Cheap Therapy

• Put an offer on a car, as detailed elsewhere. RAC check on Monday morning (they state they’ll e-mail results within 2 hours of completion!). RAC were annoying by claiming the car was a 4WD, so they’d charge $90 more. Now they just claim it’s ‘large’ (which at that stage was not mentioned on their web site as costing any different), and are still claiming the extra.
• MacGeeks dinner at Taste of Thai, which was quite pleasant, if somewhat understaffed on a Tuesday night.
• Boss announced he’s taking on a position elsewhere on campus to continue his missionary work. I for one welcome our new overlord who’s probably reading this
• Swimming with Bilby, Puggle and Mama. Bilby delights in swimming back and forth between us two, to the point where she is too exhausted to actually swim. Puggle enjoys himself and shows off his windmill arms.

The other day I was reading the newspaper when I realised that I’d already heard about the story because it was a headline that spammers had picked up (presumably from an RSS feed somewhere) and were using it on a subject line on spam being sent to my inbox.

• Snot
• Random lunch with people from the fruit company
• Discover park’n'ride is cheaper and more convenient (thanks to Condi digging up our carpark!)
• Car shopping
• Coughs
• Camera shopping
• Conjunctivitis
• UniSFA 30th dinner
• YouTube rockets etc. with Puggle (and Bilby!). (Check out some freefall action in the Japanese science module Kibo). Including a good example of what happens when you can’t get to a handhold.
• Sleep deprivation

Scaled Composite’s new Mothership “Eve” (aka WhiteKnightTwo) will lift Spaceship2 to 15000m. It’s the world’s largest carbon composite aircraft.

I don’t think their naming scheme is going to scale too well, I suspect “Spaceship54″ won’t be as compelling

For geek porn, check out the link to Scaled Composite’s giant CNC mill (available for rental to further your world domination plans)

Just awesome, check out the NASA photo archive (via Slashdot).

• 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.

(more…)

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.

• Using Google Sketchup to model some housing development and investigate overshadowing. Pretty awesome once you get the hang of it. Write submission
• Probably no WWDC this year
• A birthday dinner for Becc with fine food and company
• A week without students. Meaning lots of things getting done while they’re not around
• Get to see Cygnet for the first time
• A long weekend. ANZAC day. Bless ‘em.
• A picnic in a smaller park than anticipated. But my first time walking both Puggle and Bilby there. Reminder, Bilby is heavy enough I need the stroller
• AppleScripty pythony Dilberty goodness
• Car test driving. Kia Grand Carnival and Toyota Tarago (Last week the Volkswagen Passat Wagon, Subaru Liberty and the Tarago). See a separate post somewhat later
• Games at Kylie’s. Happy Birthday! This time I prove I can lose at Super Scrabble as well as Scrabble

The RAC are running a car battery recycling day on the 3rd of May 2008, just drop your battery off at an RAC Auto Service Centre.

Welcome to Canberra!

Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire.

At the first Olympic torchlighting ceremony, Berlin, 1936 - Adolf Hitler