Benjamin K. Tiefert

What's New

July 6, 2009 - Most of my efforts of late have been on a new blog, stringliterals.com

June 2, 2009 - Believe it or not, I *do* still exist. I've just neglected my little corner of the web for WAY too long. Life has a way of getting busy. I have plans in store, however. I intend to replace www.tiefert.com with a disambiguation page, so that all Tiefert's may have a link to their site from the tiefert.com site. I noticed that a German automobile dealership has registered tiefert.de, and I plan to reach out to them to see if they would like a free link as well. This page will become accessible only via the benjamin.tiefert.org link as part of the transition to a more equitable use of the tiefert.com domain. If you are a Tiefert of the world, immediate family or not, please email me at ben.tiefert@gmail.com and I will gladly share our name on the internet.

June 2, 2009 - Believe it or not, I *do* still exist. I've just neglected my little corner of the web for WAY too long. Life has a way of getting busy. I have plans in store, however. I intend to replace www.tiefert.com with a disambiguation page, so that all Tiefert's may have a link to their site from the tiefert.com site. I noticed that a German automobile dealership has registered tiefert.de, and I plan to reach out to them to see if they would like a free link as well. This page will become accessible only via the benjamin.tiefert.org link as part of the transition to a more equitable use of the tiefert.com domain. If you are a Tiefert of the world, immediate family or not, please email me at ben.tiefert@gmail.com and I will gladly share our name on the internet.

June 2, 2009 - Believe it or not, I *do* still exist. I've just neglected my little corner of the web for WAY too long. Life has a way of getting busy. I have plans in store, however. I intend to replace www.tiefert.com with a disambiguation page, so that all Tiefert's may have a link to their site from the tiefert.com site. I noticed that a German automobile dealership has registered tiefert.de, and I plan to reach out to them to see if they would like a free link as well. This page will become accessible only via the benjamin.tiefert.org link as part of the transition to a more equitable use of the tiefert.com domain. If you are a Tiefert of the world, immediate family or not, please email me at ben.tiefert@gmail.com and I will gladly share our name on the internet.

June 2, 2009 - Believe it or not, I *do* still exist. I've just neglected my little corner of the web for WAY too long. Life has a way of getting busy. I have plans in store, however. I intend to replace www.tiefert.com with a disambiguation page, so that all Tiefert's may have a link to their site from the tiefert.com site. I noticed that a German automobile dealership has registered tiefert.de, and I plan to reach out to them to see if they would like a free link as well. This page will become accessible only via the benjamin.tiefert.org link as part of the transition to a more equitable use of the tiefert.com domain. If you are a Tiefert of the world, immediate family or not, please email me at ben.tiefert@gmail.com and I will gladly share our name on the internet.

June 2, 2009 - Believe it or not, I *do* still exist. I've just neglected my little corner of the web for WAY too long. Life has a way of getting busy. I have plans in store, however. I intend to replace www.tiefert.com with a disambiguation page, so that all Tiefert's may have a link to their site from the tiefert.com site. I noticed that a German automobile dealership has registered tiefert.de, and I plan to reach out to them to see if they would like a free link as well. This page will become accessible only via the benjamin.tiefert.org link as part of the transition to a more equitable use of the tiefert.com domain. If you are a Tiefert of the world, immediate family or not, please email me at ben.tiefert@gmail.com and I will gladly share our name on the internet.

November 16, 2004 - My cousin Meg and her fiance Steve got married this weekend. I've posted photos in my new gallery, which is powered by this neat web service that allows direct ordering of prints off of the photo page. Feel free to order prints of any of the wedding photos. I don't profit from the purchase; the order is routed directly to the lab as though it were from your negative.

August 10, 2004 - I have another great week behind me! I went hiking at Sugarcreek park and saw the ancient (500yr+) Oak Trees (sadly, only two of the "three sisters" remain). I got my dose of cycling in with a short 10 mile evening workout on Monday. On Thursday I conspired to throw my friend Ajay a suprise birthday party. Come the weekend, I went camping and stargazing from Friday evening to Sunday morning. (More details on my astronomy page.) To top things off, last night I cooked up a steak dinner with Bleu Cheese and a glass of '99 Mandavi Reserve Cabernet. Believe it or not, I also had a very productive and rewarding week at work, as well!

