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Re: (meteorobs) Late preliminary report
Well, Chris I know a little bit how you must feel. I had written and tested a really cool program to record the magnitude and time of every meteor in a simple fashion on my laptop computer. It allowed me to enter data without ever looking away from the sky, even with thick gloves on. I was really looking forward to collecting all this data effortlessly.
When I got to the mountaintop site, I realized I forgot the laptop's power cord at home! With only 15 mins of operating time left on the internal battery, I just took out my pad of paper and pencil, and did it the old fashioned way.
Mike
--- Chris Crawford <chriscrawford@wavedot net> wrote:
> The primary news was that I faced a comically
> complete equipment failure.
> (Well, comically to a disinterested observer.) My
> computer system, tested
> and retested repeatedly prior to departure, tested
> upon arrival at the site,
> and tested upon final setup, had worked perfectly;
> when observations began,
> it failed. Calm, determined testing and swapping out
> of components
> established that all replaceable components were
> functioning perfectly, that
> power was stable at all components, and that signal
> integrity was perfect.
> Despite the fact that all components of the system
> functioned perfectly, the
> system as a whole refused to function. After giving
> up on the elaborate
> computer system, I discovered that the tape recorder
> was also refusing to
> function.
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