wesley888's Xanga

Orbitz!

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:08:11 GMT

Boy! What a mistake using them. A friend told me that their airfare was cheaper and I shopped, and they were indeed a bit cheaper for the departure time and arrival time that i wanted. So I booked my plane tickets for my whole family to our Hawaii vacation for this summer. Just a week after I booked it, they moved my departure time from 11am (which is perfect and usually more expensive) to 8am and increased the price. The price different is not so hot any more but I just didn't want to bother to cancel it.

Guess what? Another couple of weeks later, another leg of my flights got moved again. The departure time and arrival time were closer and closer to the other time slots that I could have gotten from elsewhere and priced just about the same. Sigh... I just didn't want to bother. I was thinking, well, at least I got a similar deal as the other places.

Yea, right. Another few weeks passed. Today, just got another email telling me that once another leg of my flight got moved again! It is now even worst deal than I originally could have gotten from somewhere else.

I will never use Orbitz again!!

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:34:12 GMT

I'm bringing Xanga back - drop a comment if you're with me!

Friday, October 20, 2006

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:37:57 GMT

Wow! I haven't have the mood to update my page for a loooong time.

I've been busy playing with my lightshow setup. Boy! What a task! Just pulling the cables already took me many days. Not to mention spending nights after nights of sequencing the lightshows. Check them out. I even registered a website just for the lightshows. http://www.lightshows.info

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:10:47 GMT

With the soaring gas price, I just tried to ride my electric scooter to the train station again. When I drive to the station, it usually take me about 10 minutes from leaving my house, drive to the train station, find a parking spot in the parking garage building, then walk down to the train station platform. With the scooter, I timed it today, it's exactly 10 minutes as well even though the scooter probably runs just half the speed of a car. But I don't have to find a parking spot, i don't have to walk down the parking building, I don't have to wait for the traffic lights, nor stuck in traffic. It was pretty sweet! :)

The only draw back is that this scooter has very hard wheels. It was design to run on smooth surface and not on the street. The ride to the train station feels like a very strong continuous massage on my feet and on my hands. My whole body still feels like vibrating for a few minutes after getting off the scooter. LOL

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 05:47:56 GMT

Ugg... Too much work to do. I've been working till 4-5am for the last few days. Got some new toys but no time to play them yet.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 03:11:03 GMT

I used my 10" SCT to take some moon pictures and it was more than disappointing compare to using the refractor. Instead of spending $5000+ to get a "slightly" bigger refractor, I just went out and bought a used cheapest 2x teleconverter for my camera. At first sight, it looked great. I took whole bunch of pictures of Jupiter and the Moon. The Jupiter came out just too small. The 4" refractor just doesn't have enough power without using any eyepieces even with the 2x on it. After examining the pictures of the moon, only the center part of the picture comes out crystal clear. Just about 50% outside of the center, the picture started to become blurry. It must be due to the spherical aberration from the cheapo 2x converter! So I went on ebay and bought a suppose to be very good 2x. Hopefully it really worths it.

Here is the picture with the 2x with the blurry part cropped out. LOL. It looks impressive, eh? :D This one is resized to about 1/3 of the original size. Click on it to see the cropped actual pixel size one. You better have a 1600x1200 screen. ;)

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 02:37:10 GMT

Just received the IR filter that only passing the IR and cut off visable light so i played with it a bit. Because the Canon still has a buildin IR cutoff filter that cut off all IR and let the visable light in, there are very little left over IR light to work with. I had to set the exposure to somewhere like 4 to 15 seconds in order to get a decent shots. But it was so windy today and everything came out kinda blurry. I played with the pictures in Photoshop a bit and found that the water color filter make the IR (blurry) pictures very interesting. What do you think?

Actual 3456x2304 hugh size in jpg is 800KB!

Monday, July 25, 2005

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 17:18:14 GMT

On Friday, I really wanted to take the red moon picture coming up from the horizon so I brought my 10" SCT to Robert Moses State Park. The weather was a bit cloudy and there was nobody around. All the mosquito were out to get me. Not a pleasant night. I stayed there for a couple of hours and took quite a bit of blurry picture (due to the weather) and went home at about midnight.

On Saturday, I was debating to myself repeatedly if I should go to Robert Moses State Park again or not, since AOSNY suppose to have the observing session there that night. At around 8pm I checked their forum and someone made a post in the club's forum saying that there would be an hour of complete darkness before the moon rise, so I picked up (almost) everything and I went.

I got there at about 10pm. The sky was crystal clear and pitch blank! It was the perfect condition for stargazing. So I quickly "tried" to setup my telescope, and to my surprise, I forgot my power cord for the telescope guiding motors! So, instead of doing any serious deep sky objects hunting, I just did some unguided cascal observing of the descending Jupiter and 4 of it's bigger moons. Later when the moon came out, i tried the very first time with the Canon Rebel XT on the 4" refractor using eyepiece projection method.

Even with the 820mm focal length of the 4" refractor yield quite impressive pictures, I just wanted to take adventage of the good weather and try out higher magnification via an eyepiece. I had never done that before with the 4" refractor. The focal plane somehow just either too long or too short. I had a tough time to get the camera to get to focus. After disassembled a 2x barlow, and eyepiece, and a variable camera adaptor, I had enough pieces and different combination to finally to get it into focus. I felt like a MacGyver at that moment. LOL.

The result came out quite impressive. However, because there was no power on my mount, the image kept drifting away. I had to turn up the ISO to 1600 so that I can take the picture at a high shutter speed. Even at 1/100 second, the picture came out still not as crystal clear as I wanted it to be.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 03:59:57 GMT

It has been a busy weekend. I'm too tired to type right now. I'll fill in the detail tomorrow when I can think straight. :)

In the meantime, check out one of the pictures that I took last night.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 04:47:15 GMT

Just went to an Astronomy observing session tonight at the Waterfront Park. It's a very small park but got very nice southern view. When we got there a bit after 9pm, the moon just started showing up on the horizon. It's very dark red and dim! It looked very nice even on binocular and small telescopes that the clue members have set up. Too bad I was in a hurry to go there and didn't bring any telescope or my camera of my own. I'll show you one of the lightly orangous moon that I took last night instead: