The Book of Ashes

Typing, an observation and the client function. 4:55AM

An interesting observation: The faster and more competent a typist you become the bigger, and harder to determine, your spelling mistakes become. No longer do you type a letter wrogn or add an extra character but rather you mispell whole words or mix them up. An example in my last post (which I have fixed now) was neck which I wrote as next. My mind confuses close words and replaces them. Hence a spell check won't pick up these mistakes (not that I run a spell check over my posts). This occurs more often with some words than others.

Tonight is our TechTonics work client function. We've been told under strict terms not to socialise with TT people but with clients, not to have more than a few drinks so as not to shoot our mouths off, that attendance is expected and that it is expected we shall work a full day on Friday. Then it goes on to say that we cannot force you to enjoy yourselves but we hope that you do. Is it a party with free drinks and socialising or are we going into a concentration camp in disguise? Its sometimes hard to tell. Anyway I am dressing up for it. Apparently I have taken over Crispy's role in his absence and I've been allocated a frilly top to wear. I don't know about this, I'll wait to see it before confirming my compliance. Apart from that I'm looking forward to the event. In the past I've usually got quite happy, bouncing in a bouncy castle, riding a mechanical pig tandem with a female client (where do you put your arms, theres nothing on the pig to hold on to) and dancing on a disco floor with smoke and fat beats pumping all around us. This year I don't know, but my camera is with me..

A trip to Carters Observatory 10:15AM

As Thomas puts it, you can live in a city but never visit all its places of interest. In a flash of inspiration Bonnie and I decided to head up to Carters Observatory. It was something I had wanted to do for a while but had never gotten around to. Thomas and Martin had also expressed interest so I rang them up and at 8:30 we headed up there. The point of interest though was the sign in book which was mostly signed by travellers, not Wellingtonians. More travellers than locals visit the place. Most people here probably have never been up there.

So the Carters Observatory was pretty cool. We paid $10 for the telescope tour and $10 for the planetarium tour. For the first one we were led up some steep stairs to the telescope by your typical astronomy geek. At the top I almost lost my footing and almost fell back down the steep stairs. The telescope itself was about 2 metres long. It was in a big dome with a slit down one side. The guy could wind a level to slowly rotate the whole dome around so you could position the slit where you wanted to look. The telescope had some cool controls that allowed it to point in any direction in a hemisphere. It was all motorised. I kept thinking it looked like some wicked laser gun and if it had some cool gun noises to go with it, it would be pretty cool.

First off we looked at Mars which although still prominent in the sky was much smaller than it had been a month or two ago. It still appeared as a 4mm disc but due to heat rising off the Earth and general atmospheric distortion it moved in and out of focus. You couldn't really see any detail on it. Still it was cool. Next we checked out Alpha-Centrui. A bright star in our sky which is actually a binary system. It is fascinating to see a star in the sky as a single point then through the telescope as two distinct stars orbiting each other in an 80 year orbit. Next up was a system of stars in a V shape with a red star in the middle. The red stars are the massive stars that burn up quicker due to there huge size. There expected lifespan is less than that of the white star like our own. Also of note was the fact that binary star systems are more common than single star systems. I didn't know that. Last up was a cluster of stars which came out as lightly dotted area. Pretty cool. All up it was excellent. I love looking at stars. We had about 10 other people there, one of which was this pushy little lady who asked silly questions like, so are stars affected by gravity, do they have gravity of their own? Thomas got sick of her and was second in line to look with her behind and he let everyone else go in front of him (from the other side). She tried to push past him but he's big and it was a confined space and he wouldn't let her!

Next up was the Planet-arium (from southpark). This was also quite cool although not as proffesional as I would have expected. We had a relaxed Maori fella taking it. For those who don't know what to expect at a planetarium its just a big dome that you sit in the middle of and look up at stars projected onto the inside of the dome. It was interesting to see the night sky with Wellington lights applied (very faded out stars) then he removed the lights to show us what the night sky really looks like. It was pretty cool. We learnt how to work out due south using the pointers, the southern cross and another bright star. We also learnt a few constellations. By the end of it you get quiet a sore neck though. He got an American girl up to show us how to find south. She got lost (different perspective from that side of the room) and he had a pointer like and took the piss out of her when she couldn't even follow his pointer directions. Anyway all up it was something well worth doing. Now I want to go out and observe the night sky away from the city