the moon using the new 8mm eyepiece (56x magnification).

Jupiter in the backyard. These 2 shots were taken with the new 8mm eyepiece (56x magnification). This pic was taken with the ISO set to auto and no exposure compensation. managed to pick up some of Jupiter’s bands. adjusted the ISO to 400, and got the moons, but too bright to see the bands.

Replaced all four spark plugs myself. got a 12” ratchet extension for this job, as well a 5⁄8” spark plug socket and some anti-seize. Simplest way to do it is take off the driver’s side front wheel. Best known price for the RX-8 spark plugs Thread about changing the spark plugs

turns out nine inch nails is tied with depeche mode as my favorite band. here’s my top 10 highest rated bands. the number is how many songs by that artist made it into my top 82 songs: nine inch nails: 8 depeche mode: 8 madonna: 5 van halen: 4 tori amos: 3 beastie boys: 3 alice in chains: 3 aerosmith: 3 the white stripes: 2 prince: 2

my wife’s ibook suffered a fatal hard drive failure. last time we backed it up to the imac was in december. :( among the data lost was her calendar (ical) and addressbook. I had a copy of her calendar (so I can know when she’s busy :) but not the addressbook. fortunately, we were syncing her contacts and calendars to her ipod, and that had last been done only 2 weeks ago.

it seems like I won’t be a Gentoo Linux user for much longer. My server (Gentoo Linux) has suffered a lot of problems lately. I think that Gentoo now has too many packages and too few developers. pretty much any update I’ve done in the last 6 months on any of the 6 or so computers I maintain has caused non-trivial problems. I’ve now changed my server, my work machine, and my desktop machine over to ubuntu.

I’ve had an ipod for a while now and knew about the ‘my highest rated’ smart playlist, but it was just a few days ago that I actually looked at it. sometimes while listening to the ipod at work, if a good song came up I’d rate it somewhere between 1 and 5 stars. I’m pretty conservative with the 5-star rating; to get five stars, you have to be a song that I expect I’ll never get tired of.

Gentoo is my favorite Linux distribution. However, I recently tried out ubuntu which bills itself as Linux for Human Beings''. Ubuntu definitely has that OS X feeling ofit just works”. if you want to try out Linux, or you are a hard-core linux geek tired of fiddling with settings, ubuntu is definitely nice. since it’s debian based, you only have to install once, and upgrades are typically painless. out of all the obscure programs I use, I’ve only run in to 2 which weren’t available in ubuntu.

I’ve spent way too much time playing with gnu arch (tla) and git lately. if you are simply tracking source code, I’d recommend using git. if you are making changes to a project someone else maintains, and you periodically want to submit patches to the upstream maintainer, and so are constantly needing to re-sync and re-apply your unaccepted patches, git is again my recommendation. if however you have gone off the deep end like me, and you are maintaining multiple branches of a project, you routinely merge some patches in some of the branches, but some patches must not end up in the other branches, then gnu arch (tla) is the only way to manage that.

I put 32,111 miles on the tires which shipped with the car from the factory. They were Bridgestone Potenza A030s, the size was P225/45ZR18. These tires seemed to be too small for the wheels. The new tires are Kumho Ecsta SPTs, in size 245/40ZR18. These seem to fit much nicer, and look much better, plus I get an extra 20mm or so of tread width! The old tires had a treadwear rating of 140, the new ones have a treadwear rating of 320!