Credit: NASA
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Manic Monday Number 14 – Shooting into Space!
Hello all and happy Monday to you all, it’s the start of another week and there’s lots going on on Planet Simon and it’s little satellites and as usual I like to keep you all abreast of it all and to make sure that I at least get this post out in any week that I’m busy.
Ralph and his chums are going through more Great Galactic Service Station shennanigans
The Great Galactic Service Station – Part 13
There’s been another two part to the Geeky guide to WordPress
The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Making a Contact Page
The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Customising a Blog Page
My Solar System exploration feature is back too, updated with some nifty custom graphics. Starting i the middle the sun was the first piece in this:
Solar System Exploration – The Sun
escribble has some new stuff coming this week, like my first attempt at an Apple Tar Tatin. If you’ve not visited the site go and have a look, it’s kind of like the more personal and geeky bits from Planet Simon, a bit of the old and some new stuff too! Look out for a new post on Universe of Possibilities this week, how does Sci-Fi make you feel when you read / watch it and how have the big names carried this on over the years?
If you’re on Twitter make sure you follow @BlogBashChat and join us all for a blogging chat on the first Sunday of every month 7pm British time. It’s a great little thing that’s growing and you get to find out more about blogging and Bloggers! The last chat was yesterday and there will be another one next month!
What have you guys been up to?
Keep smiling and blogging!
Simon 🙂
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The Great Galactic Service Station – Part 13
The assembled crew of motley beings from over the galaxy watched as the timer counted down, a computerised female voice counting down with it, at about seventy the voice was getting out of sync with the numbers, then the segments for the numbers started taking a like of their own. Finally the voice announced.
“Oh stuff it, chamber unlocking! There you go, wakey wakey, rise and shine!” The chamber lit up, then the power started flicking around it and the chamber went dark.
“That went well didn’t it?” The computerised voice returned.
Everyone watched. Waited. Looking at this oldish man in the chamber.
“What are we waiting for?” Whispered Ralph.
“For me to wake up!!!!!” The man’s eyes opened and he jumped up and out of the hibernation chamber and stood before them all. Well here I am, let get this service station going and get the sausage rolls defrosted and heated up. We don’t want to keep all these people waiting now do we?”
Everyone looked at Miranda. “Why me?” She whispered.
“You are the emperor’s daughter!” Harry smugly pointed out.
“Why her what? What’s going on?” The old man asked, somewhat puzzled but there wasn’t a dent in his enthusiasm.
“You’ve been in there a bit longer than you think!” Miranda stated matter of factly.
“A few years never hurt anyone!” The old man continued “How long out of curiosity.”
Harry cut in and pointed at Ralph. “See him?”
“Yes”
“He’s one of the local inhabitants.”
The old man stood closer to Ralph “My God, either you’ve had a damn good shave or I’m looking at a bit of evolution here. The last time I saw one of you you were swinging in the trees and picking the hair off each others back!” Looking down at his shirt he spied the ketchup stain “not much has changed I see, just lost the excess hair!” The man chuckled to himself.
“Oi!”
“Relax will you?” The old mad slapped him on the arm. “Right, where the others?” He turned around and looked into the other hibernation modules. He stopped and suddenly his enthusiasm was gone.
“Oh.” He sadly muttered.
“That’s what I mean, you’ve been in there, a long, long time!” Miranda comforted him.
“They – they were my friends. We were in this together and now…” The old man sat cross legged on the floor now quite despondent. In what was a move that surprised Ralph Gaz walked over to him, placing his small hand on his shoulder he calmly and softly (or as calmly and softly as a grating gargoyle can) told him.
“I know, something similar happened to me too!”
Harry joined him Gaz “Same for me.”
Now Ralph was suspicious, Harry was doing another one of his wind ups. Miranda went around to look the old man in the face. ” I know this is hard” She told him sympathetically. “But we have to get this station functional, there are hundreds of stranded spacecraft on Earth and hundreds more blockading the planet ready blow each other away. “Will you help us?”