August 2, 2004 - It's been a while since my last update.  Life has been busy lately, but in good ways.  The highlight of the last few weeks was a short visit from my older sister who stopped by Dayton for a few days all the way from Washington D.C. - it was very nice to see her again. We perused Yellow Springs, played our favorite card game (Five Hundred), took a walk in our parents' back yard, went on a mini photography adventure, and generally acted goofy around each other - which is what we do best.

Another new development: My bicycle is finally seeing some real use again. This Saturday I was able to ride 30 miles, although at a fairly slow pace: it took just over two hours to finish the circuit.  When and if I ever leave Ohio, I will certainly miss the excellent Rails to Trails program.

In the three weeks since my last update, we've had precisely two nights of astronomy-worthy weekend weather, both during the first quarter moon. Pat, the CVAS and MVAS clubs, and I put on another successful camper's star gaze at Caeser's Creek State Park. I have started a project imaging the moon, and hope to have each of it's phases imaged at the same scale. The ultimate goal is to combine them into one poster-sized print. I will be posting my progress to my astronomy section soon enough. Other highlights of the month include a newly-discovered Sushi restauraunt in town (Shiro), several devoured books, plenty of time hiking the trails at the Beavercreek Wetlands, Glen Helan, John Bryan State Park, and Clifton Mill; thirty to fifty miles on the bicycle each weekend, and the company of a few new friends.  To top it all off, work as actually been fairly sane, of late.  I can't ask for much more.

July 11, 2004 - What a weekend! I finally picked up my pencil to sketch again, and have posted the results on my studio art page. Friday evening was spent kicking dirt waiting for clouds to clear for telescopic purposes (to no eval). On Saturday afternoon I browsed Yellow Springs and exercised on the bicycle trails. My good friend Jeremy threw a top-notch barbeque for dinner, and afterwards I went to the theaters to see the Chronicle of Riddick. On Sunday I perused a local book store, dabbled with the before-mentioned sketch, basked in the Dayton Poetry Slam at the Therapy Cafe over a nice glass of wine, and finished the day off with a game of Scrabble. Despite all this activity, I feel well-rested and ready to tackle the week.

June 9, 2004 New Look - I've made changes to the look and feel of my website to increase readability. I'm moving towards larger text with wider margins while decreasing the thumb-nail size of images. I've also specified San-Serif font (if it's available on your machine) to replace the nigh-unreadable Times New Roman that for some unknown reason was declared the standard long ago. Also new is the low contrast background image. I've resisted using background images for some time, but narcissism is beginning to take hold. The washed out craters in the upper left of each page are from my recent moon astrograph. Of course, a personal web page is by nature a little narcissistic. I hope to combat that notion by providing more in the way of resources and news that will be interesting to people other than my immediate family. Also, I like the added visual effect that makes the menu across the top seem to fade from left to right. (It's an optical illusion caused by the background gradient)

June 8, 2004 Venus Transit - I awoke to my alarm at 3:00am and headed south to the VOA park in Mason, OH. I started setting up my telescopes and photography equipment at 4:25am and was ready just in time to catch the transit-in-progress of Venus across the face of the sun! I shot 140 photographs that I'm combining into an animation. I've also been requested to submit a photo to a newspaper in Cincinnati. More details are posted in my astronomy section.

June 7, 2004 - Lunch - Random thought of the moment: I'm thinking of scanning my old stamp collection and placing it online. I also want to record my thoughts about the False Arts such as RPG's.

June 7, 2004 - There is plenty happening over in my astronomy section, though I've been slow to update this section to match. Tomorrow morning will be the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. The weather forecast is clear, so it looks like we might just get a glimpse of this rare event.

I'm knocking around the idea of reformatting this website a little and adding a database back-end. My journal entries are running long, and are making for large, slow-loading web pages. I think the solution will be to setup my site similar to cnn.com, in which a headline and graphic of the most recent posts are placed on my home page, and each journal entry is treated more like a short news article with a page of its own. The different sections could still be selected to see the recent activity in each respective category, along with the archives of older material. The significance of such a change are minimal, of course, due to my limited readership. Considering that this page is really intended for an audience of friends, family, and my future self, I'm not sure that it's worth blathering on about.

