Observing run summary

3 nights of worse than grade 4 weather (tau ~.4, i.e. the atmosphere is nearly opaque) have given me a few interesting results.

1. Non-detections of CS 5-4 in a few bright BGPS cores. My best guess is that the pointing was off, though, because I definitely got down to a noise level around 50mK.
2. Lots of CO 2-1 mapping, 13CO/C18O too. That means I can now use this plot: http://dustem.astro.umd.edu/pdrt/co3221web.html to try to measure the incident flux.
3. I can't do homework at the summit. Maybe it's just that I can't do stellar structures homework, but I really am not processing this stuff well. Damn.
4. Running at altitude uphill is really, really hard. All the running I've been doing the past N months has not even come close to preparing me. Need to correct that...
5. "I am inappropriate." I probably violate a bunch of those rules... the important ones...
6. gotta get back to the mountains. Really. Seriously. OMFG.
7. ARGH those papers need writing! Lots of it!

For the next observing run, need the following:
1. Pre-prepared A3 rasters
2. Larger selection of summit music
3. Better sleep schedule preparation
4. More caffeinated drinks per night
5. Cloud cannons.

running at altitude

wow dude. I suck at that.

I swear there were some other things I had to write down but I can't remember them now.

precipitable water vapor precipitates and that can be good

pwv

precipitable water vapor, precipitable water vapor, go away, come again some other observer's day
little HARPy wants to receive
so clear up before I leave

stupid bumping-head old man.

Marc Pound's toolbox

This is neat:

Line Ratio as a function of density, incident flux from Marc Pound. Sadly, straight CO 3-2 intensity isn't included.

python stuff

to get imshow defaults to be nearest neighbor, need to edit ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc. Still don't know how to change default command-line output format.

Do not install 10.5.5

Well, I didn't obey that excellent advice from Charles. I installed the 10.5.5 update. Now DS9 - in my opinion, one of the heartiest and most reliable programs I've dealt with in the astronomy world - won't work because TCL is broken. I doubt TUI or most of the other things I use will work either. That's a tragedy of significant proportions - I NEED ds9 to make my observing files! I can only pray that an update of TCL using port will work... if not I'm basically screwed.

figure*

to make figures/deluxetables span the page in LaTeX:
\begin{figure*}
...
\end{figure*}

PHP and CGI working in the same directory

While it's not possible to get CGI and PHP to work within the same file, you can get .html and .htm files to use cgi/php scripts alternately in the same directory with the following .htaccess file:

RemoveHandler  .html
AddType text/html  .htm
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html 
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html 

If anyone can prove the previous statement false, please do! I spent hours googling and hacking to try to get php and cgi to work within the same file.

Also, the way the above file is parsed makes no sense to me. It is inverted from how I would have thought it should work.

Google search terms for which I win

Adam Ginsburg (3rd)
microwave nalgene (1st)

no-coffee day make me useless

I had a few productive hours after my run, then things kinda went downhill.... in the morning, I wrote two guides and then taught someone else to use that stuff and then I tried to write up my lecture for tomorrow and totally failed. I didn't accomplish anything after about 1 pm. Lesson to me: don't ride no-coffee days at work.

Unhealthy outlier

162.7 lbs - only a 2-sigma outlier from my weight this past month, but definitely unhealthily low. Probably says something about whether I should have played disc tonight. Or something else.

CGI errors on Origins

First step:

tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/casa/casa_error_log

Then, make sure .htaccess has the right lines.

AddType text/html  .htm
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .htm
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

Baking again

Since I totally ran out of food last night (ate my last frozen pizza), I decided it's time to try my hand at cooking things again. That will start with making a bunch of dough, possibly shaping it, and freezing some, fridging some, etc. Homemade pizza is way better.

Need to get pine nuts. 'n stuff.

Hi Kyle!

How's google reader treating you today? I hope that's what you're using.

When you come back to observe at 11:30, can you bring extra beer?

Non-greedy vim

To make .* in VIM be non-greedy (i.e. match just <a href=x> out of "<a href=x> </a>"), use:

.\{-}

List

I have something of a list going of 'hottest girls who won't talk to me'. I think I'll award prizes.

1st prize - the hoppiest beer I can find
2nd prize - baking chocolate
3rd prize - extra dark, extra fine-ground coffee
4th prize - angosteen bitters

Using AWK to fixed-format print in VIM

24,42!awk '{printf("\%30s\%20f\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%15g\%5i\n" , $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10)}'

It's important that the %'s must be escaped, otherwise they print the current filename.

IDL colors

To get IDL colors to 'work right' (i.e. a colortable has 255 colors etc), put this in a startup file:

device, true_color = 24, retain = 2, decompose = 0
red = [0,1,1,0,0,1]
green = [0,1,0,1,0,1]
blue = [0,1,0,0,1,0]
if not strcmp(getenv('DISPLAY'),'') then $
   tvlct, 255*red, 255*green, 255*blue

1 year of data

Weight in pounds as a function of time, starting 8/12/07, with nearly uniform sampling immediately before bed each night.