The old man nodded.
“f you can give me the keys to the station I can start if you want to stay here a while?”
The old man slowly got up, wiped his face and walked over to a bulkhead door. “Access for 6121 Flartislap.”
“Access is slapping me in the face with a HUGE humpback whale!” The female computer voice returned. “What I mean is The whale is granted. I mean oh get on with it!”
The doors parted and there before them was the trading area of the Great Galactic Service Station, thick with dirt but it was vast and a clear view out to the spaceports beyond. Ralph actually felt excited.
“Right!” The old man shouted “Flartislap here get on with it!” With this he clapped and five or six pepper pot shaped droise sprang out from hatches around the room and started cleaning up. With vacuums coming out of their heads and brushes and air cleansers in a few moments Ralph could see this was a colourful place, blues and yellows and greens and purples, lights of all kinds of colours began activating.
“I thought that was a code – not his name!” Ralph whispered to Miranda.
“Different times!” Was all Miranda could come back with.
“That should get this place cleaned up soon.” Flartislap told Miranda purposefully.
Harry was at the freezers and was holding up a packet of sausage rolls and pasties. “These expired after six months!” He told Flartislap.
“It’s ok” He replied “Everyone knows if you freeze this it doesn’t matter what the off date is!”
“Maybe for a few years, but a few million?!?”
“They’ll be fine!” Insisted Flarislap. “Get your aprons on and get cooking! You – Ape man! Have you learned how to cook on your world yet?”
For a moment Ralph was wondering how to answer this, he was bit offended then he tucked his arms in like a monkey “Ooh, ooh, yeah! We cook meat over open fire – we advanced!”
Miranda choked and she stopped herself from laughing.
“Good!” Flartislap continued, pointing and gesticulating “Go and take sausage rolls to hot thing over there. Put in hot thing at one hundred and eighty celsius for 30 bangs and then slapper me five them into the bright and warm thing. Don’t light fine. This advanced cooking. You understand me ape man?”
“Don’t be silly of course I do!” Ralph replied, snatching the boxes from Harry and wandering off with them.
“There’s hope for them yet!” Flartislap nodded “You, pretty lady, what do I call you?”
“I’m Miranda, what can I do?”
“Help the ape man and make sure he doesn’t start a fire and get them all to line up in an orderly queue out there!”
“I think Gaz is onto the orderly bit!” Miranda smiled raising an eyebrow.
“Oi you lot get in here!” He grated “But don’t cause a pile up!”
Things seemed to be going normally for a moment, Harry was even helping and Boris had put on a maids apron and was trying to place cream cakes out in the chiller counter. then the station started shaking, vibrating and then this God awful tune if you could call it that started resonating from the surfaces of the station. Boris’s cakes exploded with cream thrown in every direction, sausage rolls flew from every end to every other end.
Then something even worse came through Teresa’s voice “I’m here to get my damn pasties, I’m not waiting in line! The Borian’s will get there first!”
What is not generally well known about Theresa May is she’s a Praxian from Praxia seventeen, they’re known throughout the galaxy as having the worst rock music ever. Back in her day Theresa was a head banger and this with the music has caused irreparable brain damage. Praxian music is well known for making the brains bleed from any other race. Some heads have even exploded. This is what the station had just been subjected to. In here old age Theresa has calmed a bit and this was soothing music. Even so the results are devastating. One of the cleaner robots found the nearest airlock and shot themselves out of it as the vacuum of space is less painful.
Her rating continued, even Gaz couldn’t make her get in line and dock her ship like any normal person.
“I see no reason why I should wait and pay after all this long. This isn’t the NHS you know… I’m taking over that station and I’m going to lock everyone else out! If you resist I will destroy you all!”
To be continued…
©Simon Farnell 2018
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Solar System Exploration – The Sun
This is the first of a feature I ran a couple of years back. I’m going to be using the news and pictures I’ve been collecting to create a series of posts exploring the solar system a piece at a time. I’m going to start at the beginning, move out and then go all random after that depending on what I decide to put in.
