June 2004 Archives

It's just started. I'll keep an eye on things and post updates here (newest at the bottom for my convenience).

The SOI (Saturn Orbital Insertion) retro-rocket burn has been initiated and orbital insertion is nominal so far. They're 45K miles up, going about 55K mph and accelerating.

Canbera, the Australian component of the Deep Space Network, is tracking Cassini-Huygens descent.

Congressmen shaking hands with Ed Weiler and Charles Alachi of NASA.

7:42PM 43K miles above the cloud tops, 55K mph.

8 minutes into the 90 minute SOI burn.

The pass through F and G rings went well and the burn fired on schedule. The only scary bit left will happen at 9:12 or 9:13 when the burn is scheduled to end. They continue to follow the doppler predict well.

update: Tekumse notes in the comments (thanks!) that the pictures are now up.
14 minutes into the burn and the craft is following the predicts just about perfectly. We're about to pass through some of the A ring and the signal from the craft may get noisy.

35K miles above the clouds, traveling at 58K mph. Still accelerating as massive Saturn's gravity kicks the butt of Cassini's 100 pound rocket.

The A ring makes itself known on the doppler tracking. Everything going according to plan.

29K mi above the cloud tops racing at 60K mph. The doppler and carrier signal are coming in and out as the craft is behind the A ring.

A ring is still blocking a big chunk of our signal, but not quite as much as expected so we can still track the doppler predict and actual path with some confidence. We're a few minutes away from the Cassini division where we expect to get a few minutes of booming loud signal before we pass behind the denser B ring and that's when we expect signal to get seriously weak.

SOI systems engineer just announce (to applause) the halfway point. About to approach the B ring.

(I just got an email asking about photos. I think the first photos are due tomorrow morning, maybe around 5am, though I could be wrong. I'm not expecting any photos this evening though. The data we'll get here is all doppler now and maybe we'll get some additional telemetry.)

20K miles up moving at 64K mph. 3 minutes from Cassini division and signal increase.

Increase in signal at Cassini division just showed up on the graph.

Tracking the doppler predicts very, very well. Expected hard loss of signal behind B ring in about a minute.

And we're in the B ring with no signal expected for a while. 16K miles altitude at 66K mph.

Navigator Troy Goodson announces that Cassini-Huygens is now an orbital captured object around Saturn. (much applause)

13K miles altitude, speeding along at 69K mph.

Closest approach and speed has started slowing. We're nearly out of B ring occultation.

Leaving B ring, entering C ring and signal is nice and strong (applause).

SOI burn is 92% complete and doppler should track through the remainder of the burn. Everything is looking great!

(It's also worth noting here that the one-way light time to Saturn is about 1.5 hours so all of this has actually already happened a while ago. We're all spectators, even the mission crew :-)

Maybe a slight overburn based on the doppler information, but nothing out of the ordinary. We're just a couple of minutes from the end of the burn.

Applause all over. Burn complete! Burn completion within 1 second of the nominal time! That's just amazing to me.

That's all for me tonight. I'll pick up in the morning with some images if there's anything to show and maybe I'll get around to giving out those gmail invites (I think I have three).

update: press conference underway at JPL. Maybe I'll throw some notes down. maybe not :)

The greatest RSS feed reader in the world just had another release. Forumzilla 0.5.1 is avialable for download and includes some great new features and bug fixes. If you're a Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail user and you read lots of blogs, you really should give this a try. It's fantastic!!

This slate article is pretty nice, coming from msn.com as it does. I have several little nits I'd pick with the article, but the only major complaint I had with the article was that it neglected to mention the Firefox and Mozilla communities' major contributions in testing, bug reporting, and code.

Cassini arrives at Saturn this evening. Coverage on NASA TV starts at 6:30, the orbita insertion burn starts about an hour later, and the crafts will be in Saturnian orbit by a few minutes after 9PM (all times PDT).

Head over to Cassini-Huygens Home for more information.

If I'm not totally snowed over with work, I'll try to do some coverage here as the arrival unfolds. Stay tuned!

I have a couple more gmail invites today. If you're interested, drop your first and last name and email address where you'd like to receive the invite into the comments here at this post. I'll pick a couple of winners sometime tomorrow.

