The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy teaser is up!
August 10, 2004
Hubble Rescue
Excellent! The Discovery Channel is reporting that NASA has announced they are going to send a shuttle up in 2006 to fix the Hubble! That’s great news for science and space astronomers.
Myst IV
The new Myst IV Demo is up! All 200Mb of it. Erin and I have played the first three Mysts all the way through with no cheating (okay, there was that one puzzle that was just ridiculous, but that’s it, I swear!). Can’t wait to see the new game.
August 9, 2004
Outbound
Got the old tent out today. It’s similar to this one. It had been packed away in a bag in the dark in the back of the closet for over a decade, and I had grown afraid of what kind of condition it would be in when I finally opened it up. Testament to good materials and engineering: even though it still had Colorado dirt and aspen leaves in it from when I hastily packed it, it looked like it was used yesterday. Getting ready to use it again in a few weeks in Winfield, Colorado- one of my favorite places on the planet.
Family Matters
Thought I’d mention to many of my friends here that my mom, who suffered through a rough few years from an advanced malignant melanoma several years ago, has developed a case of breast cancer. She’s going in to the doctor in a week or so to get scheduled for surgery (cancer removal, not mastectomy). Thoughts and prayers appreciated. Fortunately, they caught it early and the doctors feel very confident that the surgery will be the end of it. But cancer is cancer, and some is worse than none. We’ll all be glad when it’s removed.
That’s a Lota Meatball
from engadget:
New 2 terabyte memory card coming. We aren’t kidding.
A bunch of Taiwanese technology companies are working on a new memory card with the utterly ungoogleable name ”?Ǭ
Loading Docks
Who ever thought such a dry topic could be so interesting? The History Channel’s “Modern Marvels” had a fascinating 1 hour special on loading docks tonight. Don’t laugh, it was really good.
And speaking of really good, CNN Presents had a special on tonight called “Is Anybody Out There?” about the state of the art in the world of SETI. It interviewed all the usual suspects: Jill Tarter, Frank Drake, Chris Chyba, and went to Aricebo, New Mexico, the Andes, etc. Mostly old stuff, but I had something reinforced to me that I’d forgotten: CNN’s Miles O’Brien has the coolest freaking job in the universe.
And he can pull off that subtle “O’Brien, Miles O’Brien” tux thing:
August 7, 2004
From the Earth to the Moon
Just finished watching episode 12 of the Tom Hanks/HBO mini series “From the Earth to the Moon”. Did you know that it’s the most expensive mini-series ever produced? Yup, $67,000,000! And it’s all up there on the screen, baby. An awful show if you’re a space geek like me.
By the way, didja know that the flag that the Apollo 17 astronauts (Cernan and Schmidt) took to the moon was originally taken to the moon aboard Apollo 11? Neil and Buzz brought it back from the moon’s surface and hung it in mission control until Apollo 17 took it to the Taurus-Littrow valley and left it there -that’s the one they mount on the flagpole in all the pics from 17 (I have this one from 17 on my wall). The crew of 17 took another flag to the moon and brought it back agan, and that’s the one that’s hanging in Mission Control today.
Pretty cool, no?
August 6, 2004
WildFire
AKA “the flying weeble”. Canada’s DaVinci Project is set to launch this on September 29th and Oct 4th. All I can say is that, if this thing actually makes it into space, NASA has some ‘splainin to do. Good luck to ‘em.
August 5, 2004
Classics
Worth1000 has a photoshop contest up. Entrants rework modern celebs into paintings by classic artists. Some very cool stuff. Personal faves: Gates ala DaVinci and Kidman leaving the Moulin Rouge. Nice work.
The Retro-Encabulator!
Coming soon to a hypertyrodial reverse node scribulum near you. very funny (requires wmv player)
Second Life Pt. 2
I played around quite a bit last night with Second Life. It’s an interesting idea with quite a bit of customization available. Since all the 3D is streamed, you really need a fast connection- fiber would be best- darn the cable companies!
Right now it seems like the graphical quality and movement speed are adversely affected by the streaming infrastructure, but the idea is sound. The company talks about getting the quality up to “real life” in a few years. I don’t doubt it, but that’ll only happen when we all have 10 mbps connections on a fiber backbone.
In a related development, this story points to dropping cable and DSL prices, though it’s not clear if that’s in the U.K. or not. Giles and I were talking last night about how broadband prices have hit a plateau at around $40/month and we haven’t seen any serious competition in the market. He pointed out that demand is still really high, so why drop the prices? Fair enough. Anyone know what the market saturation of high-speed home connections is? 20%? 50%?
I’d love to see 1-3mbps for around $20 in the next five years. Any takers?
August 4, 2004
Maintenance
Thanks to Mark Millard for taking on the yeoman duty of hosting Giles’ computer while it hosts this site. Giles is in the middle of a server move and we all know how much fun it is dealing with cable modems.
Speaking of this site, I’m going back through and changing a few things up in my titles and my titling scheme. From now on I’ll try and be more consistent with my categories. There’s something like 850+ entries on this site, though, so it might be awhile before all the old stuff gets properly categorized.
*Update* well, frell. I went through each of the pages on the M.T. server and laboriously changed some of the categories and titles. What I didn’t realize was that Safari doesn’t save the state of the changes when you search for the next set of entries. I didn’t save each set before going on to the next- just assumed that it was done in the background. Long story short: just wasted 30 minutes for nothing. Ah well, it’ll be MUCH faster doing it directly on Giles’ computer within his network. Something about managing this site from my computer makes the process painfully, painfully slow, especially when there are so many edits to make. Gack. I’ll do it later.