totm aug 2023 What funny/interesting thing happened in your life today?

[AlamoVampire]

tasseled wobbegong shark. Youre welcome

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Edited May 4 by AlamoVampire

[TheSaint]

It's prom night. Thing #1 and Thing #2 are off. They're going stag, apparently that's what all the cool kids do now, I don't get it. Before they left, I gave them the best advice I could: "Remember, the loneliest creature in the world is a pretty girl. And if the DJ asks you what to play, tell him to play Robert Palmer."

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, TheSaint said:

Remember, the loneliest creature in the world is a pretty girl.

And yet, we'd rather hang out with a bear than a man

Edited May 4 by Bej Kerman

[AtomicTech]

11 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

It's prom night. Thing #1 and Thing #2 are off. They're going stag, apparently that's what all the cool kids do now, I don't get it. Before they left, I gave them the best advice I could: "Remember, the loneliest creature in the world is a pretty girl. And if the DJ asks you what to play, tell him to play Robert Palmer."

Um, where did this advice come from/mean?

[kerbiloid]

Probably, from this.
 

Spoiler

 

It means, do not relax and keep your hand on the weapon, if it's just a lonely pretty girl in front of you.

 

[TheSaint]

The nerds have returned. Thing #2 said, "I hate to admit it, but I had fun." Thing #1 danced with his girl of interest. (Despite the fact that we couldn't convince him to invite her as his date. Whatever.)

[AlamoVampire]

im very salty right now. I am playing Elite Dangerous, its running in the background right now, I had to tab out to make this post as I am BEYOND salty. Ok, so, I am trying to run missions to both rank up and meet the requirements for a certain engineer I need. So, I am on this planet in the 26 Draconis system and mission reqs require I do not trip any alarms. So, I am wandering this settlement and scanning folk. I find 1 guard with a bounty and this is where it all went downhill. The INSTANT I scanned him he opened fire, I did likewise to defend myself. Well, all the guards come running, I am fighting in self defense. The guards trigger the alarm and my mission fails, I take off running to find cover and reup health and shields. I get killed because I am in an unengineered suit with an equally un engineered weapon. Why on earth am I waking up on a PENAL SHIP having to pay a fine for DEFENDING MYSELF and WHY does a CRIMINAL with a bounty that FIRED FIRST just like Han Solo (May the 4th Humor ) cause ME to fail a mission AND have to pay a 3500 credit fine??????????????????????????????????????????? Please, someone make this make sense. This was a very negative thing for me, but, I dont see this qualifying for that thread, so, here we are. But please, make this make sense.

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[Selective Genius]

My workplace has a habit of auctioning off old computers once every 3 years for dirt cheap, and my manager is willing to give me a system with an Intel i3 (6th gen), 1 TB HDD, 16GB Ram along with associated peripherals for like 2 dollars  A new 1050 Ti will prolly set me back by 200 - 250 dollars..

I have a laptop with an Intel i5 (6th gen) and 8 GB ram. For the purpose of playing KSP, will my new acquisition be an upgrade or not?

[Kimera Industries]

12 hours ago, Selective Genius said:

My workplace has a habit of auctioning off old computers once every 3 years for dirt cheap, and my manager is willing to give me a system with an Intel i3 (6th gen), 1 TB HDD, 16GB Ram along with associated peripherals for like 2 dollars  A new 1050 Ti will prolly set me back by 200 - 250 dollars..

I have a laptop with an Intel i5 (6th gen) and 8 GB ram. For the purpose of playing KSP, will my new acquisition be an upgrade or not?

It can't hurt to get a new computer, I think it will help.

Has anyone ever seen Rocketman? Hilarious and very Kerbal.

[Bej Kerman]

17 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Please, someone make this make sense

They'll defend their guards even if their guards are corrupt - being taken to a penal ship is a fairly standard punishment

[AlamoVampire]

Did you know that the word Tag as in the game Tag actually means Touch and Go?

