Shortly after our son was born, I purchased a 30-year term life insurance policy for myself, and a 20-year term policy for my wife. My wife's policy is through USAA Life Insurance.
Today, I received this great personalized letter from USAA in the mail:Did you know that your policy allows you to change your coverage to permanent status without getting a medical exam? [... blah blah...] To change your coverage, please call us... before October 7, 2021.
Either they need to work on their personalized custom form fields a bit, or they really, really know me far more than I realized, because, you know, I just hate being rushed into decisions.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Can I Have Some Time To Think About This?
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Isaac's Pre-K Graduation Today
Today, Isaac graduated from Pre-K school. Pretty special day for him. 
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Show Was So-So, But I Liked The Music
I happened to be channel surfing tonight and came across the series finale of ER. I had seen articles about the finale over the past week or so, but had forgotten it was tonight.
I have never been a regular viewer of the show. For some reason, hospital dramas have never grabbed my interest, although I do remember episodes of St. Elsewhere that were outstanding. And of course the St. Elsewhere series finale spawned its own metafictional universe.
I watched the last 20 minutes or so to see if anything cool happened. Nope. Just some doctors yammering, some important call to be made by Noah Wyle that was left unresolved, and a sudden final inrush of trauma patients - though it's always fun to see Ernest Borgnine still working.
Then the final backwards tracking shot of the hospital played, and I realized the one thing I did like about the show.
The theme song.
It was created by James Newton Howard, who most recently scored the soundtrack for the blockbuster movie The Dark Knight along with Hans Zimmer.
To me, it's a song written in the 1990's as a throwback to the electronic music of the 1980's, reminicent of mid-1980's Tangerine Dream, and perhaps Jean-Michel Jarre, some Vangelis albums, Boards of Canada, Kitaro, and Edgar Froese. It's a song that catches your attention nowadays because it seems so out of place with today's television music and themes, and, as someone who is always interested in hearing interesting new electronic music, it never fails to enthrall me for a few minutes when it plays on television.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
2/19/09 Observing Log
No moon visible, so the sky only washed out from normal Austin light pollution.
The book I have been using to determine which Messier objects to try to locate is Ken Graun's The Next Step: Finding and Viewing the Messier Objects. 
It is a great book with a lot of history about Charles Messier, as well as information and photos of the 110 Messier objects. I also like the fact that all the photos in the book are taken with the same field of view, so you can get an standardized idea of how large each object is compared to others.
Observed these objects tonight:
I also attempted to see M1 (Crab Nebula), but there is too much light pollution from my location to this faint object. I'm sure I was looking right at it in my main scope. I'll have to try again at some site that has darker skies.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
2/5/09 Observing Log
Moon is 5/6 full, so there was a lot of wash-out due to moonlight.
Observed these objects tonight:
I also attempted to find the Leo Triplet (M65, M66, NGC 3628) but the sky was too washed out from light pollution and the moon to detect anything. I'll give it another shot in two weeks when the moon is new.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
2/4/09 Observing Log
One final new eyepiece arrived today, a 35mm Orion Ultrascopic (gives 34x with my scope).
Observed these objects tonight:
Friday, January 23, 2009
1/23/09 Observing Log
New eyepieces arrived today! Orion 8mm Stratus (gives 150x with my scope) and Orion 5mm Stratus (gives 240x with my scope).
The Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas is great for star-hopping for me at this location, 
since the limiting magnitude in the atlas is close to the limiting magnitude I see through my finderscope. I also really like that the book is sipral-bound, so it opens flat on a table and can be easily opened to a particular page and held within my left hand while I'm looking through the telescope, comparing star fields, and adjusting the focuser with my right hand.
Observed these objects tonight:
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
1/21/09 Observing Log
New variable polarizing moon filter arrived today. I also installed the free Cartes du Ciel software program a few days ago and used it to print out a chart of where the planet Uranus is located, in an attempt to see it tonight.
Observed these objects tonight:
Monday, January 19, 2009
1/19/09 Observing Log
Observed these objects tonight:
Thursday, January 8, 2009
1/8/09 Observing Log
Observed these objects tonight: I also attempted to find M93 but clouds intervened.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
1/3/09 Observing Log
Observed these objects tonight:
New Telescope Arrived
Back in grade school, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I replied "an astronomer". That usually got some interesting looks from the questioner, since not many 8-year-olds want to go into that line of work. And of course there were always the people that thought that meant that I wanted to read people's Zodiac signs and forecast their future, and I had to clarify the difference between astronomy and astrology.
When Carl Sagan came out with the "Cosmos" series, I watched it avidly, of course. My family did not have a VCR at the time, so I would tape the audio of all the episodes on a cassette recorder, so that I could play them back later. I especially recall all the great music in that series, much of it early electronic music by Vangelis, Larry Fast/Synergy, and Isao Tomita.
