Friday, August 19, 2011

remote file copy

I phoned up to the CAO.

Caught up with Tony. The talk at the L.E. Shore library went well. He finished on time so was able to show them a flyover of the International Space Station from the parking lot. He was a hero! Then he guided them up to the observatory, where Ian, Terry, Kiron, Grace, John, and others were waiting. They had a good time under clear skies. By the sounds of it, there were tons of 'scopes on the pad. Nice!

Tony relayed a little gotcha with the telescope control computer. Or something with his account anyway. The screen saver kicked in. And then the Dell laptop went to sleep. Which was irksome at best. But then when he tried to restart the computer to slew to the next object, he accidently caused the computer to restart! Nooooo! 23.4 minutes later, after Windoze resumed, he was able to continue. We checked the Power Options in the Control Panel but, of course, his limited user account couldn't make the changes.

I made a note to adjust his profile when I'm next there. And I researched options, as opposed to temporarily making his account an admin... I've got some things to try. WinSuDo sounds promising.

Terry bent my ear for a bit. He was trying to figure out how to make TheSky2 (two?!) show NGC objects. I was a little surprised that there was such an old version of this planetarium software on the common computer. I told him I didn't know how different it might be to the version I knew. Still I suggested he look in the View menu for an "explorer" command...

I'll have to look a little closely at the CAO public computer, now that I've locked it down, to see what sort of useful apps are available to the "user" account.

Finally, got on the blower with Kiron. We talked about the gerry can for the weed eater and adding comets into Stellarium.

He had the Paramount ME controlling Dell in front of him (now that Tony was done with it). I walked him through my login and to where my video and image files were located. He tried to copy them to a USB memory stick. I heard him mumbling about some sort of cryptic error. It occurred to me that there might be an issue with the largest video file and a format compatibility issue. But that remark blew his buffer. He was already hooking up his external hard disk. And it went smoothly after that. w00t.

Turns out that the largest file was the recording I started to capture the ISS in front of the Sun. Alas, I did not see that.

My phone battery died before I could ask him when he was returning... Hurry!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Never let a "Kiron" know you are in a hurry.