Tommy the plumber says that the discoloration of the baseboard in the master bathroom is probably due to moisture getting in where it shouldn’t, and he figures that it’s due to a bug in the shower cabinet construction. Contact the builder, he says, and they’ll have to fix it for us because it’s structural, and not caulking-related.

A representative from the builder’s customer care department will be in next week to check it out.

When I look up at a sufficiently old moon, I no longer see a face. I see a Rabbit making rice cakes. It’s so obvious that I wonder why I never saw it before.

So I’m sitting in the Service Department lounge at the local Toyota dealer. There was one guy here sitting in the optimum laptop location, but he got up to settle his bill, so I’ve taken it over. It’s a little desk near the phones, and there’s a power point next to me, but so far I haven’t taken advantage of it.

My service appointment was for 9:00 am, and as usual I got up at 8:00, showered, fed the cats and kissed my wife and drove off to the Centennial Hills commercial park to check the car into the local Toyota dealer’s Service department.

I told Gregg the Service Guy about the things we wanted checked out, said I’d be back in an hour and a half, and then wandered down the road to the Sams Club/Walmart shopping area. Time for my own service: a haircut.

It’s pretty cold outside, so I was wearing Lisa’s scarf – the red tartan one that reminds me so much of Dad’s – and my grey woolly hat for warmth. Snow on the mountains… there’s a high layer of overcast cloud but the Sun is hitting the top of Mount Charleston, which looks great with it’s own grey-white woolly hat of snow.

Yesterday, after we picked up D from the airport, we called in at Fry’s Electronics and bought an external DVD Writer. I’ve been getting very nervous about the Gigs of audio files that I have not been backing up, and my personal data directory is now so big that to do a full backup takes five separate CDs. And you know what that means – the more trouble it is to back up, the less likely it is to happen. My last full backup was 6 months ago. If something happened… well, I’d be sad. DVD writer drives of various kinds have been coming down in price for the last year, and it seemed like the right time to get an external USB one that we could swap between our various computers.

There are various competing formats of DVD disks, with various levels of compatibility between them. DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW – it’s a confusing mess.  It seems that DVD+R is more compatible with regular DVD players, and looking at the range of blank media on sale, the +R/+RW formats seem to be more available.  HP seems to have completely switched over to the +R format, and their slogan is “the plus means compatible”.  Other companies are hedging their bets. SONY for example have a well-reviewed DVD drive that does everything.

While selecting a drive to purchase, I was sure that I was selecting one that did both formats, and so I didn’t pay attention when grabbing a bunch of blank DVD-R discs.  However, upon returning home and installing the drivers, etc, I discovered that it could not recognise the discs, and alas, it turned out that the drive does +R, +RW, but not -R/-RW.

Argh! The good news is that +R seems to be preferable, and will probably win out in the long run.

So – back to the point of all this, after my haircut I walked over to Radio Shack to buy some DVD+R media. No joy – they have plenty of CD-R/RW blanks, but no DVD. Ok, no problem, it’s just a little further to walk to Office Max or Curcuit City.

Circuit City was closed until 10:30 am, which was still 45 minutes off, but Office Max was open and a fair choice of brands of blank DVD media to choose from.

Then I walked back to the Toyota Service Bay (via Starbucks for a double-shot latte and a 20-minute sit down with the latest Analog SciFi magazine).

Upon arriving back at the Toyota dealer, Gregg the Service Guy told me the news: we need new brake pads and wiper inserts (confirming our suspicions), and the squeaking we could hear in the air-conditioning fan turns out to be the bearing in the fan motor, which needs replacing. “Luckily” they have the part in stock, so I told them to go ahead with all the items and retired back to the lounge.

So now, with nothing else to do and no distractions, I find myself able to relax and think about writing a diary entry. And having written all that, here’s Gregg walking up saying that the car is ready.

A couple of days ago I saw a faint but steady light in the sky hovering over the Western mountains. A-ha, I thought. Venus is back in the evening sky! This was confirmed the following day by a visit to SkyAndTelescope.com, which also informed me that Venus and a very new Moon would appear very close together.