May 18, 2004 - Despite a backlog of birding pictures to post, I took a break and setup my Studio Art web page. Take a look-see if you're interested.

April 28, 2004 - I've put another day's worth of bird watching on my birding page.

April 27, 2004 - This morning I've added a full account of my vacation in Chiefland to my astronomy section.

April 26, 2004 - I have a lot of backlogged notes to share, but they're not quite organized yet. Suffice it to say that my trip to Florida was a resounding success. I've just started to write about it on my astronomy page. Also, I've put together the beginnings of a web page for my new-found birding hobby.

Mar 22, 2004 - What a weekend! On Friday I left work and went to MVAS's John Bryan State Park Observatory, where we showed the skies to two boyscout troops. Sky conditions were 7/10, I'd say. It's always fun to show someone Saturn and Jupiter for the first time. We got a lot of "wows" and many intelligent questions. The club had a good turn-out of members, too. There were four or five big dobs. I met Mike, who let me peruse the skies with his 16" yard cannon. M46 was impressive with an OIII filter, showing structure in the planetary. I was up till 3am Friday perusing the heavens, and woke up just before noon on the next day. I spent Saturday with Pat in his workshop, building a jig to store my telescope's wedge on, and making various other enhancements and repairs to my telescope. Saturday evening I returned to JBSPO for the Messier Marathon, which was all but cancelled due to poor weather when the clouds broke unexpectedly. We had the club's 16" and the Fujinon 11x70's out, and spent an hour looking around. Brisk winds prevented any "serious" observing. Sunday was spent reading, watching the NCAA playoffs, and organizing my electronic equipment. I managed to track down my soldering iron and enough spare parts (plus a trip to Radio Shack) to fix my broken Kendrick Dew Heater. I hope to have the work done later this week. In short - a great weekend for the hobbies!

Mar 21, 2004 - I've finally ordered five sets of prints from the last two year's holiday photos. They should arrive on Tuesday, and I'll be mailing them out to the fam soon!

Mar 20, 2004 - I made my first attempt at some piggy back astrophotography. I should get the slides back on Tuesday, but I'm not holding my breath for anything wonderful with my first attempt

Mar 19, 2004 - I finally put something on my photography page. Not much, but something.

Feb 23, 2004 -  Wow. It's been a while since the last update. I keep telling myself that I'm going to keep this journal religiously, so I guess I'll make up for the silence with a large dose of content today. This past week has been great. I've been in the "zone" consistently. At work, code is just oozing out of my fingertips. At the end of the day I've found myself with greater energy to pursue my interests. I credit this to my return to the gym for exercise every other night. I never consciously stop going to the gym, but invariably I find myself feeling down and out and realize that somewhere in the past couple months, my regular workouts have quietly departed from my schedule. Thanks to the new-found energy, this weekend was a productive one, with plenty done around the house and plenty of time left for my hobbies.

Where should I start? The last two weeks actually started on a hellacious note, with my first tour of duty covering the hotphone (pager duty) at work. This not only involved responding to urgent requests to deliver software to customers, but also came with the pro-active task of waking up at 4:30am and ensuring that the night's scheduled activities executed successfully. Once awake, I couldn't fall back asleep easily, so I made the most of the situation and just headed for the office.  I would roll out of bed, tap away at the computer for 30 minutes to an hour, and then start my morning routine. I've never been a morning person, but I think I finally understand the disease. Casual mornings are a wonderful thing. I had time to make breakfast, brew some coffee, and read the news.  My heart rate marched at a sane pace throughout the morning without the need to impulsively check the clock to ensure punctuality.   Despite having something go "bump" in the night with deliveries every single night of my one week shift, I started to enjoy the schedule change; so much so that I've continued on early hours since. While the car warmed up in the wee-hours, I took some time out with a pair of binoculars to sneak peeks at spring and summer constellations. Even with temperatures in the twenties, it felt like summer-come-early when I saw Cygnus the Swan on the horizon.