For any developers and QA folks that read this blog, drivers met today and we decided to push the Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 freeze out by one week. We've been very focused on the various branch releases and we need a bit more time to tune in to the state of the trunk. Instead of freezing the trunk tonight at midnight, it'll happen next Tuesday at midnight.

One of the best Firefox articles (actually, I'd call it a "walk-through"), over at Nidelven IT, has been updated. Do give An introduction to Mozilla Firefox, part 1 a second (or first) look. It's filled with great screenshots and describes much of what you need to know to get the most out of Firefox.

Oh dot nine dot one is coming soon. Stay tuned.

Here it is!

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group has posted it's first first stable draft of the Web Forms 2.0 specification. If you're a web developer, this will eventually impact you so now's the time for your feedback.

I've decided that I'm sick of seeing my mug up there on the left so I replaced it with a much cuter picture (and a link to Firefox. Maybe it'll start a trend :-)

If you're an artist and love Firefox, we could use your help making more Firefox buttons. You can read more about what we need over at Blake's blog.

The latest package from the Cassini spacecraft, on it's way to Saturn, contained a very nice photograph of Titan. Go check it out.

Cassini's arrives for orbit insertion around Saturn in 4 days! It's getting exciting :)

This has to rank up at the top of my "favorite recent Firefox blog posts" list:

I have all these series of day-of-the-week underpants from years of buying stupid underwear, and when I get dressed I just sort of grab whatever's on the top of the drawer willy nilly, with no concern at all for days. Today I wore a pair and I brought a pair to wear after I showered at the gym, and wow! they're both Fridays! I thought it was neat. Oh and also? Firefox rules.

Not sure what their algorithm is, because the invites have really slowed, but I've got three more today so I'll hold another drawing this evening. Toss your full name and email address into a comment to be entered into the drawing.

update: failure to included required information will result in disqualification from the drawing.

update: all gone.

Regardless of your politics, I think this is a movie worth seeing. I saw it this evening and it was definitely interesting.

update: Sorry, I really don't want my blog to turn into a political flame ware. That wasn't my intention when I posted here. I've removed and turned off comments for this post. Hope that doesn't offend anyone.

I've bounced around between a few different on-line map services, but Yahoo Maps, with their new wi-fi hotspot info pushes them to the top of my list. Good stuff. Good enough that I don't even mind the Intel advertising.

[08:38] <Asa> we should write our own press release :)
[08:38] <Asa> "Camino is good. You should get it. -- Mozilla Foundation"
[08:38] <pinkerton> heh
[08:38] <Asa> I'm good at press releases ;-)
[08:38] <Asa> actually....
[08:39] <Asa> "The Mozilla Foundation announces that Camino is good and you should get it."
[08:39] <Asa> that's the proper format, I think.
[08:39] <pinkerton> heh
[08:41] <Hixie> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA | The Mozilla Foundation announced today that Camino, a Web browser for the Mac platform, is good, and that you should download it. "It is good. You should download it", said lead developer Mike Pinkerton. Many users have announced their intent to download the browser in order to remain sexually active. "I don't want to risk no longer being cool", said one user. Camino is available from the Mozilla Foundation Web site.
[08:41] <Hixie> ^ that's the right format.

Camino is good. You should get it.

OK, they decided to give me some more Gmail invitations. Drop your full name and a working email address into the comments here and I'll select about 18 winners this evening. It's not going to be a drawing because I want to give some priority to people I know or at least recognize. Still, I think I've covered a lot of them so if you're one of those long time listeners, first time callers, you've probably got a shot this time.

update: OK, all gone. We'll see if they give me more.

I also forgot to mention the new bookmarks manager goodness that Myk Melez (of Forumzilla fame) checked in recently. It makes organizing bookmarks so much easier. If you're still using that old and boring 0.9 release, it's time to get current ;-)

It might even be enough to get me to start organizing bookmarks again :) I use about 20 bookmarks and most live on my personaly toolbar in a few folders. Other than those, I rely on auto-complete, custom keywords and memory to get to the sites I'm looking for so my bookmarks list is pretty flat and pretty useless.

I really like the new Firefox secure site notification UI. What do you all think?

I think most users will be a lot more likely to notice it in the Address field rather than the lower corner of the status bar.

I posted a few links to some Firefox feedback but I didn't see much feedback here. It's been about a week now. What do you all think of the 0.9 release?

Putting aside the profile migration problems, the extension API's lack of legacy support, and the few new crashers, I'm impressed with Ben's mad dash to (near) feature complete by mid-june and I look forward to seeing the developers iron out the wrinkles and smooth over the bumps for the 1.0 beta. I'm also looking forward to further improvements in the Winstripe theme. Oh, and wow, that update.mozilla.org site sure is rockin'.

Today is Gervase Markham's 26th birthday. Happy birthday, Gerv!

Got a dozen more Gmail invites. If you're a regular commenter here at the blog, drop your first and last name plus email address where you want to receive the invite into the comments here. Once I've wrapped up with regular commenters, I'll move on to "long-time readers, first time callers" :-)

update: OK, all gone for the day. There'll probably be more tomorrow.

I don't watch a lot of TV and what TV I do watch is stuff that I consider a step above. One show I've been watching since its inception is Six Feet Under.

The season is young and so maybe I shouldn't be concerned yet but I'm afraid that it may have turned a slightly different direction sometime late last season and it's now picking up speed and curving further off.

Episode 40 seemed intended to pick up last season's viewers and collect a few new ones so I can understand how the writers would spend so much time on each of the living characters but tonight's episode, though it did start out with promise, fell short for the second time this season.

I hope they don't forget that the dead person's story needs to play a real part in each episode. Without that, it's just another soap opera rehashing themes that have filled out the soaps for decades.

One of the things that I believe makes Firefox such a great application is that it doesn't try to please everyone. Instead, it leaves niche features to extensions. While I personally don't need a Bible Toolbar, there's probably an audience for it.

Rafael Ebron is now working with the Mozilla Foundation to help us with marketing Mozilla products. You can read more about it at his blog.

Well, the drawing thing just got to be too much work. Without spending some time I'm not interested in spending, I'm not keeping up with who has one, who wants one, who already got one, etc. So here's what I'm gonna do. I've got 12 more accounts to give away and I'm gonna give them to the first 12 notblog "regulars" who post to this thread. To qualify as a "regular" I'm setting the arbitrary bottom limit that you have made at least 3 comments before my first gmail post. If you think you're a regular, post a comment and the email address where you'd like to receive the invite.

update: if you think you qualify, I still have more to give out.

update2: well, that's all for today. I wasted four invites sending them to email addresses that didn't exist so for next time, be sure to give me a working email address. Google apparently doesn't give back invites that aren't accepted or that bounce.

Mozilla had stories on slashdot.org every day for the last six days. On Monday, there was a story on A Look at the Newly Released Mozilla Firefox 0.9. On Tuesday, it was Mozilla Project Officially Releases Firefox 0.9. Wednesday they posted Thunderbird 0.7 Released. On Thursday, it was Mozilla 1.7 Released. Friday we had Less is More: Thunderbird 0.7 Review and today it's Nokia Invested In Mozilla?. We've been pretty busy, I guess. With 11 slashdot stories so far this month, and 16 stories in the last 30 days, I think we've set a Mozilla record for most /. noise in this short a time period. I don't think we got this much even around the Mozilla 1.0 release.

Since I don't get any website stats from my otherwise very cool hosts, I'd like to throw up one of those counters like everyone and his brother put up on their websites in the early days of the "personal homepage" explosion. After a couple of Google searches, it's obvious to me that there are way too many of these free services for me to evaluate so I'm turning to you all for a recommendation.

The only one that jumped out at me was OneStat's and only because it occurred to me that I might be able to have a tiny bit of influence on their web browser market share statistics (which often get quoted in the media and which I think under-represents Mozilla) since I've probably got a few readers using Gecko-based browsers.

What do you all think? Do any of you use free counter services? Is there a better solution? (I don't pay for hosting with mozillaZine so I'm not gonna complain about the service ;-) They've got their hands full keeping the forums up and whatnot.)

And this round goes to BlueMM, Maneesh Gupta, ej2, Ben Tucker, Sander, Tony Grisier, Juuso, Rob Speicher, Jugalator, Yegor Turin, and Greg K Nicholson. To claim your invite, please send an email to asadotzler@gmail.com with your first and last name, and the email address where you'd like to receive the invitation.

