot as well.

I still talk on my phone, but I generally try to avoid it. If it's something that's somewhat urgent, calling will result in an immediate response whereas texting might not. Similarly if there's something on the more complicated side, talking about the problem is probably the easiest and time-efficient way of handling it. I do that at work all the time; most bug reports and questions can be handled over email, but sometimes something so complex arises that it's just easier to look up their extension number and talk about it directly.

On the personal side though, I hate talking over the phone with people I'm sort of unfamiliar with. I'd sooner speak with them in person than talk with them over the phone.

BOB ROSS!...

There's not a lot of halloweeny music I listen to, but some of the movies and specials I watch in October have some songs that really get me into the spirit.

The Nightmare before Christmas - This is Halloween

Scooby Doo (Zombie Island) - It's Terror Time Again

Oh! And I just remembered this song!

MST3K - Where oh Werewolf

Endless night sounds great to me! It's only fair; this weather has been absolutely horrible for astronomy! The moon, however, for blocking my view...

Hah... probably way too long.

On the average workday, probably something close to 12-14 hours. (8 hours for work, 4-6 hours personal)

On the weekend, it's way too dynamic. I could be basically online all day, or I could be busy actually doing stuff. Sunday, I'm usually online pretty much all day (~10 hours) catching up on my shows and derping around youtube before Monday.

A bit sore. I just finished my nightly exercises and I think I might have pushed myself a little too far this evening. I might be walking a little funny tomorrow

I'm more of an introvert; social interactivity is very tiring and most of my pursuits are solo endeavours. When I find the right person to interact with though, I feel and behave more like an extrovert. I'm still working on the whole confidence thing and it's roughest when dealing with people I'm not familiar with.

I have an African Grey parrot; his name is Norbert. I first met him when he was really young, before he even had any feathers. That's why I named him Norbert; the little guy reminded me of Hagrid's dragon.

I'm listening to an album I recently bought at my local used music store. This is the current track I'm listening to:

It's actually a nice change of pace from the stuff I usually listen to

There are protections available against distributed denial of service attacks and cloudflare (the forums' host) has a pretty good reputation when it comes to handling this particular type of attack. I wouldn't go so far as to categorize it as hacking though; it's too primitive. Unless the attacker built the bot network themselves rather than paying a lump of money to someone for temporary control of their network.

The most dangerous attack vector is the database. If you can find one vulnerable website with badly hashed (or plaintext) passwords, there's an excellent chance you can take those emails and passwords and use them on other services. Hell, you might even be able to directly sign into their email account, which is absolutely game over. Having a single password these days is a HUGE risk; if just one website you're signed up with is compromised, everything's compromised.

The big takeaway: use a password manager to keep track of all your passwords. You use a single password and it gives you encrypted access to all your passwords which, because now you no longer need to remember them, can be unique 64+ random characters long. I personally use keepass because it's open source, free of charge and offline. I don't have to trust a company to keep my passwords safe. That comes with some inconveniences though, so something like lastpass might be better.

Thanks to a 3 day business trip where it seemed every restaurant insisted on drowning everything remotely healthy with cheese, I've genuinely warmed up to the taste of regular, no-cheese broccoli. I also gained a much bigger appreciation for corn on the cob, though asparagus I'm still a little "meh" on.

A little bit frustrated. See, I have a policy about Friday: you don't push software updates on Friday. There's a three day buffer where you can't fix things if anything breaks.

So, my boss and superior don't appear to agree with this dogma and they did push up a broken update Friday afternoon. It broke the production database for pretty much all of Friday and took until 8PM to restore it. Normally that should be the end of it, but they left behind the database backup on the hard drive without deleting it. Then today, the machine completely runs out of disk space and can't save anything. There's nothing we can do about this shit storm until Monday by when we'll probably lose even more data than the Friday problem.

All of this could have of course been avoided if they had just waited for Monday or even pushed on Thursday. It's the equivalent of a villain on the cusp of victory yelling "NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW!" Just don't.

4 hours ago, Phosphor270 said:

Ah yeah, that lip would make it difficult for a cart. I lift weights pretty regularly to maintain those muscles. 

The optical tube assembly weights 75lbs and I have to lift it off the cart and set it down on its mount gently. I've done some astrophotography with my schmidt-cassegrain (C8), but I find the focal length to be pretty long. Have to keep exposures at 30s or shorter to avoid star trailing. What kind of tracking mount do you have? Do you plan to autoguide it for long exposures?

Oh man, that weight is rough... 50 pounds for me is manageable as I used to have to lug around these 40 pound bags of clay at my old job. 10 pounds more isn't that big of a deal. 75 pounds though... well, let's just say I'd have to lift more.

