Day 4886

I finally got out the star tracker and began testing it again. This thing is so frustrating. It works perfectly ocassionally, but mostly it randomly crashes in unpredicctable ways. I've spend hours and hours trying to identify and isolate the problem. I always come up with nothing. Is it a bad cable that causes the camera to disconnect? Why does the app often fail to stitch together panorama shots? I can't tell whether it's the camera, the iPhone app, the Polaris itself, or the connecting cables that are causing all the problems. It doesn't help that there never was an instruction manual for this thing. There is an online user group, but almost evereyone is using a different type of camera to connect to the tracker, so useful advice is limited. I gave up trying to communicate with the Chinese manufacturer a long time ago. The marketing people speak English but most of the engineers don't. When this thing works it produces spectacular results, but it only works for me about 20% of the time. I certainly didn't accomplish much today, so the Polaris will go back in the box for another month or so.

The rest of the day was about what you'd expect. Dawn got a nice early morning walk. I ate my breakfast of shredded wheat and fruit while watching the world disintegrate on cable news. I checked my messages and once again found nothing but spam. Then I got ready for my long walk.

My feet haven't been bothering me as much lately. I have no idea why. I can't be bothered to walk in a different direction, so I keep following the same path over and over again. I've walked this route so many times that I notice the smallest details. A piece of gum on the pavement becomes a mileage marker. A missing duck becomes a cause for concern. I'm surprised at how many people follow the same predictable routines as I do. I pass some of the same people walking in the opposite direction every single day. There are a lot of dog walkers I recognize now. There is even one guy who walks his cat on a leash. The park department spent a lot of money putting up fancy barriers to prevent vehicular traffic on the wider trails. Less than three months later most of the barriers are down. I suspect  the park maintenance people complained that they couldn't get their mowers, trash trucks, and other equipment through the barriers. One more example of a bureaucracy at work. Often the left hand isn't talking to the right hand.

My long walk took most of the morning and my experiments with the star tracker took most of the afternoon. There are lots of chores I could do around the house, but chores were the last thing I wanted to do today. I also wasn't interested in mowing the grass, even though it has been growing very quickly with all the rain we've been having. I guess I'd rather just go back to Florida and watch another launch. There is an opportunity to get press credentials at the end of the month for the AX-2 launch, but they'll probably wait until the last minute to notify me again. Who knows if I'll end up going. A lot depends on when the roofers decide to replace the roof.

It looks like tomorrow will be a nice day and then there is rain in the forecast for a solid week. This has been such a rainy Spring. It's has been hard to plan for anything. One way or another I'm sure we'll have a new roof by Summer. I'll probably see another launch or two as well. By July I'm sure I'll regret complaining about the rain. We get all our rain at once and it can be extremely dry later in the Summer. At least some things are predictable. I took this week's trash to the curb like I always do on Thursday evening. The trash truck always arrives while we are walking Dawn on Friday morning. The garbage man is very predictable.

Dodger is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day