Eventually, when I was about 9 or so, I got a Montgomery Ward 60mm (2.3 inch) alt-azimuth refracting telescope. It was one of those infamous poorly constructed telescopes with a weak tripod, very cheap eyepieces, and low quality main optics. It was good for moon viewing and that's about it. It was mostly useless. As I got older, I dreamed of getting a Real Telescope.
When I was in my teens, my brother-in-law worked at a high school in a district with wealthy families. The high school had a 8-inch Celestron equatorial Schmidt-Cassegrain with a couple of eyepieces and good tripod, and he was able to borrow it for a few months during the summers and lend it to me. That was a Real Telescope, and through it I was able to see the planets well for the first time. Seeing Saturn for the first time through a Real Telescope is a memorable sight. When Halley's Comet came around in 1986, I spent many nights trying to find it from my northern Indiana location using the borrowed Celestron, but was never successful - though I did learn a lot about the constellations in the process. The Comet was a bit too far south and there was too much light pollution along the horizon from my location. I continued to dream about getting a Real Telescope of my own.
Job and family and other priorities intervened for many years. I eventually got interested in computers and went into software engineering instead of astronomy, but astronomy still remained an important hobby of mine. I joined various astronomy clubs over the years, and for many years this page was how long lost friends found me on the Internet.
This past Christmas, I decided to get a close family friend a "beginner" Orion StarBlast Astro 4.5-inch telescope as a gift, and finally decided to get a Real Telescope for myself at the same time.
On January 3, 2009, my Real Telescope arrived. It is an Orion Skyquest XT8 8-inch Dobsonian. Great scope! Quite portable, and excellent optics for the price.
The scope was around $350. In January, I took advantage of Orion's 20%-off-all-accessories sale to pick up some additional quality eyepieces, eyepiece filters, Barlows and an eyepiece case, for about an additional $1000 or so. So, for a total of around $1500, I now have my first Real Telescope.
Things are looking up!
Thursday, January 1, 2009
New Year's Eve Traditions
One of my New Year's Eve traditions is watching the Marx Brothers classic movie Duck Soup. 
I'm grew up in Portage, Indiana, which I consider to be a suburb of Chicago. Portage is in northern Indiana along the Lake Michigan lakefront. On clear days, in fact, you can stand on the beach in Ogden Dunes or the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and look across Lake Michigan to see the Chicago skyline rising above the waves like Atlantis.
And because Portage was close to Chicago, all of the over-the-air TV stations back in the 1970's were broadcast out of Chicago. One of those stations was WGN, Channel 9. And every year in the late 1970's and early 1980's, shortly after midnight on New Year's Day, WGN would broadcast Duck Soup. Over the years, watching Duck Soup became a yearly tradition for me.
It did not make a lot of revenue when it was first released in 1933, but now it is considered to be the Marx Brothers greatest movie and a superb satire. It gained a resurgence in the 1960's and 1970's as it began to be rebroadcast on TV. Robert Ebert now lists it as one of his Great Movies.
I have watched it many times now, but I still find myself picking up new little things even now, when I see it again
Creating JoePeartree's Blog
As a New Year's resolution, I decided to finally create a blog. No better time than the first day of the year! That led to deciding which blogging system to use:
After reading up a bit, I think installing the WordPress software onto your own domain seems to be the best system, but I didn't feel like going through those extra steps right now. I just wanted something quick.
After Googling a bit on the pros and cons of all the above choices, I tried out the hosted Blogger, LiveJournal and WordPress versions a bit over the past few days, and I decided to settle on Blogger for now.
There were many more built-in templates to choose from on LiveJournal as compared to Blogger or WordPress, especially if you pay a bit extra ($20/year) for a LiveJournal "Paid" account. But for most of the templates there, you can't easily override individual portions of the template. On Blogger, everything is editable if you choose to hack the template itself.
I finally settled on a Blogger template that I felt matched my aesthetics for readability and minimalism. I'm still messing around with getting the custom header image to show up exactly right, though.
I also liked the "LJ-cut" facility on LiveJournal that easily allows you to hide sections of a long post with a "Read more..." style link that expands the article when you click on it. I've been influenced by fivethirtyeight.com I guess. Luckily, I found a webpage that describes how to set up the same functionality in Blogger.
Blogger has a lot of widgets you can easily add to your site, though. And of course since it is ran by Google, it is easy to get stats and add context-sensitive ads later, if I ever decide to go that far.
I'm going to mess around with Blogger and LiveJournal a bit more, and perhaps someday I'll move over to an installed WordPress configuration. But at least I'm up and running for now.
So there you have it.
My first blog post.
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