Introduction
The sun – our own shining little corner of the galaxy. Our Sun is a star, a small and quite calm, quiet star. It has storms and changes that are significant but tiny compare to other stars in our galaxy. This is good for us on Earth as it makes living with our nearest stellar neighbour tolerable and therefore it’s activity promotes life on Earth.
Facts
- Diameter: 695,700km (about 109 x Earth’s)
- Mass: 330,000 x Earth (The sun makes up for 99.86% of the mass of the solar system)
- The sun is made up of about 75% Hydrogen, the rest is mostly Helium with the rest made up of heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon and Iron.
- The Sun orbits the galaxy at a speed of 220km/sec.
The picture above shows the scale of the sun to the planets, it is phenomenally HUGE! Somewhere between 99.8% and 99.9% of the material in the solar system is the sun, the rest is planets, comets, asteroids etc. To scare you even more, the sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen PER SECOND. Per second?!!?
The real surprising thing about this fact is that it’s a immense amount of fuel, but it’s very efficient as the Earth (tiny though it is many times greater than this mass) will not run out of fuel for a long, long time. But when it does, it’s predicted to swell and become a red giant. It will grow, probably swallowing the Earth and warming the outer planets, making moons like Europa and Titan possibly suitable for humanoid or advanced lifeforms.
Despite the size of our local star, it is tiny compare to many other stars in our galaxy. Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us apart from the sun and it is not visible without a telescope, despite being brighter than the sun. So, our sun isn’t a bight and shining beacon in our galaxy. Knowing this makes an oberserver very aware that the stars we see are far bigger and brighter than our sun and also, that there is far more in our galaxy than we can see. Our size and insignificance is mind blowing.
Our sun also has storms, storms that are many time bigger than the Earth that would burn away everything in a second if we were close enough. These storms radiate from the spots which can be spotted on the sun fairly easily, these too are many times the size of the Earth.
The sun is an ever changing ball of self sustaining energy and yet there is so much more to it than being a bright circle in the sky.
Viewing the sun
As the sun is so bright it’s not a good idea to look right at it or though a telescope. This great little one pager shows how it should be done:
There’s a method for everyone to use.
(Credit: space.com)
Inspiration
I’m going to be using Gustav Holst’s the planets as part of the artistic inspiration. Now as the sun isn’t a planet, Holst did not compose a piece on the sun. But in every culture of society we’re inspired by the sun, there are numerous sun gods that have been devised.
Thomas Bergerson (one half of the Two Steps from Hell duo) has composed a piece on the sun though and this heart warming piece can be heard:
Also think about Art, how many pictures and paintings include the sun rising or setting, how many children’s pictures have a bright yellow circle in the top corner and how often do we wish for warm summer sun in the depths of winter.
I hope you my bloggies are enjoying this feature.
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NASA technology and how it’s making life safer for the human race.
It’s often hard to appreciate the benefits to the human race of space exploration, but there are so many things that we use everyday that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for NASA and space exploration.
This post highlights some of the safety systems used that were originally developed by NASA.
Credit: NASA
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Solar System 10 Things to know this week – Saturn V
Credit: NASA
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The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Customising a Blog Page
As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.
Knowing how to customise a blog page helps your blog stand out to those that find or navigate to it and if done well guides the reader to look at more of your content. This is normally a good thing because that why we blog right – to create posts that other will read.
To start customising your site hit the customise button on the bottom left.
Now we see this – every theme will customise slightly differently. There’s a few helpful pointers that WordPress helps you with. Icons next to the profile picture, the header picture and menu’s shortcut straight to those options.
- The header image is usually taken from the media library and scaled to fit, this is the main image for your site. Make it relevant, cool and catchy.
- The profile picture is simple enough and can be scaled to fit how it’s wanted.
