Self As Team

As a space junkie, I frequent nasa.gov and astronomy picture of the day sites to marvel at the universe and our attempts to learn and explore it. One of my favorite sites is the venerable Heavens Above created and run by Chris Peat. If you haven’t checked it out, please do so soon as it gives lots of very useful information for observing satellites such as space shuttles, international space station (which is large enough to be seen in the daylight hours), Hubble space telescope and hundreds of others. If you register with the site or plug in your location, you can get lists of dates/times to see things like the space station fly overhead. My kids think I’m a genius because I’ve been known to look down at my watch during dinner and announce that the ISS is about to fly overhead – we all run outside and I start a countdown and poof – right on cue – a big bright star starts a lazy, 5 minute pass overhead. All thanks to Chris Peat’s great web site. You can even get star maps and ground track paths to help you get oriented.

I sometimes forget to check the site so I setup an automatic twitter feed to send me reminders. Was very easy to do …
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Been having lots of fun playing with different versions of ruby using the ruby_switcher shell trickery. This is works great but it broke my slightly tweaked version of mategem (a shortcut for pulling up the gem source in text mate using bash’s auto-complete trick). I am working on a more complete workaround but in the mean time, I needed to replace the gem environment gemdir command with the hardcoded path to my main ruby gems directory. This works for the nominal case again but the longer term solution is to have the auto complete work across multiple gem directories (again based on the gem environment as established by ruby switcher. I’ll post more when I figure it out (or remember to).