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[Ultimate Steve]

I've been working on a CubeSat for the past 2 years, mostly software and testing, and we uploaded the final code onto it yesterday, it is flying to Texas for integration in a few hours, and will be launching into space on Cygnus NG-21 probably sometime in August, and ejected from the International Space Station probably in Fall or early Winter.

(picture was very zoomed out, that's why it is a bit fuzzy, I zoomed in)

This is CySat-1, a mission to prove the viability of measuring Earth's soil moisture levels using a software defined radiometer (and also to prove that an undergraduate led satellite program at our university is viable). There's many subsytems involved:

• Endurosat OBC, tells everything else what to do
• Endurosat UHF antenna and transceiver, how we talk to the satellite, has the worst documentation of any of the modules and took us a long time to figure out how to use.
• CubeSpace ADCS, has magneto-torquers, star trackers, Earth sensors, a magnetometer, GPS, and a reaction wheel to figure out where the satellite is and point it in the right direction.
• Endurosat EPS, manages power collection, the batteries, and power distribution throughout the satellite
• A breakout board with numerous electronic components soldered onto it for toggling power and converting voltages
• PumpkinSpace solar panels, we bought them (really expensive) after failing to build our own
• Analog Devices AD9361-Z7035 FPGA/SDR/SOM/whatever you want to call it. Power hungry computer that is only on sometimes, and runs our scientific program using GNU Radio and Python on an Analog Devices Linux Distro
• Analog Devices ADRV1CRR-BOB Carrier Board, holds the other Analog Devices board and distributes power and data to and from it
• Mini-Circuits Low Noise Amplifiers and Bandpass Filters to amplify the signals from the radiometer antenna
• A custom antenna for the radiometer

And on the ground:

• An Ubuntu desktop computer running a GNU Radio flowgraph to talk to the satellite
• A software defined radio and antenna (we will get a bigger antenna in the next few months, the one we have is temporary)
• A Windows laptop running a python program (the ground station front end/GUI) to communicate with the Linux server

I have been a programmer for CySat-1 for the past four semesters, programming lead for the past three semesters, and the only programmer for the last semester. My job has been to get these 7 computers made by 4 different manufacturers running 3.5 different operating systems in 2 separate programming languages talking with each other seamlessly. For the most part, we have succeeded, and the satellite has worked during short term ground testing. Unfortunately, we ran out of time for long term testing due to an issue with charging the batteries.

This project has been one relentless string of failures and setbacks and frustrations, so long I'll probably make a video essay about it at some point. It felt like bashing my head up against a wall repeatedly only to find another wall on the other side, over and over and over again. I'm not very optimistic about our chances for successfully completing the mission, we have at least one possibly unresolved critical bug with no leads (and no time to fix), and given that we were discovering bugs literally up to and including the very last day, there's probably more we don't know about.

But I learned a lot, enough that success is one of the possible outcomes. While it is supposed to do a lot more than beeping, I will be happy if it beeps. I'll be even happier if it will beep on command. Anything after that is purely bonus in my mind, especially given that half of university CubeSats don't even get a beep back, so I'm told. I'm proud of how much we managed to overcome, and that this thing finally got shipped off after years of delays, the satellite having been originally conceived sometime between 2002 and 2017 depending on what you take as the start date.

That picture is an expression of equal parts "We finally finished it!" "Oh boy, what if I forgot something? What if it fails because I forgot to change a line of code, and I won't know for another six months!" and "What now? This has been my big thing for 2 years, where do I go from here?"

In a really roundabout way, KSP is one of the reasons I found myself on this project. Part of that was just because it awakened my love for space, but another part of it was that the organization that manages CySat has a bunch of other project teams, one of which was a KSP simpit. I was on that project for one semester because a friend told me about it. When the KSP simpit project shut down, that same friend invited me to join CySat.