Speaking of stargazing, I had a very active observing week. On Wednesday, Pat, Rick, and I met up at the beach of Caesar's Creek and enjoyed an hour or two of good viewing before being clouded out. Pat practiced merging images on his new binoviewer, and I spent some quality time with Rick's 4" TMB refractor.  If these two guys are any judge, amateur astronomers are among the most generous, patient souls on Earth. Once the clouds set in, we just relaxed and chatted for about 90 minutes before giving up for the evening. Naturally, just as we were finishing packing everything up, the clouds blew out of the area. Oh well, it was a weekday, so it was nice to get home by ten. The following evening, I got a call from an old friend of mine from PC Upgraders, Craig Miceli. He and I hadn't seen each other in months, so we went out for hot wings at Quaker Steak and Lube and gabbed away. I told him of my astronomy hobby, and his interested piqued. He, like I, had always wanted to view the heavens through a telescope. We went back to my apartment and I gave him a tour of the sky and introduced him to the basics. I'm quite jealous of his 15/20 vision. He could pick out naked eye doubles that I can't, and was very keen on M37, one of my favorite dense star clusters. As luck would have it, one of my apartment complex's giant halogen flood lights burnt out, so we had reasonably low light pollution compared to normal. The light pollution in my neck of the woods appears severe at first blush, but is only local. The sky itself is fairly clear, but the local flood lights make dark adaptation of the eyes a challenge. We poked around at Jupiter, Mars, M42, M45, M37, M38, C13/NGC457, C14, and M31 before calling it a night.  Not a bad selection.  I can't tell for sure, but I suspect that I may have hooked another unsuspecting soul on astronomy.

Friday rolled through without event, and the weekend became hobby-time overload. I took the opportunity to give the apartment a thorough cleaning, catch up on laundry and paperwork before delving into odds and ends. By the end of the weekend I ordered quite a few new toys that I've had my eye on for the last six months. Amongst the plunder are Nagler 22mm and 31mm eyepieces (the "hand grenade"), a green laser pointer, a Milburn Deluxe equatorial wedge, a Piggy Back Camera Mount (PBCM), a camping cot, a catalytic propane area heater, and various nuts and bolts (literally) from www.scopestuff.com. I can't wait for it all to arrive in time for my April vacation down to Chiefland, Florida for a star party.

I spent Sunday afternoon tooling around town. I dropped in for a sandwich at Current Cuisine, my favorite deli in Yellow Springs, and perused the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Beavercreek. I decided to start research for a Europe vacation / sabbatical that I've intended to take for a few years. After 30 minutes in the travel section, it became clear that most of my World History has leaked from my brain in the years since high school. I had hoped to find a good tour book that brought the past alive for individual European cities, but failed to find what I wanted. Instead, I decided that I better take a step backward and head to the History section. There I found a wonderfully dynamic and succinct account of world history fittingly titled A Short History of the World. I figured that I better pickup the big pieces of the past and return them to their allotted spaces in my brain before digging down any deeper. Well written history is very rare, but this book manages to entertain while spanning a huge breadth of material. So far it has been a very lively read.

On the way out of Barnes & Noble, new books in hand (along with a Godiva chocolate bar), I was almost stopped in my tracks by a beautifully clear deep royal blue twilight. Hung in the air was a 2 day old crescent moon slung below Venus, sparkling in all her brilliance. I knew that this meant another night of star gazing, so I put my books out of mind and rushed home to setup my telescope. While letting the optics cool, I snapped off a few dozen photographs of various parts of our galactic neighborhood using my digital camera. The camera is not an SLR, so precise focus is a serious issue in low light conditions, as is premature hot pixelling. Nonetheless, I obtained a few frames that should be useable after a little processing. As I organized them into my "My Pictures" folder, I realized that I'm overdue in making Christmas prints for the family. I hope to get to them by week's end. Returning to the fridged outdoors, I wandered around Orion and took in a few vistas of Saturn and Jupiter before tearing down for the night. What a week!

This (Monday) morning I woke up early and arrived at work by 6:30am. It sure felt good to get a head start on the week. It reminds me of a pact I made with myself the summer after high school graduation:  I vowed never to slip into the habit of rushing through the week in pursuit of Friday's salvation - and to make every day count.  

