For a few years, I have very lackadaisically played along in the Where’s George game. Essentially, it’s a site that tracks the movement of currency through the US. And how’s the currency tracked? Folks stamp bills with something encouraging the recipients to hit Where’s George, enter the serial number, and describe the condition of the bill, where they got it, and what they did with it. It’s a pretty nifty idea, although there have been some questions as to the real legality of stamping the bills.

Today, I found a marked bill in the Jeep — I have no idea where I got it or when, but when I keyed its serial number in, I discovered it was old and started life far away from me. After almost three years, it had traveled halfway across the country, and wound up in a soda machine today, helping quench my thirst.

Kinda cool. Below is a image snipped from Where’s George with the info about my little Georgie.

With Charter starting to do some network upgrades around town (for their home users; not sure if I’ll get any boost out of it yet), I decided to see how my line speed was doing. I check it occasionally, but it’s been a while. Ya know, if it’s working, don’t bother it.

When I ran the speed test (from Speakeasy), I noticed that my downlink speed was about half what it should’ve been, which wasn’t what I expected. Charter’s gotten very active on Twitter lately, so I popped a tweet to Eric (@Umatter2Charter), who was quick to ask for some details. This was way before he gets in, but I check Twitter via my iPhone pretty frequently, so I saw his response later in the morning. He though that I’d need to be home to help troubleshoot, so I figured I’d pop another tweet his way once I got home… assuming there was still a problem.

I got home, found there was still a problem, and tweeted Eric about it…. and that’s when I thought to try the test from a different machine on the network. Sure ’nuff, the other machine was just fine. I was about to send Charter on a wild goose chase for something that was on my end. Not good. I tweeted Eric, and got him off the hook just in the nick of time before he called out the dogs.

As it ends up, my MacPro was sitting at an MTU of 1500, which is not the way it should’ve been set — everything in the house is using jumbo packets instead. Dunno how it got changed, but that wasn’t the culprit. It was my duplexing settings. Again, for some reason unknown to me, the MacPro was sitting at “full-duplex, flow control” instead of “full-duplex”, and through the arcanity of ethernet protocol compliance, that was slowing down my connection as the MacPro saw it. Once the settings were what I would’ve expected, all was well.

I sure wish I knew how things got ugly, but I’m just glad to get ‘em fixed!

My new lens finally arrived today. After PayPal snafus and FedEx snafus, it finally got in my hands.

And it’s a jewel.

First off, the thing looks pristine. I’m always leery of buying things on eBay, but I got such a great deal on the lens, lens sack and lens hood, it was hard for me to avoid. Frankly, if it’s had three uses prior to me putting it on my 40D, I’d be surprised.

I decided to do something quick and dirty, so I took a $5 gold coin, and decided to photograph it. Below is the size of it as compared to a quarter — it’s about dime-sized.

I’ve played with macro lenses before, but nothing like this beast. Everything I’ve read says that this is an incredibly rewarding lens, and can do wonderful things if you have the patience to practice with it. However, in my quick attempt at throwing everything together, here’s what I got.

The image below was taken at 2x life size, and shows a bunch of detail that would be hard to see with any lens I’ve had in my camera bag.

And now for the good stuff. The one below is at 5x life size, and all I can say is “Wow!”

Stay tuned for more playing with this really outstanding lens!

Last week, I bought a new (to me) lens from eBay — a Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro lens — and it was supposed to be sent FedEx yesterday. I expect touchdown in the middle of the week.

This is a lens that will take my macro photography to a higher level. With it, I can blow tiny things up to five times their real size in the frame. Imagine filling a frame with something the size of a grain of rice. Or a bug’s eye. Or a dew droplet. You get the idea.

I can’t wait for this little dude to show up!

Anyone who’s been around me for more than a week or two in my house has seen my eyes light up at the prospect of far off TV viewing. I just love the spring and summer when the weather and the ionosphere conspire to produce just the right conditions to watch TV from Wisconsin. Or Florida. Or Montana. Or Arizona. Or Cuba.

However, the move to digital TV here in the States will really foul that up. Oh, the propagation that allows those things to happen will still be there, but the telltale signs won’t. With analog signals, you can see other strong signals start to bleed through, and when there’s several on the same channel, there’s a glorious whine that is reproduced nowhere else in nature. It’s fun, and is one of my earliest memories of playing around with radio (well, TV is technically radio, right?). With digital signals, I imagine the only heads-up you’d have is unexpected blockiness, or perhaps other kinds of interference that won’t be real obvious as signs of long distance TV signals coming in.

And I’ve been counting down the days until the mandated switch to digital, with woe and despair. This week though, the President’s wish was granted, and analog TV got a four month stay of execution. Yippee! Maybe Barack likes chasing long distance TV signals too.

So now we have what could be the perfect storm. Many stations already have their plans in place to switch to digital, cut the analog umbilical cord, and stop feeding two transmitters and possibly two transmitter sites — our local ABC affiliate was showing commercials tonight indicating that they will be turning off their analog signal at 11.59pm on the old cutover night. I say, let ‘em do it.

Here’s where the perfect storm comes in. Some stations probably will keep their analog transmitters live through June. I’m sure many won’t. It’ll just depend on their plans. But for those that do, they’ll be entering a time when tropospheric ducting and E-layer ionospheric conditions could bring some of those far off signals to me… without having to fight some of the local (and local-ish) stations just to see the far off stuff. In particular, it’ll be interesting to see what our stations on the VHF channels do (channels 2, 4 and 5).

If they all move in a couple of weeks, it could be a DXers paradise around here for four months. From what I can tell, the only VHF station that will shutdown on February 17th will be channel 4. That’ll help, leaving both channel 3 and 4 available for some of that long haul stuff.

And the last bit of silver lining? Canada doesn’t complete its digital transition until August 2011, with Mexico having started, but not completing the transition until 2021. Quiet, mostly abandoned VHF bands, and targets within one E-layer hop from here may make for some pretty cool stuff over the next few years.

Sit back kids, and help me watch for Star Trek in French from Quebec, and futbol from Mexico!

I came home today to find that iLife ’09 was waiting for me in my mailbox. This little box started out 250 miles to my south, traveled 475 to the northeast of its starting point, and then another 375 to the west of its first landing point, to finally arrive in my mailbox a week to the day after I ordered it. What a strange trip it seems to have been.

So, how is it? Well, I don’t know yet. I just got home and got it installed — installation takes a little while BTW — and haven’t yet fired it up. The impressive thing so far is seeing that iLife is supported on G4′s… that’s some old, old iron.

Stay tuned for more!

So, early in January, Apple announced the new version of their personal software, iLife ’09. They said the release would be sometime in January. Sure ’nuff, last Tuesday, folks starting getting shipping notices. On Tuesday, I decided to order mine too. I picked ground shipping, which I thought woulda been okay. On Wednesday, Apple dropped me an e-mail saying iLife has shipped. However, at that point the story gets a little glacial….

Kinda looks like the combination of DHL and the USPS have turned this into a Pony Express event of some sort. And now, with a predicted delivery date of Thursday the 5th, I’m questioning whether the higher cost for faster shipping woulda made more sense. Or, I guess I coulda driven through the snow and ice to the Apple Store. I’m sure I woulda been back here by now!