Blackberry speed tests
A colleague of mine said “hey, pssst. Have you tested your internet speeds on your blackberry yet?” I said “no, from where?”, and his answer was “google mobile speedtest”. I’m thinking – wow, Google has Google Maps, Google Mobile Search, Google Mobile Maps (gmm), and now they have a mobile speedtest?
But it turns out he was using the “google” as a verb. (cue light bulb). now I get it.
So I do that, it gives me the dslreports testing page and I’m amazed at what the answer is
Wow, that’s actually very nice. 1297 kbits/sec? I can type emails SO much faster with that kind of speed! :/
Reminds me of a quip I like to make, which I heard from a long-time Unix friend, in response to faster and faster modems (33.6, DSL, broadband) becoming more and more prevalent amidst the days of 1200 baud, 2400 baud, etc. The quip is “Why would you ever need more than 1200 baud? I mean, you just can’t type that fast.”
If you don’t get it, ask your friendly local neighborhood OLDER computer geek.
Weekly computer training
I think each week I might put in some training, seeing as how I’m probably the geekiest guy you know. You never know when this little tidbit or that little piece of information might help you out, given how popular the Internets are with the young folk.
This week’s special training topic is about your mouse cursor. You know, that little pointy thing that moves across your computer monitor when you move the mouse on your desk. And given that many of you still haven’t mastered the difference between a single click and a double-click, or when to LEFT click vs RIGHT click, I figured some remedial training was in order.
I find that visual aids are usually best in doing training. So I think you should go and see the little video of what actually goes on in the background when you move the mouse.
http://www.1-click.jp
When you get there, there’s just a big grey circle in the middle of the screen. Move your mouse to the circle and move inside. It graphically depicts what goes on in the computer each time you move your mouse.
Astrology Bit o’ Knowledge (ABoK)
I frequently start things and don’t finish. For example, this “Stuff you don’t want to MISC” episode implies that I’m starting two weekly things – a computer training section and an astrological tip of the week (this entry). All I can say is – right at this moment I intend on continuing. But I might forget. So maybe if I give it a snazzy name like ABoK I might remember.
Christy and I are getting our NCGR Level 1 Certification in Astrology. A big part of that is being able to cast a chart by hand, and that means determining the exact locations of the major heavenly bodies in the sky at a specific date and time at a specific location on the planet. For example, if you’re sitting in Austin, TX on July 4th, 2007 at 3:25 am, and you take a snapshot of the cosmos, where are the planets?
Get in your mind’s eye that you’re sitting on a plane, and not a ball. There’s a celestial equator that represents, more or less, the solar system and our view of it on a horizontal level. Since the solar system itself is mostly horizontal, with only slight variations (think of it as 9 huge, increasingly larger hula hoops), our view OF those components (ie, Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, the sun, etc) are pretty much in the same big wide band.
What’s BEHIND that band from our point of view are constellations, and that’s where the “signs” come in – Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc. When someone says “I’m a sagittarious,” they’re really saying that from earth’s point of view, the Sun looks to be “in the costellation of Sagittarious” because that’s the constellation that’s directly behind the Sun. So although there are tons of constellations, the Signs we use in Astrology relate to the ones that serve as the backdrop of the celestial equator.
You can see more about what happens with the celestial equator at astronomynotes.com.
Note about the constellations: There’s a difference of reference in this respect. There are two camps here – the Sidereal camp and the Tropical camp. One prefers to actually keep the constellations with the actual constellations (Sidereal), and the other prefers to take into account the Procession of the Equinoxes (Tropical). It’s like a Leap Year for the Zodiac. You know how we add an extra day every 4 years? Well we do that so our seasons won’t get off every couple hundred years If we didn’t have Leap Year, eventually our calendars would say Summer but the earth says it’s really Spring. It would catch back up eventually, over thousands of years, but we as a society have chosen to honor the earth’s seasons as a basis for the calendar vs just the rotation of the earth (days). Same for the Tropical camp – it prefers to use the actual equinoxes as coordinates around the sun and follow that (the solar “Seasons”) instead of the physical constellations that serve as the backdrop. If you care to know more about this, read the Wiki entry.
The key parts to casting a chart by hand is to have an Atlas, an Ephemeris, a keen mind for math when it comes to sexigessimal numbers (hours:minutes:seconds and degrees:minutes:seconds), and some patience. The Atlas helps you with latitude and longitude of a specific place, as well as the time zone offset for specific dates for that place, and a logitude time equivalent. The ephemeris tells you where a specific planet was at midnight in GMT (ie, the Sun was 23 degrees Sagittarious, 14 minutes, 5 seconds). With that information, you can interpolate exact positions of these planets most anywhere on the world where humans live. (the upper latitudes, say over 60 degrees, is where the math breaks down and is hard to do without trigonometry).
The modern astrologer usually abandons casting charts by hand and uses software such as Solarfire or an online site like astro.com. These computer programs are quite adept at the calculations required, and have online ephemeris’s (ephemerides? what’s the plural of ephemeris?) so that they can do things in fractions of a second vs the hours it might take manually. Plus, it can do more math for things like asteroids and imaginary things like the North Node.
There. Now don’t you feel mo’ bettah?
