Cheap Therapy

I guess I first heard of wire recorders through golden age SF (probably Heinlein), they were basically the precursor to tape recorders (because I guess tape does actually require a lot more in the way of special manufacturing than wire). Anyway, here’s someone who’s attempting to recover their grandfather’s old wire recordings.

If you deal with the public and are looking for something to brighten your day (or just others to commiserate with), check out notalwaysright.com. Or maybe contribute your own.

Or for the more visually inclined, PhotoshopDisasters. Beware it may contain photos of scantily clad models (frequently with extra hands or distorted heads) which may not be considered appropriate for your workplace.

WordPress 2.6 was a painless subversion update for me. Probably the nicest features for me are word count (although I’m not actually sure when it does the count, definitely on manual saves) and tracking of revisions to posts.

would be to not let your red LED sign on a busy intersection stay crashed for 3 days. At least it’s not displaying any spelling errors this time.

Taste.com.au are running a competition to find Home Cook of The Year, you’ll need a winning weeknight recipe that your family loves.

• Home Based Learning Network trade fair. I won the first door prize
• Touring the frozen eastern states. Qantas cancels two of my flights due to maintenance issues, and books me on the earlier flight. Fortunately I am able to make it to the airport on time in both cases, although one of them involves eating my dinner in the car… One flight is on a plane flown up from Melbourne to replace the original aircraft. The new plane has a loose interior panel next to my seat, which the hostie kicks into place And the reading lights don’t work. Hopefully nothing else is wrong with it!
• I’m going to try a cut for those who like such things. Apologies if this doesn’t work on the syndicated feed.

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Out of curiousity I checked out how much it would cost to offset a Perth to Sydney return flight. Qantas listed it as $7.86 for 0.38 tonnes of CO2.

Really, if it’s that cheap they should automatically include it in all ticket purchases and allow people to opt out if they’d rather not pay to clean up after themselves.

Been meaning to blog this for a while. It takes 10 minutes to walk from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital to UWA, less than 5 minutes by bus.

If you need a St John’s Ambulance from there, it can take 20 minutes to arrive (in non-peak-midweek-around-lunchtime traffic). I hope nobody lives any further away than that from an Ambulance depot!

The Australian reports that Channel Seven will be releasing TiVos on July 29th at Harvey Norman.

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.