I’ve had a very quiet birthday this year.

Other than my parents visiting I didn’t do anything really special.

I did, however, get a nice pressie of a Breville bread maker.. The Anthony Warrell-Thompson one. It’s going to have to live on top of the fridge as it’s too big to store elsewhere. For operation I have a nice space on my folding table which also gives enough space to mix the ingredients.

The first loaf tasted nice though it does seem to go stale quite quickly, though this may be due to the loaf sitting in the open rather than being put into a bag after it cooled.

Yesterday, as well as making the first loaf, my dad and myself re-hung the side gate extending the post, moving the hunges outwards and the brakets on the gate itself. The gate now opens fully flat to the wall. All I have to do now is fit the hook to the wall and the eye on the gate.

Well, today, on the BBC News web site as part of the story of Opportunity’s initial results on the rock strata in the crater:-

Principal investigator Steve Squyres told a news conference in Pasadena, California that preliminary readings with the alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) show rocks in the crater outcrop are loaded with the element sulphur.

“I’m not going to give you quantitative numbers, but it is maybe a few more times sulphur than we have seen at any location on Mars,” said Professor Squyres.

Well, now, what was my prediction for the white rock? That’s right, Calcium Sulphate. It’s looking more and more like that’s what they are.

Not only this, but looking at the close-up images on the rover web site, the rocks show polygonal cracking, suggesting being deposited in water and then drying out repeatedly. In addition to this there are balls of some other compound which suggest the possibility of wave action during precipitation of the salts. The possible cross bedding I thought I saw turned out to be an optical illusion caused by the mis-alignment of ajoining broken blocks.

Of course, this is still only speculation. I’m not even sure that the rovers have enough equipment to make the final resolution of what the rocks are really made of.

This evening I watched “Enemy of the State” and noticed that the chief bad guy, who was doing illegal things to get a “Patriot Act” like bill through the US government using the excuses of needing to fight terrorism, was born on 11th September 1940. This film was released in 1998.

Spooky, eh? I’ll go and put my tin foil beanie cap on in a minute.

if the white rocks showing near by to the Opportunity rover are anhydrite. (Scans currently show no silicate, hematite or quartz.)

Most people would know anhydrite by another name, plaster of paris (Calcium Sulphate). It’s basically dehyrated gypsum.

If it is indeed anhydrite then that would be a good case for the presence of water at one time or another with the Calcium Sulphate precipitating out when the water evaporated. Such deposites on Earth are created when ground water evaporates at the surface and in evaporating lakes.

Well, this weekend I…

(1) Discovered that my camera and flash will probably do a good enough job at John and Katie’s wedding so I’ll not have to buy any new, expensive kit.

(2) Finished filing all my papers from the boxes they had been sitting in. They are now all in the filing cabinet sorted by provenance.

(3) Did a load of washing.

(4) Had a fun, relaxing afternoon and evening at the Hartlands’.

(5) Tried playing the “Holomatch” mode of “Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force” and found it boring (after winning a couple of online games and getting almost bottom of the list in others).

(6) Replenished the washer fluid in my car’s windscreen washer bottle.

(7) Watched Saturday’s press conference about the Oportunity Rover rolling onto Mars’ surface on NASA TV.

Those items are in no particular order whatsoever.

On the subject of the rock “Adirondack”…

When the first full colour images came in I saw that the rocks were grey-green, have little bubble holes (the name of which I can’t remember how to spell is pronounced vee-ci-cles), are fine grained and break with sharp, angular edges. I thought, “Hmm.. that looks like basalt, probably olivine rich.” It’s the rock formed by the cooling of lava which comes out of mid-ocean ridges and places such as Iceland and Hawaii. Or, if you’re hard up, there’s some of the stuff eroded out in the north of Scotland. Smash up a pillow lava and have a look.. it’ll look just like the rock on Mars.

Well, ‘s the analysis from the Spirit rover.

Actually, they could have saved rather more by putting one rover in the dunes at Dawlish Warren and the other on the lava fields of Hawaii.

Anyway, whatever it is, it looks like the crater that Opportunity is in was excavated from sedimentry rock.

In this image, at the far right end there’s a block of the rock on show which looks like it has cross bedding. Such things don’t happen in igneous rocks, only sedimentry ones. Now, this doesn’t mean that there is water on Mars. Cross bedding can be created in sediments which are sub-aerial, sand dunes, but they can also be generated in sub-aqueous environments, namely flowing water, sediment ripples.

From the size of the bedding planes in this bedding it looks more like sub-aerial sand dune type deposits such as can be seen in the cliffs around Dawlish Warren.

It looks from the JPL Mars rovers web page that the Spirit rover isn’t obeying its masters…

I wonder when they’ll receive “Would you like to be a pepper too?…” and “Number 5 is alive.”

OK, the title’s not strictly true. Some things have happened over the last fortnight since I last updated this journal.

For a start, I’ve been out on the town once. I learnt a couple of friends at work are getting married at the end of March and I’ve been invited along to the stag day at the beginning of March. Another friend has swapped boyfriends, dumping one technically the day after linking up with the other.

At work I’ve been wrestling with RAID arrays. One decided that it didn’t like the data on the disks and initialised them. Don’t believe the “Reliable” bit in the advertising for “Reliable Array of Inexpensive Disks.”

For the last couple of days I’ve been fighting off a cold. It’s been expressing itself as a slightly sore throat. I’ve been dosing myself up with Lemsip Max Strength, orange juice and Strepsils Extra. The sore throat seems to have eased and the slight attack at the back of the nose seems to have gone away as well. So the first battle seems to have been won. Whether the war is won is still to be seen.

On other fronts, today I managed to finish putting down limestone chippings around my house. I’ve still to put some weedkiller on the whole stuff as the cooch grass has punched its way straight through the anti-weed membrane. I’ve also got a second 6′ post which I can bolt to the current one which will allow me to move the gate hinges away from the wall which should then enable the gate to swing right out to be flat to the wall when opened.

I’ve also written a script which will take the output from net-snmpd’s snmptrapd generated by my router/firewall and send a log to syslog on my server whenever a connection is made inbound or outbound. The only problem is that the linksys router doesn’t say if it’s tcp or udp.

That’s about it, really.