And indeed they did, although not as close as the website would have had be believe. I took the camera out and attempted to capture the beauty of the scene, but now I wish I’d used my new tripod because there was a lot of shake that kind of ruined the detail. Still… here’s a taste:

In 1669 Giovanni Cassini arrived in Paris and was presented to Louis XIV, who among other things desired to have the most prestigious collection of learned scientists residing at the newly established Royal Academy of Sciences.

Personally, I know the name Cassini as the astronomer who gave a name to the gap in Saturn’s rings – the Cassini Division. But in 1669 it was Cassini’s published tables of the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons that brought him to the King’s attention, but not for the reasons you might think. Although Cassini agreed to join the Royal Academy in the hope of getting his hands on better telescopes, the King’s minister of finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert, want Cassini to work on his pet project: the accurate mapping of France.

Why would a cartographer require the services of an astronomer? The connection is this: In order to draw accurate maps, you need to know whereabouts on the surface of the earth you are, both degrees of Latitude and Longitude. The problem of latitude had been solved some time earlier by taking note of the noonday’s sun’s angle from the perpendicular. (Remember Eratosthenes and the noon sun shining down the well in Syene?)

The solution to the problem of Longitude, however, still eluded scientists without an accurate timekeeping device. Once you declare a specific line passing through an arbitrary location – say, Paris – joining the two poles of the earth as 0 degrees longitude, you know exactly how many degrees East or West you are from that line, providing you know two things: first, choose a specific local time of day (sunrise, sunset, noon, whatever) and b) what the exact time is *in Paris* at that same moment. Every hour ahead (or behind) in time you are represents 15 longitudinal degrees East (or West).

Many scientists believed that the answer to the longitude problem lay in the heavens, and the regular periodic eclipsing of Jupiter’s moons seemed promising. The four moons visible in the telescopes of the day appeared to have a relative motion that was as predictable as a pendulum clock.

So all you’d need, they proposed, was an accurate table of eclipses and the times at which the moons should reappear (in Paris), a table that used the predictable orbital motion to extrapolate these times into the future, and one could, with careful observation using a telescope and a pendulum clock running on local time, determine the differential in time between the two locations, and therefore the difference in Longitude.

Slowly, Cassini worked on revising his tables of Jovian eclipses, training cartographers in the use of the tables, and sent them out across the country. Cassini also corresponded with other astronomers in other cities across Europe, requesting that they make their own observations and return the data to him. He cleared the third floor of his observatory and created a polar-projection map (centered on the north pole) of Europe that steadily made every other map of Europe totally obsolete.

As Cassini aged, he employed his son to assist him in the observations and triangulation measurements. In total, four generations of the Cassini family devoted themselves to creating an accurate topographical map of France, the first country in the world to be so mapped.

Why the “Cassini Division” did not end up being a cartography term, I don’t know.

Book of the month is still The Mapmakers, by John Noble Wilford.

Well, we just sent off a delivery of a bunch of work that we’ve been concentrating on for the last few weeks. With any luck, there won’t be any immediate follow-up work, and we’ll have a few stress-free days before the beta testers cut loose.

It feels good to be at this point, even though we’re probably only half-way done.

Second Cat has taken to coming in to the bathroom when I’m showering and sitting on the ledge next to the shower, waiting for me to finish. Then, when I open the shower door to reach for my towel, she sticks her head in and started to lick up the water drops collecting in the trough at the bottom of the door. A couple of days ago, she was actually eager enough that she figured out that I was *about* to take my shower, and she insisted that I open the shower door for her, at which point, she jumped in and waited for the water to appear. I told her she really wasn’t going to like it, and recommended that she wait patiently outside the cabinet until I had finished, but she just meowed and sat on the drain.

So I turned on the water.

You know, for a fat cat, she sure can move.

A few days later, there she was again, waiting for me to finish. This time, she would actually sit on top of my towel where I had put it in easy reach. This is right next to the glass partition, with me showering on the other side. The only way I could persuade her to get off my towel was to open the shower door – upon which she jumped down off the ledge and stuck her head in to take her morning drink.