I had a marketing call from a credit card company whose card I have the other day. They wanted to tell me about an offer that was tailored specifically for me. But before they could tell me about it, they wanted me to confirm my postal code.

I said “uh, no”.

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So, a couple of days ago I posted an apology to astronomers in this part of the world because I had cursed the weather by having ordered a new astronomy toy. Well, a couple of days ago, I ordered a tripod for my new toy and now the viewing conditions for the foreseeable future look like this:

The line of particular interest is the “Seeing” line. White and grey boxes are bad. And the “Transparency” line is pretty much solid white, so that sucks, too.

I think I’m done buying astronomy bits for a while, mostly because it appears there’s no point because I’ll never get to use them. That should cause the weather to clear up sometime by the end of the month.

Once again, my apologies to the astronomers in this part of the world. I’m sorry.

Hmm… I could use a dew heater. (Does anyone want to pay me to not buy a dew heater and thus not curse the weather further?)

I appear to owe the astronomy community an apology.

Everytime I buy something related to astronomy (e.g., telescope, filters, etc.) the weather turns to crap and noone can see the stars. The length of time this goes on for seems to be directly related to the amount of money I spent on the astronomy stuff.

Just after Christmas, I picked up an iOptron Skytracker Pro, so we probaby won’t see the the stars anytime soon.

I’m sorry.

Today we pause to remember those people who have made the ultimate sacrifice over the years so that we have the peace, security and freedom that we enjoy today.

To them and their families I say “Thank you”.

Tomorrow evening, we North Americans (well, most of us) are supposed to turn our clocks back an hour in the vain quest of pursuit of saving energy.

Why “vain pursuit”? Well, because although daylight saving time is promoted as leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption, there hasn’t been any proof that this has ever been accomplished. Check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962) if you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds.

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a few years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

[pastacode lang=”markdown” manual=”%5Bgordon%40seedling%20gordon%5D%24%20zdump%20-v%20%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%7Cgrep%202017%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2006%3A59%3A59%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2001%3A59%3A59%202017%20EST%20isdst%3D0%20gmtoff%3D-18000%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2007%3A00%3A00%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2003%3A00%3A00%202017%20EDT%20isdst%3D1%20gmtoff%3D-14400%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2005%3A59%3A59%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2001%3A59%3A59%202017%20EDT%20isdst%3D1%20gmtoff%3D-14400%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2006%3A00%3A00%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2001%3A00%3A00%202017%20EST%20isdst%3D0%20gmtoff%3D-18000%0A” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]