I would plan for longer exposure shots, so I would need to get an equatorial mount with the telescope. Honestly though, I'd like to try hacking something together myself first. It's likely a harder problem than I'm thinking, but it would be fun to see if I could program an arduino board to deal with it. The software is no problem, it's the hardware; I only took basic circuitry

2 minutes ago, Phosphor270 said:

Nice! I initially wanted the goto version of the 16in model, until I ran across the Skywatcher 16. I think Orion and Skywatcher are made by the same parent company: Synta. The non-goto Skywatcher 16 went on sale over the summer for under $2k, so I pounced on it. I do planetary imaging, so I wanted tracking. Spent another several grand on a custom made tracking platform and I was all set.

You're not kidding about the weight. I keep the optical tube on a cart. I assemble the base on my patio and roll the rest outside. What kind of photography did you have in mind with a cassegrain telescope? 

I've thought about a cart, but even that would be a pain for transportation. I keep it inside and move it onto my deck for star gazing. The trouble is that to get it there, you have a small lip on the ground you have to step over. Wheels wouldn't do too well. Plus with manual transportation, it forces me to keep active so I can support my hobby.

As for the cassegrain, I was thinking about photographing some relatively bright star clusters like M37 and M39. Nothing further than that though, so a 6" would probably be what I'm after.

I have my Orion XT12g dobsonian with a 12 inch diameter and motorized goto. It's an absolute pain to set up as the base and telescope are 50 pounds each, but I love this thing once it's in place and calibrated.

I also have my first telescope, a 60mm reflector I bought at walmart, but it rarely gets much use. I've been thinking of getting a cassegrain for doing photography, but that'll probably be a little further down the road. They can be a little on the pricy side...

On 3/8/2018 at 3:54 PM, KatonRyu said:

As the title says, have you ever had a moment where you realized that you're really not cut out for the job you do? I have, today.

I'm a programmer. I went to college, got my Bachelor's degree, have a job, etc. Tomorrow, a new programmer is going to apply at our company. To test his skills, two of the senior devs created a test for him to do, in which he has to come up with an algorithm which sorts and merges objects along specified guidelines. I was the guinea pig for the test, and I failed miserably. After three hours, I still had nothing but errors and failing tests. A friend of mine, who hasn't programmed in two years, was able to get something more or less working in half the time, so it wasn't like the assignment was too difficult. I just completely lack the ability to come up with an algorithm. At that moment, I realized that all of my programming skills are derivative rather than innovative. I just look at what's there and expand upon it or alter it, as needed, but I've never once, either at work or in college, come up with my own algorithm for anything. 

While I already knew I didn't want to program for my entire working life, that realization still sucked. So, have any of you ever had a similar experience? A moment where you just thought, "Well, I guess this really isn't my thing." ?

From a fellow programmer, snap out of it man! Software development isn't all about code golf; there's more to it than sorting algorithms and tree data structures unless you're in a very specific area of development. I took software development at a college level and they encouraged us to use what was out there already. It wasn't because it was meant to be an easy course, they just didn't want us to spend days reinventing the wheel when there's already perfectly good and well-tested libraries out there. As such, I've never manually written any custom sorting algorithms; heck, in most cases, std::sort is good enough anyway.

I fall down this path sometimes too and I have to remind myself that the projects I make have value and there is true design complexity behind them. Maybe not algorithmic complexity, but I'd like to see someone make a custom virtual machine monitoring service as flexible, secure, and efficient as mine. It's pieced together with components from other projects, but it's my implementation that brings it all together into the awesomeness that it is. It's had three major rewrites and each version was better than the last; that's because software development is a field where you keep learning.

And if nothing else works, just have a look over at some of the stuff in NPM. Over 25,000 weekly downloads for is-odd, with a dependency on the package is-even which has over 1,000,000 downloads per week. IsEven is exactly what you expect it to be: (n % 2) == 0. If you've never imported simple dependencies like this, is-array or left-pad, you're probably more skilled than you give yourself credit for.

Never a bee, but I did by a wasp once. I used to work on maintaining sports fields and commonly mowed the fancy patterns on the baseball diamonds.

I was just finishing up and driving the mower to the break room when a wasp darted right at my face. Fortunately I was wearing safety goggles, but the bugger got me right above the eye. I honestly didn't feel much pain, it felt more weird like what I imagine a zit bursting to feel like. Perhaps because it stung me on the eyebrow instead of something more fleshy or nervy. I ended up taking the rest of the day off though because the swelling was pretty rough. I learned that day that I wasn't allergic though, so that was a plus.

I'm probably somewhere in the center-left.

Economics wise, I'm a believer in regulation because I don't think companies can be trusted to do the right thing instead of the cheapest/easiest thing. Look at what's happening with asbestos; we were still mining the bloody stuff into 2011 and we still aren't banning it because of brake pads. Hell, it was supposed to be banned January of this year, but the automotive industry somehow got it delayed until 2019. And according to this article, which is quoting a government report, all of this is over a $5 difference in price per unit. (Got a bit off topic, but stuff like this is why I think the way I do.)

As for social leaning, I'm probably a little more left leaning too. I support gender/racial blindness and treating everyone equally; try to look through the differences and simply treat people like people.