I returned early from the pub, and I noticed it was a typical winter night with *finally* a crystal clear sky. Great chance to test drive my new telescope to its full potential.

• I started with something easy : Cancer was high in the south, so I took a glance at M44 aka the Beehive and M67. Both are nice and large open star clusters which are easily spotted in the scope. I even got M67 right in sight with the 9x60 finder scope, great piece of equipment. It has saved me hours wasting time searching.


• M48 is a great open cluster in Hydra, but after 15 minutes searching, it turned out it had already disappeared behind my neighbours house. Damn !


• At that time Leo was high in the Southeastern sky, so I took a glimpse at M65 and M66. Now, I don't like galaxy nebula, and with these two it became clear why : no details, and it doesn't even matter it you look at those with a small or large telescope. NGC3628 was hardly visible, only a faint hint of a galaxy, indicating that the seeing wasn't too perfect either. Maybe it was getting misty...


• Ursa Major was high in the zenith, so it was impossible to have a look at M97 and M108. I switched to Canes Venatici, and have a look at M3. And boy, what a beauty; thousands of stars, clustered together in what seemed a sticky spider sprinkled with faerie dust. This was what I bought the telescope for. Have a look at these pictures of M3. Exactly what I saw. Beyond bliss...


• NGC5466 is a globular cluster nearby M3, so I decided to have a look at this one, but the object seemed too faint.

At 2h15, I decided to jump back inside the warm house (freezing cold outside). Some more nice weather is being predicted, so the weekend might be interesting...

Mozilla Firebird 0.8 is released, and oh, it's got a new name, again. The new name is Mozilla Firefox. The name change FAQ has the details, Ben Goodger and Steven Garrity and Jon Hicks have more details about the rebranding. So the name went from mozilla/browser, to m/b, to Phoenix, to Firebird, and now again to Firefox. Starts looking like a soap opera, I think...


What's worse, is that the Windows build is only available as a Windows installer. And that''s bad because a) my employer doesn't allow downloads of EXE files, and b) we don't have the authorisations to install software on our WindowsNT machines. Extracting a zipfile somewhere in a hidden directory, muffled away in the Windows directories wasn't a problem, but now I'm afraid I'm stuck with Firebird 0.7...




Update : there's a zipfile available on texturizer.net. Wheeee !!!

For some weeks now, I'm not watching any TV at all. And guess what, it's easier than I thought. Except for an occasional movie or DVD, or very special occasions, my TV remains dead. Last week, I tried to watch the news, but the banality is baffling : the main subject was that it was snowing. Well, duh !
If all goes well, I'll try to do the same thing with my internet use. Time to reclaim my free time...

I saw the DVD of 'Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain' laying in the hypermarket, so I bought it. For a hefty 22 Euros, I'm a bit dissapointed, because the DVD contains only the movie itself, with no additional material. After ten times watching the movie, there are still questions puzzling me, like why every scene in the movie contains red and green as the most basic colors. Why does the wind blows so hard in the garden of Amelie's father ? Questions I hoped to find answers for on the DVD, but alas...The DVD has as subtitle She will change your life, and that's ironically very true. Since I have seen this movie, my life has changed remarkably in the past month...

In this prank version of LOTR, they're all gay and the diaries are cleverly intertwined. Very funny. From Sauron's diary :




Day Three Million Twenty-Six:

Fellowship in Lothlorien. Oh god, Galadriel Galadriel Galadriel. It's always about HER. Paint my toenails, Sauron. Don't touch my hair, Sauron. I want a pretty ring, Sauron. Then she goes off with slabbish oaf Celeborn. Bet HE cannot forge twenty rings of Power.




(via Jeroen)

This guy build a computer mod [read: modified case] to propose to his girlfriend. Check out the photo's. The're really cool [and crazy].


I ended up cutting a side window (which I hand etched with the words "will you do me the honor" with my trusty Dremel), a front window (custom crafted out of some plex I had- matching the curve of the case was FUN!) below the 5.25" bays, painting the entire case white, vinyl dyeing the CDRW, wrapping EVERY wire with white wire wrap and heatshrink, adding lace from said craft store to the PSU and side window, and as the piece de resistance, I created a fake 3 tiered wedding cake decorated with mini ribbon roses attached to the top of the case (the top tier of the cake removed to display the ring inserted inside). Also, you can see in the pics that I accented the case like mad with the mini ribbon roses and lacy wedding-ish stuff. I even went so far as to create a desktop theme for her, with a wallpaper of her ring, and matching icons (her "My Computer" was a ring, "My Documents" was another view of the ring, and "Network Places" was a diamond-- unfortunately I have no pictures of that as the system is now at her job).

I won't spoil the fun by reposting the pictures here, but I will spoil the fun by saying now she said "yes".

I'm waiting for the rain
to fall for days.
I'm longing for the flood
to sweep this all away.

-- Tabula Rasa, Covenant

It has been raining for a month now. What is this, some compensation for the long hot summer last year ? The new snapshot on the right shows the raindrops on my car. And damn, now I think about it, I forgot to take a snapshot of Saturn last night.

Tonight, I had a first real chance of testing my new gear. Despite mediocre conditions (damned high cirrus clouds !), I got a fair view on several winter objects :

• M1 was dissapointing, but the Crab Nebula is a difficult object anyway : too faint, no real structures.


• So I decided to start with something more easy : M37 is one of the most beautiful open clusters. A breathtakening sight with a 100 magnification.


• NGC 2392 aka the Eskimo Nebula, is a ring nebula which dissolved nicely, with a good view on the central star.


• The most surprising moment was the Lord of the Rings, Saturn. I got a splendid view through a 200 magnification. I even got a glimpse on 3 moons : Titan, Rhea and Japetus. The reddish color of Titan was clearly noticeable.

Like diamonds in the ground
we're waiting to be found.

-- Wall of Sound, Covenant.


Even in the darkest of all hours, some lights apparently still keep shining.

Some minor modifications lead to DarkChannels 0.4.1. I still want to clean up the code a bit, and make some improvements to the layout in IE browsers, so 0.4.2 might not be far away. Note that the Perl module I use to extract the information from the RSS feed is apparently limited to RSS version 0.91 or lower, so for technical reasons a submitted link might not be included (so don't take it personally if the link you submitted, doesn't show up ;)