Year: 2004

Go Burt. Since the Apollo program America has become so averse to risk that the engineering world has quit daring to be bold (see the cancelled Sonic Cruiser for just one example). This attempt by Scaled Composites to shoot a private citizen into space feels like a big ‘ol “bite me” to the politically-correct, fearful-of-adventure, ultra-conservative mentality that is so prevalent today. I’m hoping they succeed, but moreso it’s laudible that someone is willing to strap themself into a homemade spaceship and risk death, simply because in this case a life lived in complete safety would eliminate the possibility of a glorious adventure.

Quote of the evening: “When a guy is wearing black shoes that are that shiny, you automatically know you can kick his ass.”

Excalibur today entered the Golden State. And no, I didn’t pay $1500, but yes, I’ll still be forgoing the extra cheese on my whopper for a while.

Fun things to do when you should be sleeping:

• Read free books online from Project Gutenberg. They’ve got intellectual crap like Shakespeare and Chaucer, or you can read Tarzan, who’s cool ’cause he swings on vines and stuff.
• Track Excalibur on his journey across America. Today Excalibur visits the Garden State.
• Virtual Crack.
• Write an inane journal entry that mentions both William Shakespeare and Virtual Crack.

The past week of work was a humbling one that required several trips to the local pub with some British co-workers. We did a new software release on Tuesday that vastly improved our system, but some of the changes proved to be incompatible with other systems and the ripple effect took days to fix up and caused lots of headaches for those affected. In general I feel like I’m one of the best at what I do, but this experience definitely left my confidence a bit shaken.

In other news, ever since the Antarctica trip I’ve been debating whether or not to buy a digital camera, and today I finally ordered one. With the top of the line Canon 1D Mark II going for about $4500 I obviously had to scale back my ambitions a bit, but the Canon 10D (hereafter referred to as “Excalibur”) still cost me almost four times what my old Canon Elan 7 sells for. Excalibur should be a great tool for improving my photo technique, will save money in film and developing, and will allow me to post photos online immediately. The biggest advantage, however, is that new toys are cool.

Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites company today launched a test flight of their X-Prize craft to 211,000 feet, just shy of the fifty mile height required by NASA to be a certified astronaut. They are already the first small company to break the sound barrier, and with another 120,000 feet they will have won the X-Prize, becoming the first non-government group to enter space.

Comments on Slashdot about this event ranged from insightful to stupid, as illustrated by this posting and response:

>They could sell this Technology to the NKoreans
>and then they would have a working ICBM.

Not just an ICBM but a manned ICBM. You can imagine the intense competition for that job.

Jason was kind enough to hook me up with a Gmail account. It took only three days for the spammers to find it. Three days.

Not much worth writing about lately; I spent a grand total of six hours over the weekend driving back and forth from Burbank to Venice and LAX. On the visit to LAX I spent almost two hours negotiating traffic jams and arrived at the Lan Chile desk shortly after it had closed; luckily I was able to take care of my plane tickets over the phone today. Now I’m trying to find a place to stay for the two weeks that I’ll have in the Falklands. Sea Lion Lodge and Pebble Island Lodge look like interesting options.

Having lots of time in the car provided the opportunity to listen to an NPR talent show for kids aged twelve to twenty. If Sahara Smith isn’t a household name someday I’ll be really surprised. Listen to her song It Don’t Rain Much and try to guess her age — I bet you’ll be wrong.

After talking to several Lan Chile operators (who apparently were really located in Chile) I finally got one who spoke good English and after a bit of difficulty due to the fact that there is only one flight per week to the Falklands, booked plane tickets for the South Georgia trip this October. Four weeks on the boat, followed by two weeks in the Falklands, and preceded by one hundred and forty eight days of trying not to get too excited.

“There it is! There’s the cow bell, baby!“

It was a good weekend; I went back home to the Bay Area and got plenty of Kill Bill, several games of basketball, just the right amount of beer, not enough sleep, a healthy dose of Sam Wo’s, and of course, some cow bell.

In an effort to thwart my attempts not to get too excited about the trip this October Ted pointed out that NASA has lots of satellite photos of South Georgia island available online. In the photo below, South Georgia is the bright white feature on the left, while the large white object on the right is iceberg A-38B. Scale: the island is one hundred miles long by twenty miles wide.

A team of researchers will be searching Mt. Ararat for Noah’s Ark. They aren’t going to find a boat. There is no doubt that it is impossible that a boat could be thousands of feet up on a mountain; still, a little voice is saying “but what if…”

Working this weekend, but seeing as I’ll probably only be working six months out of the entire year I’m not gonna complain. In addition to time at work and making this site less of an eyesore I’ve been busy attempting to compile Mozilla from source code (yes, I will soon be the uber-geek, and no, I’m not proud of that). The Mozilla organization produces a great browser, a really good mail client, and responded to my bug report in less than five minutes, but when it comes to documentation for developers, it’s been an ordeal. I’ll post my notes from the experience in the near future in the hopes that it might make the process less painful for someone else.