Happy Leap Day!

February 29th, that day that only comes once every four years. I have often thought it would be cool to have Feb 29th as a birthday. I don’t know anyone whose birthday is Feb 29, but I had a friend who had a son who was born on Feb 29.

There’s a nice article about it here:

For leapers, Feb 29 birthdays well worth the wait

Celebrants say joys outweigh complications

I also saw an article entitled “Wipe February 29th from the Calendar” but I didn’t read it. It is a stupid idea.

I don’t know a lot about the different types of calendars, I think there is one calendar where they add a week to the calendar every several years.

We have leap year because it takes slightly more than 365 days for the Earth to orbit the sun.

I’m up early this morning. Last night I had a dream about music, everyone had to play it perfectly. I did some upgrades to my Linux computer and I am getting ready to make coffee. I was thinking I’d go back to sleep but I guess not.

Enjoy your leap day!

Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho

To all you cruel people who said I should mow the yard yesterday – HA! It rained. So I went to run some errands and it got sunny so I went to the beach!
Now it’s raining again, hard. We need the rain bad too.

These are pics of a Pelican from the beach yesterday, although in my brain yesterday I was thinking penguin instead of pelican.
I’m drinking coffee from my new Pura Vida Coffee mug!

I feel good this morning because it’s raining real nice. I hope it rains like this all day!

Playing It By Ear

Monday morning again. I remember last Monday, I feel a lot better than I did then.
I worked all weekend, sound job, recording a convention. So today I’m ready for a day off. But if I have to go move the dish to the other satellite, I supposed I will go move the dish.
But, for the most part, I’m playing today by ear.
I need to go to the bank, I need to go to the post office, hopefully to pick up my present from my In-Laws which was sent last year as a Christmas Present. I predict it will be a coffee cup. I could mow the yard, but I doubt that will happen.

2 Sleeps and The Myth of 8-Hour Sleep

Since I’ve been talking about sleep a lot lately, I found this on Neatorama, I thought it was very cool and definitely applies to me. I like the idea, kind of like a reverse siesta!

Did you get your 8 hours of shuteye last night or did you spend the better part of the night wondering why conventional wisdom says you need 8 hours of sleep?

Stephanie Hegarty over at BBC News Magazine explores the concept of the eight-hour sleep, which is actually not how humans have been sleeping, historically speaking:

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. […]

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

Wish I could do it every night

Last night was a normal night, an hours sleep here, and hour there. Getting up walking around, go lay on the couch for a while. That’s what it’s like every night. Night before last was extremely rare. I’m not going to say once a year, less than that.
I’m not complaining. It was a great thing to enjoy, sleeping like that. Wish I could do it every night.

I’m getting pretty tired of this dish crap. I think I’ve proved my point. But they want to try again today. I wasn’t planning on going out there today, I have another job starting about noon. Here’s a pic from yesterday, me in the dish adjusting the polarity.I will probably be heading out there again in a few minutes. Trying to keep a good attitude and keep up a cooperative front.

I Slept!

Last night we went to bed about 9:30, I looked at the clock and thought “I’ll be up by 10:15”. But I didn’t wake up at all all night. Except once about 4 to go pee, I slept all night, and the wife beat me up and I didn’t hear or feel a thing. What woke me up was the dawgs, one on a foot and one on an elbow. I got up, jumped in the pool, walked the dogs and am now drinking a cuppa excellent coffee.

Today is The Wifes birthday! I got her a perfume and a Hello Kitty stuffed animal. Very dangerous for a dude to buy perfume.

After the past few days, I am pretty sure we need to move the dish to the other satellite. But no, the radio guy says he’s been talking to the satellite guy and the satellite guy says we should have a stronger signal than we did on the old satellite. I feel like saying show me the data. My data says the opposite. But I don’t want to get cocky. I’m still afraid that somehow I make a mistake and I’ll feel like a fool. SO I’ll be out there again today Trying to get a lock on that weak ass satellite. Really, I know nothing.

Wish me luck, and please go tell the Wife
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Distracted

I came here a half hour ago to post. I’ve been looking at Facebook and drinking coffee. All I hear are complaints about how messed up Facebook is getting. You hear me complain about Blogger. Is it human nature, to always notice the flaws in things? I remember hearing a psychology used in Israeli prisons. The prisoners are complaining they want new chairs, so the prison takes away their mattresses. In a few days, they give the mattresses back and nobody complains about the chairs anymore. To me, something seems fundamentally wrong with society. Something subtle, easy to fix, but nobody knows what it is….

People complain about things, and when somebody changes it, they complain about the change and reminisce about how good it was before the idiots screwed it up. I’m guilty too.

To answer yesterdays questions, it looks like I can move the dish to AMC 1, a different satellite. But I need a new LNB, the part that receives the signal from the reflector of the dish. But, the greater minds are hashing it out now, about how to resolve the problem.

AMC 1 Footprint

I wasn’t going to say anything

I’ve been having such a hard time with this satellite dish. I quit talking about it, I was going crazy. I couldn’t get the signal to lock on. Then I found out that there is no signal. We are not in the footprint of the signal from the satellite.
The little red tick in the pic above shows where the satellite is, as it orbits over the equator, the earth turns, and makes the satellite always stay above the same spot on Earths surface. The pictures above and below show the areas where the satellite transmits it’s signal. It is called the ‘footprint’. As you can see in the pic below, Cayman is not in the footprint.
I’ve been kicking myself in the ass. Calling myself incompetent. Losing sleep. Growing zits. Thinking God is punishing me. Worrying about the customer wanting money back. Putting myself through hell.
Dammit

Monday has it bad

Mondays have it bad, Mondays have a bad reputation as being a day filled with apprehension and dread of the upcoming week. I’m feeling that way now, I just want this week behind me and next weekend to start. In the book, The Caine Mutiny, Caines father tells his son: “Wasted hours ruin a life, whether at the beginning or the end, but they’re more noticeable at the end.” That is very true. And it bugs me when I wish a week of my life away. But still, I sure am looking forward to the weekend!

New Word Verification

Sometime last week (or this one) Blogger changed their word verification program. I remember when they started the old one, back in 2005, you can see my old post about it HERE. When IT came out, it was bad, but Blogger eventually sorted it out so it was usable..

Now this new one is worse than anything. As a rule, I can never read the word in the “‘blob”. Below are some examples, taken from my comments on your blogs!

Is 1890 a word? Are either a word?

What’s that first letter? A small B off in the white? Is that three “f’s”? Sorry I “asked”

This one, you can see I got wrong, but Blogger accepted it anyway!

This one has a comma at the end, do I put that in? And WTF is over that ‘e’ in the second word? Is that called a freekin Tilda?? Don’t I need a Spanish keyboard for a tilda??!!

How can I prove I’m not a robot by typing words that aren’t words and using keys that I don’t have on my keyboard? C’mon Blogger.