Well, it’s probably official enough to announce now, I guess.  I’ve had a signed employment agreement for a while, but there was still stuff going on in the background. But this morning I got an official start date.
On 8/25 I’m starting a long-term contract at Lockheed (working on ERAM, which is air traffic control software). The contract is through Aerotek.
So I finally broke down and replaced the (broken) 8.5″ Epson R800 (which doesn’t do B&W at all well) with something a bit better—an Epson 3880, which prints up to 17″ wide and does gorgeous B&W (they both do quite good color).
There is, however, one other slight problem—where to put it. I’ve let the office get a little, um, cluttered, and this printer is a lot more than twice the size of the last one so I can’t just replace it in place.
And significant progress has been made. I need to settle some power and data connectivity issues, and carry that big box down into the basement, which may be a bit interesting. But I should be printing tomorrow.
The stuff on the shelves can now be sorted in smaller groups, and the stuff behind the shelves integrated, and stuff on the computer shelf. And eventually a lot of the stuff on the other shelves where the second closet is supposed to be can be moved and sorted, and the closet built, and some of the stuff moved into it. And, in the end, these new shelves removed again to open up that floor space. But they give me space to do the sorting needed now, which is a big win.
All better now, but last week I finally dealt with the persistent DSL problems (requiring CenturyLink to both replace the wire from the house to the pole, and also fix a corroded connection in a box a block and a half from here), start dealing with the Airave nano-cell dying, and replace the UPS that was supposed to keep the household network and phone system going through a power failure.
Still waiting for the second replacement Airave; the first claimed to come up okay, but wouldn’t connect to my phone.
Along the way I also dealt, finally, with the DSL noise on the second household line (I had to completely rewire the input side of the wiring panel for the phone lines to make that possible, is why it took so long to get to).
So, here’s the new panel, not that different from the old panel.
Back then, we posted pictures of department heads and trouble-shooters and such on the bridge to help familiarize volunteers with the people with authority in various areas. We found these going through the Minicon archives last weekend. There are some more, not Polaroids, that I haven’t scanned yet because I haven’t figured out how to clean them (there’s gunk on the front). (click photo for gallery)
I remember reading about this back in one of the mainstream photo magazines in the 1960s. At the time, Zeiss was taking a lot of flack for making slow lenses (they made very good lenses, but for lots of uses, their lenses were too slow for the new, gritty, world of 35mm photojournalism). This lens was a major counter-thrust in that war. The lens consisted of an enlarger condenser element, cobbled into a mount, with an aperture and so forth.  Zeiss was saying very loudly that anybody can make a fast lens if you don’t care how good it is.
See Petapixel article for more detail.