Size doesn't matter

Hi all,

I had my two week post op appointment, and guess what? I am doing so well they advanced my diet, no more full liquids now I am on to mushy proteins!

Now I need to begin by discussing a sensitive subject.

Ladies and Gentlemen I need to talk to you about the sizes of your equatorial
mounts. Now I just went back and corrected some mistakes in my rant about aperture when I came across this monstrosity:

This is the Skywatcher EQ8, and there is some excitement about it, even talk that it will challenge the big boys, i.e. the Paramount ME and the Astrophysics AP1200. To this I say, so what? This thing ways about 110lbs, which means that you will take it out once a year if at all, the same thing goes for the Paramount and the AP1200. This is yet another symptom of the bigger is better mentality, and it is highly correlated with aperture fever. 

If you want a beefy equitorial mount you are sport for choice from the CGE Pro to the LX 850 to the Losmandy HGM Titan, but the question you have to ask is, is a 100lb mount really "portable." Just because it mounts to a tripod does not mean that you can lug it around as much as you want. The only way these mounts are truly useful is if you put them in a dome near your home. 

Its an insidious trend I have noticed, taking ridiculously massive mounts, putting them on tripods and calling them "portable." The EQ8 even has handles on the mount head. If you really want to do astrophotography get yourself a sturdy workhorse like them mount I am going to get:

And yes I changed my mind again, the Gemini II system scares the shit out of me, I think it might be too complex for its own good. 

No news is good news

Hi all,

As you know I went in for surgery on 11/18/2013, and since I am writing this I think you can all guess it went reasonably well. I woke up in the recovery area after surgery and man did it hurt, spent a day on the pain button then moved to liquid Vicodin, which I am almost done with today. The pain really goes down from day to day.

Right now I am struggling to get my daily intake of nutrients down, its not too much it is in fact two little, I am getting maybe 50g of protein a day and about 300-400 calories, the good news is that yesterday I was able to get all of my supplements down for the first time. If I may make a suggestion, never buy the chew able wild cherry Calcium Citrate "lozenges" it is either like sucking on chalk with a bit of flavoring or chewing on chalk with a bit of flavoring.

Now my weight loss has slowed down a bit owing to my lack of activity after surgery. Here is the ever growing chart:

Order of Operations

Hi all,

Now that I am a week into my liquid diet, I think its time to admit that this is happening. If you want tips for surviving a liquid diet I would be more than happy to help. However, its time to talk about The plan again. So the goal is to be able to go to the Grand Canyon Star Party as our first expedition this will happen next summer assuming all goes well. However I need a road map for my acquisitions. Things have been made more complicated by my insistence on a Losmadny G11 for my mount.

It suffices to say that the first purchases need to be the laptop and the telescope, these will be the biggest expenses next to the purchase of a new SUV at some point in the next year, probably next fall. But we can break it down even further, the main problem with building a telescope from scratch is that you will inevitably mess things up. You can have all the wishlists and planning that you want but your going to inevitably meet with the fact that Murphy's law goes double in Astronomy.

Your main enemy is the complexity of open loop tracking systems. Everyone solves this with a guide camera, however there is something much more insidious. I have often said I will never buy a used telescope mount and here is why,

This is as close to a precision mechanical instrument as you can get in our hobby, it requires knowledge of mechanical and electrical repair and it is very sensitive to the weight that you put on it. There is no way you can just flip a switch and let it do its work. It has to be coaxed and finessed into doing its job. You cannot loose patients with it, you cannot try to reason with it. You can only be patient and work with it. If you try to take it out of the box put weight on it and get it to track and point, you are probably going to destroy it. 

This is the problem with mounts, they are a lot like cars, and this leads people to treat them like cars. That is to say that for the most part people treat there cars like shit. They assume that its going to work and when it does not they get frustrated and/or irate, when a car is a mechanical object and hence it must be maintained and taken care of, it does not need near the coaxing as an astronomical mount but the point is that you should not just abuse it and then expect me to purchase it. 

So I am going to buy the mount first, take my time assembling it, powering it on learning to balances it, getting to know its nooks and crannies and when I am done I will buy a telescope and put it on the mount, but not before I have taken the time to understand this object. After the mount then I will probably by a Camera, then the telescope and guide scope package. The laptop will also go in there somewhere since it is just a very useful object to have around. And once that is all acquired there will be test runs in my back yard then maybe in Tucson. The reason not to just get into my truck with a new scope and take it to a dark site is simple, it won't work. The scope won't work, the trip will probably be a disaster. 

Netbeans on Windows

I am more than a little bit irritable since I have started my all liquid diet. We are two weeks out from surgery as of today. The major aggravation is MiKTeX, let me do a stack trace to the beginning, after extolling the virtues of Netbeans, I decided to run it on my windows machine.  This was a mistake as I am using Avast anti-virus software and it sees compilers and IDEs not made by Microsoft as malware. In order to install Netbeans I had to disable Avast. So the procedure for that is:

1. Download Netbeans for windows 
2. Disable Avast
3. Install Netbeans for windows. 

Next I installed MinGW, the minimalist gnu software distribution for windows. (Here is a link to the MinGW installer.) After all of this Avast decided that any attempt to scan the MinGW exes by Netbeans was an attack. So after adding the following file system exceptions:

Then adding the following exceptions to the "Deep Screen" feature:

I was finally able to compile C++ programs. Before I got this far I needed to do something even more annoying. It turns out that MiKTeX comes with its own version of libstdc++, and thus causes your programs to bail, so you have to statically link to libstdc++.a in the MinGW lib directory in order for the damn thing to work. So yeah fun times all around for my first day without food since I was a toddler. It should be noted that on Linux this ish just works. 

