October 19 2020
Day shift: Water Treatment Plant.
Collect plant figures for the last 24 hours, clean lime slaker, inspect the chlorine dosing plant, labwork, online chlorine analyser cross-checks.
I was supposed to finish my on-call week this morning, so I took my bike with me to work, with the intention of riding home.
Nope.
The bloke taking over for this week called in sick.
I did get a ride in after work though, thankfully. All up I rode over twelve kilometres, but Actifit didn't seem to be tracking my activity 100%.
I've noticed since the recent update that it won't track properly when my phone is locked.
I've turned on the 'agressive' tracking option too, but it doesn't help.
The odd thing is that the issue is intermittent. Sometimes it works fine with the phone locked. Other times the step count freezes and I have to close and re-open the app to get it tracking again.
Anybody else finding issues lately?
Anyway, I'll get in touch with the developer through the app store.
Determined to at least get to the quasi-magical 5000 mark, I went for a night walk with my darling around the local neighbourhood.
We saw a Tawny Frogmouth perched on a no-standing sign. It was too dark to get a good photo, and I didn't want to disturb it with a phone camera flash.
So we stood in the middle of the road and marvelled at the bird.
It watched us for a while, before effortlessly flying away.
We also saw a strange string of lights in the night sky.
Actually, it was my darling that noticed it. I was too busy checking that the Actifit app was working properly.
What has my life become!?
At first I thought it was condensation on an overhead electrical wire, reflecting the city lights.
Nope.
We stopped, and it kept moving, over the horizon.
We scratched our heads.
Okay, maybe it was a group of planes flying in formation?
A quick look on Flight Radar 24 confirmed that wasn't the case.
The lights moved in perfect lockstep, as if part of one object.
I then had a look on N2YO a realtime satellite tracking website.
And there it was. It must have been...
The International Space Station!
According to NASA the ISS orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.
So I set an alarm when we got home.
An hour and a half went by and we raced outside to see if we could find it again in the night sky.
Nope.
We craned our necks and searched in the chilly wind, but to no avail.
We must have been in just the right spot at just the right time earlier.
It was pretty cool to catch it once though
Well that's today done. Time to sleep.
See ya
Some time later I worked out that what we had actually seen was a Starlink launch