I had 12 to give away and I hope you won't mind that number dropped to 11 because I gave one to my mom (who entered the drawing, but shouldn't have had to.)

I'll hold another drawing as soon as I get some more invites or if any of these aren't claimed within a couple of days. I may have also included people who asked to be removed. The number of entries is more than I ever expected and getting too much for me to manage. I honestly thought it was going to mostly be people who actually read this blog or participate in Mozilla or other shared interests. Not a problem, but don't expect me to do a perfect job on keeping everything straight.

As promised, here is our first release candidate for 0.8final. Please test the heck out of it.

Note that the version still says 0.8b+. I'll change that next week as we finalize the release schedule.

Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox, has revamped his blog and has a great post on making Firefox 2.0 cool where he's soliciting ideas for a school project that could be incorporated into a Firefox 2.0. Give it a read and while you're there, bookmark Blake's site. He's gonna be one to watch in the coming years.

I'm sure this will come to an end soon, but I've got another dozen or so gmail invites to give away, so if you haven't put your name in the hat at one of the other posts on this subject, you can do so here. Tomorrow sometime I'll do another drawing and hand out maybe 12 more accounts.

It's been baking for a while now, but it's finally done. If all goes well, I should have Mozilla 1.7 pushed out momentarily.

...and it's here

Scott Collins (who needs to post more ;-) spoke with Jorge Castro at Ars Technica recently and the interview is now available.

Alfons points to a New Scientist article that discusses the news dished out at yesterday's JPL press conference. It's worth a read. Thanks Alfons.

Daniel Miessler, over at Lockergnome has written a very good article on Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer and move to one of the alternatives. He recommends Firefox. It's a good read and the kind of article that you may want to pass on to some of your less technical friends.

Henrik Lynggaard, Natalie, Pacman, José Jeria, Olivier Cahagne, and Peter Nilsson are the six winners today. If each of you can email me at asadotzler@gmail.com with your first and last names, and the email address where you'd like to receive your invites, I'll send them right out.

Congratulations, and to those who didn't win, I'll hold another drawing as soon as I get more invites.

You know you want it.

You can read about it at the Firefox 0.9 press release, the mozillaZine Firefox 0.9 article, and the newly revamped Firefox product page. another update: Jesse's put together a great Burning Edge page on what's new in Firefox 0.9.

update: Parker Morse, over at Flashes of Panic, has renewed his offer to help anyone experiencing difficulty migrating to Firefox. Also, if you know how to use IRC, there are lots of very helpful folks in #firefox on irc.mozilla.org. Oh, and don't forget the mozillaZine forums update and Slashdot finally noticed.

Others are talking:

Joel on Software
the-smarts.net
redemption in a blog
Maladjusted
Tools . Komlenic . Com
Robert Accettura
Pero Vera's Weblog
roblog
The Industry Standard
The Burning Edge
streettech.ch
Static in the Ether
wonko.com
Not Quite Random
Jacob's Mozilla Tips
digital media minute
blizzle.com
Red Hot and Daily
Work in progress
Fishter's Blog
The Word
Pained.net
Leo Laporte
Falconey's blog
ForgetFoo
Greg Chittim
Luminous Monkey
Newsfilter.co.uk
8BitJoystick.com
Neowin
Good Blimey
Chinwags from Abu Dhabi
Mozings
Dandelion Wine
dark matter
Neil's World
deviantART
Jacob Carpenter .com
tAylott42
Outside the Beltway
The Icelander's Blog
Us and Them
Justelise
Not the Total Ninja
Mirabilis.ca
TraderMike.Net
Scott Sizemore
twenty4.org
Circadian Shift
freemode.net
Son of Tom and Geri
ericd.net
SlothRadio
Geek Girl 4 God Weblog
Letters to the World
ink from the squid
octopus dropkick
Not Quite Random
Igor's Sphere
Zen, and the Art of Blogging

(more as I find them)

OK, I've got a couple more invites. If you didn't put your name in the hat over at the earlier post you can put it there or here now. If you put your name in and you no longer want or need a gmail account, then let me know here to exclude you from the next drawing which I'll probably do sometime tomorrow.

update: I've got about 6 or 7 invites to give away so your chances are improving :-)

update2: OK. I'm closing the door and reaching into the hat in 1 hour. I'll create a new post to announce the lucky 6 winners.

