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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Araquan Skytracer's LiveJournal:
| Friday, July 17th, 2009 | |
| 7:35 pm | Walter Cronkite - 1916-2009 Probably the most trusted television news presenter who ever worked in the U.S. is now gone. This, exactly 40 years after what were surely some of his most famous broadcasts of all, during the Apollo 11 mission. Story here. Current Mood:  moody |
| Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | |
| 3:18 pm | For those of you counting...  Apollo 11 breaks the sound barrier at 9:33 AM, July 16, 1969- one minute after launch. NASA photo. It was 40 years ago today that Neil Alden Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. departed the Earth on their mission to become the first to land on the Moon. And today, in orbit around the Earth, there are more human beings in space- thirteen- than there have ever been before at one time. Six residents of the International Space Station, and seven aboard Endeavour, which launched yesterday. Current Mood:  enthralled |
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | |
| 3:30 am | Harry Potter and the VIth profitable film. Saw it tonight, at a midnight showing. Because I have nothing better to do. Anyway, it was quite good. And Harry Potter is a trainspotter. *giggle* Current Mood:  amused |
| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | |
| 1:34 am | Moon Tonight, I saw Moon (spoilers in Wiki entry) at a local indie house. If you're looking for a good, hard sci-fi film that takes an unflinching- yet sometimes darkly humorous- look at what life might really be like for someone spending years working on the Moon, see this film. If you're looking for one that asks just what the human cost of long-term lunar exploitation might be, and how far a company might go to reap the benefits, see this film. If you're looking for one that uses the latest techniques to provide you with a claustrophobic world that's a credible blend of both the sterile and gritty aspects of past films like 2001/2010, Alien, and Silent Running, see this film. And hey, the music isn't half bad either, adding to the feel of being surrounded by machines and mechanisms, and of counting down the minutes in anticipation of the end of one's three-year contract. Trailer here. Thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ionotter for suggesting this one to me. Current Mood: calm |
| Friday, July 10th, 2009 | |
| 3:04 pm | |
| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | |
| 12:34 pm | |
| Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | |
| 8:03 am | Monorails collide at Walt Disney World... Pilot killed. Story here on CNN. From the photo it looks like that's on the Epcot line, at the Transportation and Ticket Center (Magic Kingdom parking lot). If trains were following the normal flow of traffic, Purple rear-ended Red, but Red was stopped in an unusual place- partly in, partly out of the TTC station. Given the hour, I suspect one or more trains may have been waiting for clearance to transfer to the Magic Kingdom Express line, ultimately to return to the maintenance facility in the North Service Area. I have also seen a report that this was Pink and that it backed into Purple, but the photo seems to indicate that this was Red... This wasn't supposed to happen- the MAPO system is supposed to prevent this. But maybe if one of the trains was backing up, that might explain things. I don't know. More will come out on this, I imagine. Right now, though, my thoughts are with my fellow Cast Members- today we lost one of ours, on duty. EDIT: Some photos in other articles show the wrecked vehicles inside a station- in those it appears that it could indeed have been Pink that was involved in this incident... More details to come. Current Mood:  shocked |
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | |
| 5:45 pm | Boredom yields icon. From a photo I took a couple months ago comes this... Contrast and brightness were tweaked a bit, but saturation was not. Yay for RAW shooting and preserving color profiles. Depth of field wasn't what I wanted, but the camera's battery was drained before I could reshoot... Too far to walk back to the car and do a swap. Good enough for an icon though, perhaps. Anyway, we'll see how long I keep this one. It was added on a whim and may end up getting deleted on a whim too, if I start running out of icon allotments. Current Mood: amusedCurrent Music: Night Fever - Bee Gees |
| 1:47 am | Public Enemies Went to see it at a late, late showing tonight with leonard_arlotte. It was pretty good, another great performance from Depp. Violent as you might expect- but that kind of goes with the territory in a story like this. Generally very well crafted- I recommend it.Even if the steam engines they used in the movie are technically from after 1933... ;) Current Mood: amused |
| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | |
| 4:43 pm | GWR 4866? I've looked through some photos I took at the Didcot Railway Centre and noticed that one of the engines in the shed there is one of the same 0-4-2T's that I have in miniature. It's even in the same color scheme as mine- GWR green with the round "shirtbutton" logo. It's numbered 4866 though, and mine's 4969. Change just one digit* and I'd have a model of one I've been in the presence of and touched... Tempting. But first I have to find the decals... *Actually, I'd also have to change the shedcode on the frame as well, since 4869 was based out of Exeter while 4866 was based out of Newton Abbot, but... that's not a big deal... Current Mood:  curious |
| Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | |
| 3:10 pm | Uh oh. Politics. So this is from several days ago, but I've been busy. But still... You know how Fox News is all fair and balanced, right? Well, I guess that depends on where you want the center of mass to be. See, back in 2006 when congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) was found to have been sending sexually explicit messages to a teenager, he showed up on the news a lot. But when Fox News showed footage of him, what did they put on the ever-present graphics underneath the picture? They identified his party affiliation thusly: (D-FL). Well, hey, that's an innocent mistake, I suppose, right? Er, isn't it? Well, much more recently, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford (R) vanished without a trace for a while, and apparently got lost on the way to the Appalachian Trail, ending up in Argentina with a woman he's had an affair with... Hey, things happen, and we all make mistakes. But, well, when he showed up on Fox News, the graphics they put up during his press conference were... Hey, wait a minute. There's a '(D)' after his name... But he's a Republican... What the heck? They made that same innocent mistake again? Aw, man, someone needs to have a talk with the guy making all these typos! Or maybe, just maybe... could it be that Fox News isn't fair and balanced, but rather has such a strong pro-Republican bias that they stoop so low as to relabel any Republican involved in a spectacularly newsworthy scandal as a Democrat? Yeah, I think I'm leaning toward that possibility, myself. I mean, it's not like assertions of that sort of bias are supported by any other evidence or anything, but... Well, you know how it is. And rest assured, I know how it is too. Current Mood: amused |
| 2:20 pm | Dayum... Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays...? This is NOT a good week to be a celebrity, is it? Current Mood: concerned |
| Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | |
| 2:35 pm | And so it's happened... I took a break from working on the SDP40F model to... work on a different model. This time it wasn't detailing work so much as a mechanical and electrical upgrade to one of the things I acquired in the UK. Hornby equipment tends to have wheels that are out of gauge, generally too narrow, so the steam engine I got over there wouldn't run properly through the finer scale turnouts and crossovers of my club layout. Also, it needed to have digital command control (DCC) fitted. But we can rebuild it- ( we have the technology... ) So now, yes, chili_factor can laugh and say that I've finally given in and gotten myself involved in modeling steam just like everyone else who has any British stuff. I'd actually thought about getting two of these and repainting the other into British Rail colors, which would be much more correct for hauling those coaches, but I wanted to see if the mechanism was sound and readily upgradable for running on my club layout. Since the answer is that is "yes," I guess I can put that on my list of projects to take on someday. Of course, I could always go the other way and try to track down a Great Western autocoach to push/pull with 4869...I guess I'm addicted. Current Mood: accomplished |
| Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | |
| 1:29 pm | Basking in the Sun A Bengal tiger dozes on the edge of a fountain, on the edge of sunlight and shadow. ( Have a look... ) Current Mood: calm |
| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | |
| 11:58 pm | Plate lunch and Spam musubi... in Iowa? For wxkat and ionotter comes this... Apparently there's a bit of Hawai`i in Clive these days. I gotta check that place out sometime soon. Current Mood:  hungry |
| Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | |
| 5:58 pm | Kodachrome: 1935 - 2009 Sorry, Paul Simon, but they're taking your Kodachrome away. Sadly, I don't think I ever shot a roll of it. Closest I ever got was Ektachrome. That is now unlikely to change. Some of the most striking images of our time, including the one of the Afghan girl that made the cover of National Geographic in 1985, were shot with it... But technology marches on. Kodachrome is dead. Long live the CMOS digital sensor. Current Mood:  nostalgic |
| Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | |
| 5:29 pm | |
| 12:55 pm | Postage II Second box got here yesterday. A bit roughed up on the outside, but everything inside is okay. Now... I need to reconfigure my workspaces so I can once again resume work on the oft-mentioned but never seen SDP40F and E8A projects... State Fair is less than two months away. Current Mood:  busy |
| Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | |
| 2:20 pm | Numbers. On my recent voyage across the pond, I took 2452 photos, of which 1928 exist in RAW format. 26.6GB of data. I'm going to go shopping for a new hard drive now. Current Mood: amused |
| Friday, June 19th, 2009 | |
| 10:40 pm | Postage. The stuff I'd ordered from Hereford Model Centre got here the same day I did. Today, one of the two boxes I mailed myself from Malvern got here. In good shape, outside- haven't opened it up yet. This is not the one I was worried about though. Had a bit of confusion with the postage stickers on one of them- and this was the 'good' one that arrived. We'll see. |