- The menu’s options are really varied, the menu’s can lead to a page, blog post categories, tabs… almost anything needed can be done. The order of the menu’s can be messed with too – have a play!
On the right it gets a bit more advanced where all the options can be accessed. I would like to detail all of these, but it would a HUGE blog post to do all of that. Most of it is pretty simple and it can be worked out. Have a play too and see what happens, that’s the fun of this and I’m sure I can help if not the happiness engineer’s will definitely be able to.
The customisation for me is the fun part about creating a site, it’s fun and makes a huge difference to your site. As with anything that’s creative don’t just copy what I’m saying. Have a play, anything that goes wrong can be undone or put right.
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Minion Thoughts – I don’t like to think before I speak…
Sometimes I wonder if someone else said it…
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The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Creating a Contact Page
As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.
Creating a Contact Page
A contact page is a secure way to let your readers contact you without them knowing your email address. Giving your email address freely on your blog can invite all kinds of uninvited messages. Creating a contact page is easy, there should be a standard contact page already in your pages when you create your blog, but in case you need to create one this is how you do it.
Go to ‘My Sites’ and select site pages.
Click ‘Add’
On the new page click ‘Add’ and Select @Contact Form. This will bring up the fields and settings box.
This is all set up for you, so unless you want to add or remove or edit any fields leave it as it is.
To change the settings, select the settings tab.
Then this appears with the email address for your blog and the subject line is blank, the email address is a hard setting that can’t be changed but the subject can be what you want.
Click insert.
Personalise the contact page and publish it, link it to your site andthat should be it. Anyone wanting to get in touch can send you an email and they didn’t have to have your email address.
Credit: The third image in the blog was taken from the WordPress help page
I hope this has been useful, let me know if you find this helpful or have issues.
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Manic Monday Number 13 – With Eggs and Bunnies
As this post goes out the UK is enjoying a public holiday and that includes me too. I hope everyone yesterday had a good Easter. I’m still not sure how eggs and bunnies have anything to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ but there you go.
So what’s been going on here on Planet Simon, well have a look at the blog roll, But The Great Galactic Service Station Part 12 was posted on Friday, the there was 10 Things to know in the Solar System This week10 Things to know in the Solar System This week and The Second Part of the Geeky Guide to WordPress.
What’s interesting about writing the Geeky Guide to WordPress is that it’s obvious that there’s bloggers out there with problems and are being quiet about it. What I would say is ask… Not just me but other bloggers that have been around a while.
Universe of Possibility saw some action last week too, a post on Sci-Fi Moments – When Machines Die that was originally posted here on Planet Simon. Despite the fact hat they’re just machines or robots, in the scifi world we can get very attached to them and maybe shed a tear when they’re trashed.
Another thing I’ve noticed this week, was the presence of a troll going about leaving not nice comments about, nothing nasty just annoying and not necessary. If you get this and it bothers you, let someone know. I’ve told this person to do one and they turned on me. Meh, whatever. But if you’re the person and reading this, save your time, mine and anyone else’s and just bugger off.
I’ve know I’ve promised to get some posts going about using InkScape and Gimp for the budding artists out there, patience, it’s taking a bit longer than I hoped to get this started but I’m hoping it’s going to be really good once I’m there.
Also watch out for the solar system exploration series returning, with some snappy graphics and updated information I hope this will turn into the project I originally envisioned.
escribble has some new stuff coming this week, like my first attempt at an Apple Tar Tatin. If you’ve not visited the site go and have a look, it’s kind of like the more personal and geeky bits from Planet Simon, a bit of the old and some new stuff too! Look out for a new post on Universe of Possibilities this week, how does Sci-Fi make you feel when you read / watch it and how have the big names carried this on over the years?
If you’re on Twitter make sure you follow @BlogBashChat and join us all for a blogging chat on the first Sunday of every month 7pm British time. It’s a great little thing that’s growing and you get to find out more about blogging and Bloggers!
What have you guys been up to?
Keep smiling and blogging!
Simon 🙂
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