This is crazy.\u00a0 I kicked off the LAF Tuesday night before I went to bed, and by morning, it had scanned about an eighth of its tasked area by the time I headed out to work.\u00a0 When I came home, it had surveyed nearly half of star’s surrounding area.\u00a0 I received not a single email or tweet throughout the day.\u00a0 I even checked on the computer again before we left for the movie and all was well.\u00a0 The log was empty except for the occasional update on the antenna’s position.\u00a0 As I said before, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything in the narrow band surrounding star HDS-288.\u00a0 At least not in the visible spectrum.\u00a0 I was mulling over the idea of relaxing the frequency scan range but I eventually decided to do this only on completion of the this pass.\u00a0 After all, the job was now half done.\u00a0 If this first run failed, I could always tweak the parameters and try again later.<\/p>\n
So, we headed off to see “The Fifth Element”.\u00a0 I really love this movie.\u00a0 It is an adventure, comedy, love story, and sci-fi all rolled into one!\u00a0 Anyway, on the way home I decided to turn on my iPhone.\u00a0 I had turned it off when the movie began around 8:00pm.\u00a0 It was now more than two and a half hours later.\u00a0 The phone immediately began to shake like a kid in a candy shop.\u00a0 I was driving on the highway at this point, so I threw the phone to Zoe.\u00a0 She gave me a dirty look, but her eyes opened wide as she read the display.\u00a0 She read it out loud to me: “You have 117 emails from the LAF… Oh, and one from a very important online vendor.”\u00a0 I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, and slammed on my breaks.<\/p>\n
The triggers were firing all right.\u00a0 Zoe read the first message: “Are you having problems satisfying your loved one at night?\u00a0 Your troubles are now over!\u00a0 We deliver affordable Viagra discretely to your door…”\u00a0 I smiled at Zoe, and shook my head.\u00a0 I grabbed the phone back and read the first LAF message.\u00a0 It had the subject: “Signal detected, locking in frequency”.\u00a0 In it contained some low level diagnostic info that I could examine later.\u00a0 The second message read: “Signal analyzed.\u00a0 Frequency Modulation detected.”\u00a0 I quickly jumped to the third message which read: “LAF now recording to disk 0x0”.<\/p>\n
What followed were nearly 100 emails containing updates to the ongoing data recording.\u00a0 The last email put the data recording at around 93%.\u00a0 I panicked.\u00a0 “Zoe, we gotta get home – now!”, I said.\u00a0 I was about to slam on the gas when I glanced up and noticed the red and blue flashing lights in the rear window.\u00a0 Crap, just what I needed.\u00a0 It seemed like forever, but a policewoman eventually got out and made her way over to our car.\u00a0 She asked me why I was parked on the side as I was.\u00a0 She then looked at Zoe and said: “Are you ok?”\u00a0 Zoe smiled and said she was.\u00a0 Then I told her we needed to get home to my computer which had been sending us urgent email.\u00a0 I didn’t realize how that sounded until the policewoman asked me to step slowly out of the car.<\/p>\n
For the next ten minutes I was asked to walk lines and perform endless tricks.\u00a0 Eventually she asked me what I do for a living.\u00a0 When it became clear that I was a “geek” by trade, my behavior no longer seemed as strange.\u00a0 Eventually she let me go, but the whole ordeal took way too long.\u00a0 When she left, I tried not to rush home because I didn’t want to stop again, and this time have to explain why I was speeding.\u00a0 When we arrived home the house was dark.\u00a0 Zoe turned on the lights while I ran to my office to check on the LAF.\u00a0 The screen had timed-out and was black, so I quickly jiggled the mouse and brought up the LAF console.<\/p>\n
The last entry in the LAF log read: “Disk 0x2 exhausted, LAF shutting down collection”.\u00a0 Crap.\u00a0 Crap.\u00a0 This is exactly what I didn’t want.\u00a0 I looked at the current status indicators which displayed the current position of “God’s Ear”, but “No Signal” was currently being detected.\u00a0 I was exhausted at this point, but I was even more curious, so I\u00a0 scanned the beginning of the recording on the first disk.\u00a0 For frequency modulation I simply record the demodulated wave.\u00a0 On the screen I saw a single pattern continuously repeating. There were equal sized waves followed by silence for an equal amount of time.\u00a0 After closer inspection, I counted and found each set contained 42 waves.\u00a0 Not very exciting.<\/p>\n
This was most likely a terrestrial signal, and not one from space.\u00a0 Probably just a test pattern from some military vehicle.\u00a0 Ah well.\u00a0 What a day.\u00a0 Tomorrow night, after work, I’ll cross reference the last sky position, time, and frequency with likely terrestrial emitters to see what the LAF found.\u00a0 At some point I need to add logic to the program so signals like this are automatically rejected.\u00a0 Right now, though, we’re going to sleep!\u00a0 What a day…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is crazy.\u00a0 I kicked off the LAF Tuesday night before I went to bed, and by morning, it had scanned about an eighth of its tasked area by the time I headed out to work.\u00a0 When I came home, it had surveyed nearly half of star’s surrounding area.\u00a0 I received not a single email […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyze3d.com\/Godslog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}