In anticipation of this evening's Firefox 0.9 release, Slashdot.org has posted an item on the review by Mad Penguin. I really like the bit about the "small warm puddle".

Also, mozillaZine.org has a piece up on the new Winstripe and Gnomestripe themes. If you didn't get enough of the "it sucks!" "no, it rocks!" thread from the 0.9-pre article, maybe there'll be more here :)

Check out the new Mozilla Store. It's much improved in usability and style. Enjoy, and buy lots of stuff!

update: and you can see nice big pictures of all the merchandise! See a large view of the firefox t-shirt and a nice big firefox plush toy.

We're t-shirt signing rock stars ;-)

And finally, the good pictures are starting to come in. Head over to the Cassini site and see for yourself. Great stuff!

To jump directly to the images, here are some links:
The Face of Phoebe
Phoebe's Surprise
Crater Close-up on Phoebe

update: The caption for "The Face of Phoebe" says "No enhancement was performed on this image" but it's pretty clear to me that they edited at least four spots in the area around Phoebe. What do you suppose they were airbrushing (poorly, I might add) out of the picture? Background stars or other moons? Dust on the camera lense? Also, do you think the airbrush was intentionally obvious? If so, why not note that in the caption?

I suck at CSS. Why can't I get this left-floated image to stay within the space for the post without this extra clear left paragraph?

The winners of the first drawing are RabidPenguin, Lim Chee Aun, and brewthatistrue. Please contact me at asadotzler@gmail.com with an email address where you'd like to receive the invite. If I don't hear back from you in the next couple of days, I'll re-draw for uncollected invites.

Congratulations to the first group of winners. I'll let you all know as soon as I get another batch of invites (if it happens). Previous winners will not be eligible for the next round.

update: oops, I can't count. Sorry for that. I only had three invites after awarding the original contest winner. I removed the 4th name that I drew. Sorry again for the confusion.

update2: man, I've made a small mess of this drawing. I only had 3 invites and I drew and posted four winners. The fourth name I drew was Robert Morris. I quickly removed it. Then, thinking that Robert might have seen it and been dissapointed at finding his name removed, I found a friend with an extra invite and asked him to send it to the wrong person -- Daniel Morris, who didn't even enter the drawing. Well, I've managed to get one more invite so now Robert Morris is once again the 4th winner today. Robert, please email me at the address listed above to claim your prize.

OK. I've read through all of the entries to the contest and I didn't like any of them :-) Actually, I sort of liked several but I'm not really interested in making this requre any real time or effort on my part. Andrew Sidwell suggested "find people who want one, and then choose between them at random to be fair" and that's what I'm gonna do. So Andrew, you're the winner. Email me at asadotzler@gmail.com and let me know where to send the gmail invite.

Use this thread to let me know if you want an account and I'll randomly pick (you'll have to trust me) from the commenters each time I get a new account to give away.

update: I have several accounts to give away in this first round. After that, I'll pass them out as they become available.

update2: I'll do the first drawing mid-day Sunday (PDT) or when we hit 50 names, which ever comes first.

update3: OK, I must admit that I'm surprised at the number of entries that came in over night. I really didn't think that this many people even knew my blog existed. In my happiness that so many of you came to read my blog, I've dropped the "or when we hit 50 names" closure. We'll have ourselves a drawing sometime in the next few hours.

When I get more invites to hand out, I'll announce it with a new post but I'll continue to include the entries from this post in future drawings so no need to repeat this. One caveat, though. I'm going to announce the winners in a post and I'll expect a reply within a couple of days. If I don't hear back from a winner within a couple of days, I'll hold a new drawing for that invite.

update4: First drawing completed.

These are just thumbnails and the high resolution images will hopefully come in later today. Click the image to see a larger version.

update: while we're waiting, here are some pics from Opportunity's RHazCams showing her descent into Endurance crater. I particularly like this one.

Happy birthday, blake!

If you don't know who Blake Ross is, you should check out his blog.

update: link updated.

An early press release is up but still no pictures. The release suggests we'll get some later today. I'll update as soon as I see anything.

They haven't posted the Phoebe flyby pictures yet, but the most recent Cassini photo, this saturn shot sure is pretty.

Things are starting to heat up with the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Keep an eye on the web site as Cassini makes it's first major rendez vou today, an encounter with the intriquing Saturnian satellite Phoebe.

