Mike's Page

I'm always a little behind posting recent stuff to the blog. Wednesday night I went out to watch the lunar eclipse. We had some clouds but they seemed to make way for the moon. I decided to try shooting the eclipse with my digital camera (a Canon EOS 300D). My longest lens is a 100mm macro, so I used that and took some test shots. It's great to be able to run inside and see how the images turned out while the event was still going on. I found that the 100mm lens is not very good for moon shots; I really should get a longer lens or attach it to a telescope if I try it again. But I made use of what I had. Going back outside, I made some adjustments and photographed the eclipse until it became total. With the brightness constantly changing, I had to vary the shutter speeds to get the proper exposure as the moon got darker. Another great feature of the digital camera is that I wasn't afraid to take lots of shots, changing the shutter speeds to see what worked best. The only downside was having to winnow the images afterwards...Pixort is great for this. I only got to shoot the first half of the eclipse, so that's what's shown here. I took 9 of the better images and made a collage (click to see the larger version). The first five photos exposed for the still-sunlit portion of the moon as the Earth's shadow started to cover it. For the last four photos I started exposing for the shadow instead of the sunlit part.

It was a fun experiment and hopefully I'll get even better images the next time a lunar eclipse occurs. There are some even better photos here at SpaceWeather.com.

P.S. The transition back to standard time was unwelcome. Why can't we just stay on daylight time all year round? No bothering with changing the clocks, and there's an hour more of daylight to enjoy in the evening.

I finally got around to getting my two kayaks off the garage floor and more efficiently stored. I built a simple wall-mounted rack on the side of the garage. So far it's working great. Originally I was going to build it out of 2x4s and pattern it after a design I saw on the web, but while browsing the home-improvement store, I saw some heavy-duty shelf brackets, and decided I could just build it with those. I carefully attached them to the wall studs with 3 inch screws. Then I bought some water-pipe insulation and slid it over the tops of the brackets for padding and to create a less-slippery surface. I fixed these to the bars with plastic zip-ties. I'm using bungee cords to help keep the boats from accidentally slipping off the shelf brackets. I attached the bottom bungees between the shelf brackets, and the top ones between the upper shelf bracket and some eye-bolts I screwed into the studs.

It remains to be seen if there will be much horizontal force that causes the brackets to try to spread apart. The brackets are certainly not as strong in that direction. If it becomes necessary, I think that I could run a small wire horizontally between the brackets to keep them from spreading. I probably won't have to, but we'll see.

This wall-mounted method replaces a homemade rope-and-pulley system that I used to have. It was a pain to get the kayaks off the floor...it took two people to do it, and it was always tricky to properly clear the garage door when it was up. The result was that the boats spent the majority of their time on the garage floor. Hopefully that'll be a thing of the past!

Two of my paddling trip photos were published last Sunday in the Columbia, South Carolina newspaper, The State. They were small parts of a big two-page spread covering the various aspects of Congaree National Park (which sadly didn't make it to the web). One was a landscape shot from the Congaree Bluffs, and the other a photo of my wife paddling the Cedar Creek. It's fun to see my stuff in print, and great to see a big writeup about a place I love to visit. Thanks to my friends in the Palmetto Paddlers for introducing me to lesser-known parts of the Congaree (and sending me a copy of the paper).

This isn't the first time I've had a photo published in a paper. I had a bird photo published in the Orlando Sentinel in 2002. I need to get more photos online...I'm always way behind, and you never know what someone is interested in. I just love going to the places and capturing the images. Maybe someday I'll be able to make a living at it.

Sure the game is probably sold out, but I'm going to complain how the schools sold out by selling the naming rights to SBC. The yearly rivalry game will now be called the "SBC Michigan Ohio State Classic." The schools will split a million bucks for the deal. I know ads are nearly everywhere now, but I think this is the start of a slippery slope where every regular season matchup will want a sponsor.

When OSU comes calling for a donation next year, maybe I'll tell them that SBC already covered it.

Update 2004-10-28: Maybe they read my blog. The deal is off. Let's keep it that way.

I just returned from Charleston, having taken a basic keelboat sailing class at the Ocean Sailing Academy. I've been sailing centerboard dinghies infrequently for maybe eight years, but I've never really stopped and practiced a lot of the basics. Despite being the webmaster for daysailer.org, I'm no expert. I also hope to be able to buy a bigger sailboat someday and this class was a first step to learning how to handle larger boats, since I've never sailed in a boat with a keel before.

(details and photos follow)

We had a fun weekend. Went camping with our neighbors Friday through Sunday morning at Calhoun Falls State Recreation Area, which is not too far from home. The campground weaves around part of the shore of Lake Russell, one of the big lakes created by the damming of the Savannah River. Mostly we just hung out, ate good food, and chased after the kids. Great weather, low 70s and slightly overcast, no biting bugs. Fall is coming but the trees are mostly still green.

When I got home Sunday my friend from Charlotte flew down in his new-to-him Cessna 172. He took me up for a short ride over the Lake Greenwood area. I took some photos out the open window of the lake and my neighborhood. Not too bad for a first try, but I think I need some practice to steady the camera in the wind and focus. The lighting was so-so since it was overcast. I just let the camera fire on automatic-everything for this attempt. The next chance I get, I'll try faster shutter and ISO speeds. Here are a couple of the aerial photos...one of my neighborhood and the other of our landing approach to the airport.

I also got to see the Fujifilm blimp moored at the Greenwood County Aiport. They take employees for rides when the blimp is in town. You can just barely see the blimp in the upper right of the airport area.

For about a month I've been struggling with an annoying problem using Cygwin's SSH to communicate between my two PCs. In early September, several applications just stopped working, including Unison, rsync, and WinCVS. All of them would hang while trying to connect to the server computer via Cygwin's SSH. But SSH at the command prompt still worked fine. I was mystified until today, when I came across this post:

It looks like a problem with a recent release of the cygwin engine -- maybe in conflict with SP2. If I downgrade the cygwin engine from 1.5.11-1 to 1.5.10-3 unison works as expected. If I switch back to 1.5.11-1 unison freezes after I enter my ssh password.

So I also downgraded to 1.5.10-3 and it works fine now. Awesome!

Note that the problem is independent of SP2's new firewall...I'm not running that. I eventually found more detail here, which suggests the problem was due to an update in Cygwin's pipe handling code conflicting with SP2.

Can't all these upgrades just get along?