But wait, there's more! The last week was crammed with little gems. I finally got around to seeing Roman Holiday, which, as an Audrey Hepburn fan, had been on my "to-see" list for quite some time. This movie is the epitome of classics. Its directing, acting, and editing were all executed to perfect to produce a timeless flick. It's nice to know that there are still great masterpieces out there in which I haven't yet indulged. I delighted in Roman Holiday to such a degree that I had to rescreen my favorite epic, Braveheart, just to reconfirm its rank.

I hope that you have enjoyed my ramble. Take care, and in the words of the recent epic film Titanic, here's to making it count. Hear, hear.

Feb 2, 2004 -  This weekend I was at the John Bryan State Park Observatory, showing some boy scouts around the night sky. The temperatures were in the single digits, and the moon was washing out most DSO, but seeing was excellent.

Jan 13, 2004 -  Not much to report. I'm making changes to this site to make it compatible with the Opera browser, but I'm still having problems with the layout. I've also added a good number of links to my blog, and am considering using the Blogger service.

Jan 8, 2004 -  Updated my camping page with paragraphs about a few of the things I love about the outdoors.

Jan 8, 2004 -  I decided to post some pictures from Christmas 2002 as well.

Jan 8, 2004 -  I've just posted some of my 2003 Tiefert family Christmas photos.

12:25pm Jan 07, 2004 -  As promised, I've posted pictures and details of the astronomy observing chair I made with a friend this past weekend.

2:36pm Jan 06, 2004 - Fairwell, fine maiden. My S2000 is gone. Honda finally repurchased my car under threat of a Lemon L lawsuite. And although my frustrations are finally over, I can't help but miss her a little.

11:30pm Jan 05, 2004 - I just finished a two day wood-working project at a friend's house. The product? An observing chair for my telescope. I will post pictures soon. My friend and I might make a bunch of these and sell them at star parties, so if you're interested in purchasing one, let me know!

1:01am Jan 03, 2004 - Spruced up this home page with a menu bar completely styled with CSS (no tables at all!)

7:22pm Jan 02, 2004 - This home page is now valid under the XHTML 1.0 Strict standards of the W3 Consortium.

5:00pm Jan 02, 2004 - I just realized that I have include no contact information on this website.   I will be working to setup a temporary hotmail mail account that I can directly link. For now, the world may contact me at gmail.com by placing "ben.tiefert" before the at sign.   (This is my personal email account, but I'm hesitant to embed it in the web page for fear of a bot scooping it up and putting me on spam mailer's a-list.)     BTW - Happy New Year everybody!

11:34pm Dec 29, 2003 - Added my favorite 20 movies to the Home Theater page.

9:54pm Dec 29, 2003 - I got around to posting a picture of the moon on my astronomy page that I took on the 27th of this month.

9:25pm Dec 29, 2003 - Updated my list recently read books.

9:21pm Dec 29, 2003 - A friend of mine forwarded me this loving parody of the film Lord of the Rings Return of the King

9:16pm Dec 29, 2003 - Added the introduction, disclaimer, and the first of what hopefully will be many thoughts on politics and religion.

Old Blog Entries

Jan 13, 2004 - I want this combination pocket pc / cellphone.

Jan 13, 2004 - A few sites of interest which I will elaborate upon later: BrightHand, GPS Passion, NASA Picture of the day, $100 5mw Green Laser Pointer, 5GHz Overclocked CPU, ibiblio.org, RicksAstro, Web Usability Guidelines, Waypoint Exchange, Good Astronomy Accesories including glove/mittens

Jan 09, 2004 - One day after I wrote a blurb on Geeks camping, CNN publishes an article titled When Geeks Go Camping...

5:20pm Jan 08, 2004 - Alternative to black holes? Introducing Gravastars. An interesting concept, I'll have to stay tuned to see how well it undergoes scrutiny.

5:20pm Jan 08, 2004 - Miniature Supernova created in Lab. Thank goodness it was a small one!

10:55pm Jan 02, 2004 - Maximum-cars.com has a very large set of pictures of the new redesigned 2005 C6 Corvette

Contact Information

I haven't explicitly posted my email address on this website because I'm avoiding being added to spam lists by web bots. To reach me, send an email to my first name followed by a dot followed by my last name at gmail.com. Thanks!