eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog: e Birdseed Bird Cam Back Up... Phew! (And the Moon)

Hi all,

Well, our bird cam is back up. Looks like we had a busted router and maybe a fried network interface card. Anywho... To give some sense of the mess when even a small network goes bananas, here's a shot of the back of just part of our system. (Remember, this is just my own personal network, and it has no connection with the eBirdseed configuration, which is fine.)

So, be sure to check out our rejuvenated eBirdseed.com bird cam

Onward... You didn't think this old engineer would leave today without noting what happened 40 years ago - Apollo 11. The image below is of yours truly sitting by the TV watching the greatest achievement in human history in real time.

Think about that for a moment... The moon shot made the Great Pyramid look trivial. A bunch of engineers living the American mantras of hard work and competition actually put men on the moon four decades ago. The on-board computer system that they used? Well, it had 1/16th the computing power of a $50 calculator available from Staples today. And here's some cool info about the Saturn V rocket that got the men to the moon...

At liftoff, the rocket weighed over 3,000 tons.
Ever wonder how tall the vehicle was? Go to your local skyscraper and take the elevator to the 35th floor, get out, go to a window and look down. That's how tall that thing was.
The rocket consisted of three stages...

The first stage took the astronauts from zero mph to roughly 6,000 mph in two minutes.
The second stage accelerated from 6,000 mph to 14,000 mph in six minutes.
The last stage would drive the vehicle up to 17,000 mph in eight minutes.
When all was said and done, the craft boogied towards the moon at a cool 25,000 mph.

There isn't a lot to write about that special night of July 20th, 1969 that hasn't already been penned. If you were lucky enough to have been born before 1969 and were old enough to grasp the enormity of the event, it was life-changing. For me, it was the first real poke in my psyche's ribs that told me that I had to do something technical with my life. But there was such a complex, subtle beauty there too... the moon, the engineering, the realization of a slain American President's challenge... With that, I'm going to leave with a photograph of the moon. Well done NASA...