meeting night

When Jim heard me talking to Charles, he released me from setting up servers for the next day's TANDBERG class. I could come out and play! Yeh! Charles had invited me to join him at Jack Astor's for dinner. I hopped on the tube from downtown and made it to Pape fairly quickly. The platform was surprisingly empty. The bus pulled in after a couple of minutes. Good timing. Charles wasn't answering his mobile phone. I thought it was going to take an hour; it was probably about 35 to 40 minutes door-to-door surprisingly. We talked shop, ASUS netbooks, flat screens, TigerDirect, NOVA, DDO, Olympics. Received the unneeded laptop bag from Paul and my Earth grocery bag. I hitched a ride with Charles to the OSC.

When we walked in, the men's hockey was playing on the big screen! Later, when I saw Doug from A/V, I gave him a big thumb's up. The men were leading!

The lecture by Dr. Youdin was good. He was nervous. Did a brief review of our home system, showed a snap of directly viewed young solar systems, briefly discussed some of the exoplanets. Snuck a couple of hockey references into his short talk. His simulations of perturbations in clouds of primordial gas were very interesting. Planets formed in the spinning vortices, interacting with each other, like eddies in a stream. Like our atmosphere. I asked if he followed chaos, or rather, complexity theory, how large systems and small systems exhibited similar behaviors. Didn't seem like he gave it much weight.
I was very pleased to see my repaired presentation file used, followed by Ralph, along with the supplied handout, printed by Charles. Stuart H's background conjunction photo looked really good. The Uncle Sam image got a good laugh. Diane protested at her image being used. I didn't know that Scott had shot the photo.

At the Gastronomical Meeting afterwards, I sat opposite Uve. He took the last NOVA course. He was very complimentary. I was just happy to hear that he had become a member of the RASC! He had already joined the Yahoo!Group and signed out one of the loaner 'scopes, the Dob 8". We helped him with a number of issues, the biggest of which was sticktion. I reminded him about telescope cool-down time and dark adaptation time. I gave him my email. Chatted briefly with Matt. He offered a Linksys 24 port switch for the CAO. Nice! Then we can get rid of the dLink stuff...

Got a ride home with Tony. He also offered to take Denis home. Along the way, Denis and I chatted about the changes he had made to the prototyped membership pages I had built (and he changed without asking). It was clear that we were going to disagree on some items. But I believe he's going to follow the style that I've established for the Toronto Centre web site. For the balance of the ride to Denis's home, Tony and Denis discussed the possible membership fee increase and the role and skills required of the new staff person National wants to hire. Very interesting.