June 9 views looked like this and June 10 views looked like this. These early looks are already far superior to anything we got from Voyager 2 and today's flyby just before 2PM Pacific time promises to be dramatic.

Phoebe interests planetary scientists because it has a retrograde orbit, opposite of the inner Saturnian moons, and it appears to be made of a darker material than the others. There's been speculation that it may have been a Kuiper belt object before being 'acquired' by Saturn. Photographic, spectroscopic, and radar data from the Cassini June 11 flyby at a distance of about 2,000 km will hopefully help scientists to better understand Phoebe's history and the history of the solar system.

After this, it's less than three weeks until Cassini-Huygens reaches Saturn!

And, while I'm on a planetary exploration post, if you weren't excited by the last Spirit images, check out this image of the hills. Wow! She's gettin' close. (and if you've got red and blue glasses, check out the stereo image.) Oh, and don't forget her younger sister, Opportunity, who just took her first steps into Endurance crater yesterday. Such exciting times to be a space fan with internet access :-)

Ray Charles put his soul into his songs and changed music forever. He will be missed.

The Spirit rover has passed the three kilometer mark on her odometer and this is what she sees.

Ben and the Firefox team (which I guess includes me) have released a pre0.9 build for final testing before the upcoming Firefox 0.9 release (hopefully next Monday). There's a pretty good review with screenshots over at Neil's World if you're looking for a quick rundown on what's new and what it looks like.

For those of you (like me) who have been playing around with Firefox on USB portable storage devices (flash keychains, etc.) you should head over to the Portable Firefox page at JohnHaller.com and download a ready-to-go package of Firefox 0.9pre. Nice work John!

I just read over at martian soil that the rover folks are working on strategies to survive the Martian winter and get the rovers going again in the spring. This Space.com Wintering on the Red Planet section of the rover update article is really exciting news.

Any minute now.

update: ...and here it is.

I'm getting semi-regular gmail accounts to give away and I think I've got my friends and family covered so now I'm going to offer up accounts to blog readers each time I get another one to give away (which seems like about once every few weeks). Most of you folks probably already have accounts or don't want them, but I'm sure there are at least a few people who are curious.

I'm not sure how to give them away so I'm gonna hold a contest. The prize is the first gmail account and the contest is to suggest the best way to hand out future accounts. I have no idea if I'm going to even get future accounts to hand out or if Google will just open it up to everyone before I get any more but they've been fairly regular so far so what the heck.

The contest will close at the end of the week so comment your suggestions here at this post.

update: Wow. I swear I didn't copy Stuart's post but it does look like he came up with this idea first. Feel free to participate in his contest too :)

I missed this news while I was away on vacation, but it's very exciting so for any others that missed it, Opportunity will enter Endurance crater. This is a huge crater with very steep walls and the science and engineering teams have been considering a descent into the crater for some weeks now. I had predicted that they wouldn't take the risk of not being able to climb back out but I guess I was wrong.

It sounds like they plan on dipping into the crater about 7 meters, doing a few days of science, and then attempting to climb in reverse back up the 25° slope to escape the crater. This climb will be right up against Opportunity's limits and requires a solid rock surface but the testbed runs at JPL have apparently given the engineering team confidence that Opportunity can pull it off.

You can read more at the June 4 press release. I've got my fingers crossed and I'll let you know how it turns out as soon as I hear anything.

I forgot in my previous post to say thanks for all the email (and a couple of blog post) birthday well wishes. For those of you who asked, I'm 30.

I got a few comments and a couple of emails about the Firefox "theme drama". I skimmed the mozillazine thread and the slashdot thread and the thread at Kevin's blog and I see a lot of heat and very little light. I don't expect to read them in their entirety because it just doesn't look like it's worth my time.

For those who are wondering, I love the new look and I've loved it since I first saw it a while back. I think it looks grand on Windows XP and Gnome Linux. We have an awesome visual design team and they haven't let me down yet.

On other Firefox news, 0.9 is coming and it's gonna rock. So is Mozilla 1.7 (my current headache) and it's great too.

I'm back. The trip was great. I'll hopefully post some pictures soon but I've got a good bit of catching up to do so it may be a couple of days before I'm posting regularly again.