It has certainly been an adventure that took me far outside my comfort zone. When I started, I didn't know a lick of C, and barely knew two licks of Python. I came in wanting to do structures/CAD stuff, as I felt that would be what I would suck the least at. But through a quirk of fate, got put on programming instead, something I did not at all feel confident doing. After a lot of pain and a lot of learning , the inter-computer links fell one by one, and we got it to a point where everything (discounting the single use stuff we weren't able to test) works in short term ground testing. While obviously we would have preferred to do more extensive testing, at this point, for a variety of reasons, we've just got to send it.

About eleven years and about two weeks ago, I launched my first Kerbal into the sky, and now, a spacecraft I worked on is getting launched for real. Hopefully, when it gets up there, it shows up as a probe and not as debris!

[Ryaja]

4 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Did you know that the word Tag as in the game Tag actually means Touch and Go?

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What?!?!?!

[Admiral Fluffy]

It’s snowing. In may.

I like snow and cold, but this is ridiculous!

[GDJ]

11 minutes ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

It’s snowing. In may.

I like snow and cold, but this is ridiculous!

Yep. Had that a week ago here, but it pretty much disappeared in a few days.
Now it's raining. That's fine.

[kerbiloid]

Somebody said "May it be snowing!"

And the May is snowing.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

It’s snowing. In may.

I like snow and cold, but this is ridiculous!

1 hour ago, GDJ said:

Yep. Had that a week ago here, but it pretty much disappeared in a few days.

We're having a pretty close shave here. Near damn freezing at nighttime. Municipal heating is set to be reactivated.

[AlamoVampire]

7 hours ago, Ryaja said:

What?!?!?!

When you play Tag and you are “it” what action do you take? Touch the other player and go run away, Touch And Go. 

 

 

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[Ryaja]

4 hours ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

It’s snowing. In may.

I like snow and cold, but this is ridiculous!

That's Utah for ya, I had snow on the ground until noon where I was.

[DDE]

7 hours ago, DDE said:

We're having a pretty close shave here. Near damn freezing at nighttime. Municipal heating is set to be reactivated.

Scratch that, it is snowing right now!

[kerbiloid]

Walpurgis Night and Halloween have been swapped.

Now it's cold in May and warm in November.

[AlamoVampire]

Learned my car has an electric water pump! Was driving to get food when my car suddenly chucked a code and lit check engine. Went to autozone for a quick code read. 5 min later i learn my cars water pump is failing. Call my neighbor to see if he can put one in, checks the amazon and we learn its an electric water pump! 
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[LHACK4142]

17 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

When you play Tag and you are “it” what action do you take? Touch the other player and go run away, Touch And Go. 

 

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"The game has different names in different parts of the UK: 'tig' in Yorkshire and Scotland, 'tick' in the North West of England, and 'it' in the South of England. In the United States of America, however, the game is usually called 'tag'.

In 2018, the popular internet meme "How old were you when you found out ____" began circulating, which stated that the origin of the word tag was an acronym meaning 'touch and go'.  Investigation by snopes.com found this to be false.  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the origin of the name 'tag' is unknown, while the Oxford Dictionary of English speculates it to be a variant of 'tig', which itself is possibly a variant of 'tick'."  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(game))

[cubinator]

I flew a plane today!

I had an hour up in the air in a Cessna with a flight instructor, and got to control the plane for most of that time. It was great to learn how it feels, as I've been considering doing flight school at some point in the future. Of course, I flew over my house!

[AlamoVampire]

welcome to the club! I share now with you words from Da Vinci: When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you will always long to return - Leonardo da Vinci.

I am a licensed model aircraft pilot and a life long sim pilot, and NOTHING compares to having the controls of the real thing in your hands knowing YOU are flying. Again welcome to the club! back around the 97th anniversary or so of the Wright Brothers flight I got to take a fam flight in a cessna, and that hour in the sky was something that I will never forget. 

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