One problem with the iPod is that it doesn’t store mp3 files by name anywhere. All the mp3’s are stored in hidden directories by numbers. So I was at work and wanted a way I could move songs onto my hard drive there and listen to them. I found a neat piece of open source freeware called SharePod that lets you do just this as well as export playlists or just play songs from your computer that are on your iPod. It does this by running a program that you store on the iPod itself so you don’t have to install anything on the host computer.
Bought some Delta
Delta went down to around 7 a year or so ago after being at 60 before the crash and 9/11. I thought it had to be a good buy except that it’s earnings at that time were -$15 a share and projected losses were $6 a share. It just seemed like a company couldn’t possibly lose that much money. But they bottomed out and went up to around 15 before starting to work their way down again. Earlier this week they released the earnings which were bleak again and their stock was back in the 7’s. I thought it was interesting but I’d hold back. Today it dropped in the mid 6’s so I bought some. It’s very speculative but hopefully it will go up. As soon as I bought it I wished I’d bought more, but that was the greed talking. I will buy more if goes down 20%, but I’m thinking I won’t sell unless it goes up 40%.
Katie follow-up
Today marks 8 weeks since Katie’s surgery (see the update at 4 weeks). She seems about 95% recovered, barely limping and being pretty normal. But I know she can’t really run at full speed or jump as high as she usually does. I took her in this morning and the vet was very pleased with her x-rays. But there is still a pretty substantial gap on one side of the bone where new bone hasn’t filled in yet. That’s normal and he says that at this point there’s almost no chance that she could do anything to mess up the surgery, like pull out a screw or bend the plate.
That means I can start taking her on walks up to the full 2 miles over the next few weeks. After 8 more weeks she will have another follow-up visit and hopefully be given a clean bill of health to do regular Katie stuff.
Meanwhile, Lucy is staying with me for a week while her owners are on vacation. She’s a very cute little version of Katie with a *lot* of energy. Since she’s an only dog in her house she’s used to getting all the attention and toys and it doesn’t work that way in my house. Still she’s have a lot of fun and everyone is getting along well.
See the conclusion to this series.
More Human Beings
The other day I was walking to lunch past Atlanta City Hall. There was a lady on the corner talking on a cell phone. But she was talking very, very loud and was pretty perturbed about something but mostly just loud. It was odd enough to notice, but not really think much about. After we ate lunch we came back the same way. This was at least 30 minutes later. The lady was still on the cell phone and yelling. At no time was she apparently ever listening. As we walked by she got louder and it sounded like she was sort of addressing us. I think what she was doing was staging some kind of protest (there have been a lot lately with the Georgia legislature in session; one day the gay rights group faced off against the family groups that are against gay marriage) but she didn’t have a permit to do the protest. So she brought a cell phone and was just yelling to everyone. Then if anyone questioned her she could say she was just talking to someone on the phone, there are no laws against that.
Space Junk
One of my AvantGo channels I download to my Palm to read on MARTA is space.com. I’m not sure how they make money, but they have a lot of good space-related articles. Today they had one on space junk, all the pieces of old rocket motors, dead satellites, loose screws, and other pieces of debris in orbit around the earth travelling thousands of miles per hour. Even a paint chip travelling at 10,000 miles per hour can knock a hole in a satellite or spaceman. So it is a significant problem and there are all kinds of efforts to minimize any cast-off material or debris. Also there is a project to track every known piece of junk to make sure critical satellites, the space shuttle, space station, etc. can move out of the way if they are in danger of being hit.
This article is about a series of old Russian satellites that had nuclear reactors on board for elecricity. The Russians didn’t want the satellites to fall to earth with reactor cores in them so they included a booster rocket that would, after the satellite was no longer needed, launch the reactor core into a much higher earth orbit that would take thousands of years to degrade. By the time the core would re-enter the earth’s atmosphere so many half-lives would have passed that it would no longer be dangerous. So that was a neat idea right there.
But then it seems that after the cores were ejected, the leftover part sprung a leak in its liquid coolant. A stream of drops came out of the satellite. Each drop is a piece of space junk and some of the “drops” are a couple of inches in diameter. So now there are 10,000 drops of Sodium-Potassium coolant in orbit waiting to hit anything in space at extremely high speed. Oh, and each drop is radioactive.
Then they said that because these satellites were all at roughly the same orbit, that even the non-leaking ones are now subject to be hit by one of these droplets, causing further leaks and even more space junk. In fact they said people are doing research to see if there is already a “critical mass” of space junk that will just keep colliding into each other and producing even more pieces of debris that will cause more collisions and so forth.
Fifty years of exploring space and we may have already ruined it.