The Final Countdown (and thoughts on Cross Platform IDEs *finally*)

Hi all,

As I write this I prepare for my last weekend of eating "normally." On Monday I go in for preoperative testing, that also happens to be the day I start a two week diet of specially formulated protein shakes from Bariatric Advantage.  This is both good and bad, good in the sense that I have my meals planned for the next two weeks, bad in the sense that my stomach is full sized and so these shakes will not in any way satisfy me.

Now, I have been promising a blog post on cross platform IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) for awhile so here it is. To start, there are no good cross platform IDEs, because there are no "good" IDEs. All IDEs are about trade-offs, all of them are idiosyncratic and we must accept this because an IDE is the most general programming tool available. With that out of the way the next problem has to do with language. Oddly the most useful IDEs around are for JAVA.

Eclipse leads the pack of course, and it fits the bill for a cross platform IDE, the problem is that production JAVA code is pretty much an in-house affair, most of the code that escapes into the wild, for better or worse is, C/C++ or Python. This is where Eclipse falls down, it is the ultimate in shitshowing when it comes to C/C++ because CDT is terrible, terrible to set up, terrible to use on a daily basis. The next cross platform IDE isn't cross platform but maybe if your clever, the code it produces is, I am talking about Visual Studio, which is the standard coding platform for any professional outfit. Hopefully your code is ANSI C++ avoiding any of the proprietary stuff you could get some cross platform code, I have done this and it is a monumental bitch.

Finally I have found a solution I think, Netbeans is the best IDE I can find so far. It is truly cross platform it does pretty much every language imaginable and it has a feature for selecting available libraries installed on your system, which is much better than Visual Studio where you have to go through a metric tonne of windows just to add a single DLL to your project. However this a compromise choice, it is not as good for JAVA as Eclipse, it is not a fully featured as Visual Studio but I think it may be the sweet spot.

Consuming

Hi All,

Its been awhile, as most of you know by now I have been cleared for surgery! So my gastric bypass will happen, baring me smoking or drinking a bunch of water the night before on November 18, 2013. After that it will be 6 months to a year of recovery. The good news is if all goes well I will be working again by week 2.

The Plan is back on, delayed by a month, and this delay has wreaked havoc on my finances. But enough about that, this post is about my proclivities as a consumer.

While I don't particularly want to argue about the nature of consumerism, I do want to expound on my distaste for used items.

The problem is the illusion of a good deal.

For certain items, purchase of a used item is a completely decidable problem, does the item work or not? This goes for things like various media, books, etc. However after the items whose operational modes are working or not working things get a little tricky.

I don't like used text books because inevitably they come marked up resulting in information being highlighted that I don't necessarily need, the result is a book that is less useful to me than a new one. For personal items, like clothing or dishes, I cannot get beyond the question of who wore this item before me, maybe that is a little OCD but the result is that used clothes, pots and pans, and mattresses are a no go for me.

Then we come to my personal favorites, complex items, cars, computers, telescopes, mounts. These items can be purchased used, but only after careful inspection, typically this only applies to cars. The issue is not just who used it before but how well did they maintain the item. Refurbished electronic items are a no go for me since they have a higher probability of failure maybe even a lower Mean Time Between Failures. Unless I can inspect the item, I am not going to purchase it, simple as that.

For telescopes they problem is that there are mechanical mechanisms that need to be properly used an maintained otherwise they must be replaced. As far as I can tell almost no one in our society is mechanically inclined anymore hence I do not trust used mechanisms. If I buy a scope on the cheap and have to immediately replace the focuser what is the point, I probably am not coming out ahead. Now if I know the person I am buying from that is another matter entirely but buying something off ebay or astromart, fuggetaboutit.

Mounts are a no go period. The issue is that the guts of the mount are usually garbage at the time of sale. This is because there are many more people who don't know how to maintain there mounts than do know how to maintain there mounts. The result is usually stripped worm gears, bad firmwares and all around terrible tracking from used mounts.

Some may say that I am too picky about what I am willing to buy, but hey to each his own, I am just never going to put anything on my skin that I don't know has come from a factory or further purchase something where the previous owner/manufacturer messed it up.

Denials and Delays

Hi all,

I know I promised a post on cross platform IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) but unfortunately life has intervened. A couple of weeks ago I got word that my insurance company was denying my pre-approval for the surgery on the basis that the surgery was not a covered benefit.

The irony of course is that there are still documents available on the website or my insurer referring to bariatric procedures as a covered benefit. This, along with the fact that the weight-loss center was told that the procedure was covered are the basis of my appeal. I mailed it about a week ago. This is my next immediate move.

As for the move after that its unclear. I need to get insurance that will cover the procedure, thus I may end up attempting to cancel my current coverage and go to an insurance policy which is on the newly set up exchange in Arizona. However, I think this will be costly as I have several pre-existing conditions. Another option is to sue my insurance company, which I really do not want to do since it will be costly. The other options available are to appeal to the insurance regulator in Arizona or go on Access.

All of this has delayed my plans, including The Plan. My goal was to have the surgery in mid to late October so that I would be recovering over the course of the end of fall beginning of winter. Then I would hit the ground running, putting the plan into motion. Now it appears that I am not going to have the surgery until mid to late November at the earliest. This delays my plan, and to be honest, I it has put me in a sort of purgatory, as my body continues to betray me.