Lockdown Day 4

Today is a sad day for us, a Kiwi has died from Corona virus. Our thoughts are with the family.

Following on from yesterday I would like to know who these ladies are with my mother who is on the right. I’m guessing it’s from the same series as yesterday?

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Today we started with a jigsaw puzzle (hey Mary Beadle the younger). It ‘s pretty detailed I have to say.

Later more Boules, a strange race track game and a long walk for Vicky and I. Tonight there was a pretty good sunset over the mountain.

https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1723/pirongia-mountain

Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, ‘Waikato tribes – Ancestors’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/photograph/1723/pirongia-mountain (accessed 29 March 2020)

Story by Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, published 8 Feb 2005, updated 1 Mar 2017

Kia kaha (stay strong) everybody and this too shall pass.

Movie night for the 4 grown-ups tonight, woo-hoo. We are making progress on the jigsaw.

My first real job out of college was as a QC seismologist which sounds pretty grand I suppose. What I actually did most of the time was look at the output of a trace of the 50 odd geophones from a long cable stretched out behind a survey vessel.

The digital equipment was pretty bulky by today’s standards and the seismic recording were made onto 9-track tape – that’s a tape rewinder in the background I’m pretty sure.

Tapes were boxed up 10 at a time and air-freighted to the processing centre. At this time (around 1974) you could probably count the number of satellites on the fingers of two hands and most of those were for satellite navigation (not in geo-stationary orbit I might add, so we sometimes had to wait for them to align before starting a survey line). However, the satellite data was not very accurate so usually shore-based radio systems like Maxiran were also used and a PDP-8 computer onboard calculated the position. Something a modern calculator could handle pretty easily but the PDP-8 took up a whole rack.