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.

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.

Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.

Tony Stark makes it in at number 8 on Forbes fictional 15,behind Ritchie Rich and Scrooge McDuck.

The CofE are looking at Christian symbolism in Doctor Who as a way to seem more relevant to youngsters.

The “Iron Sky” trailer looks very interesting.

Spent the day up at A+K’s, much of which was spent with Puggle learning how to play with a playful and very licky puppy Zoe. A yummy lunch, (Bilby kept wanting all the cherry tomatoes from the salad). Puggle and I also got to play some Wii.

The rest of the week and a bit, redux:

• Easter, see Swancon. Plus chocolate eggs
• Swancon, caught up with lots of people. Despite much discussion elsewhere the only problem I had with the programming was that it seemed a bit light on for Friday and Saturday (Sunday and Monday were fine though). Ken Macleod, Rob Shearman and were great, Karl Schroeder had some very interesting information about forecasting future possibilities, and unfortunately I personally didn’t see much of Glenda Larke (although I know she’s great from chatting with her at previous cons) or the academic stream. Some wonderful moments at the awards ceremony. We now know how to herd fans (tell them more bar tab still needs spending Puggle amazingly lost interest during the Dalek voiceover. He did however pick up some tips from the Jedi training as he repurposed some coloured cricket wickets as a sith lightsaber later on in the week!
• Got to watch some of Puggle swimming (thanks to an outage at work :() and all of Bilby’s swim.
• Plumbing a solenoid into the back reticulation. Now just needs to be leakproofed and connected up to the X-10 system once I find the bits.
• Got a MacBook Air for the evening, which conveniently I could show off at Pancakes If only I got a commission…
• Caught up with the ‘local’ FileMaker Rep. Has certainly evolved since last I saw it, some nice plugins available.
• Jamie’s Steak, Guiness and Cheese Pie (this online recipe is missing that it’s 1kg of beef and 3 red onions, and we used no stock, just water). Unfortunately we were out of Guinness so I was forced to go out and purchase a carton
• Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5, still waiting on some more plugins to become compatible before the sidebar is back to normal.
• The end of daylight saving for another year. Yay!

Check out isitferret’s Swancon 2008 photobucket here. Leece and Rob’s photos from the Heroes and Villain’s Ball are here. Suggested flickr tag swancon2008.

Sadly suburbanrocketry.com don’t ship engines, but they do do kits. Presumably you can get engines (and kits) from your local hobby shop. Now if only the fire hazards will go away.

• Up before 0700hrs (”What does the Oh stand for? Oh God it’s early!”) as Puggle was restless so he may as well be fed breakfast and not wake anyone else up.
• After breakfast, turn off the water, replace washer in tap (it had been wasting water, annoying me, and annoying me during the night). Again. Need to find better washers or a better seating tool. Or a new tap.
• Turn on the water, discover that with the mains tap on almost full the bathroom tap outputs water faster than the bathroom sink can drain. Puggle is attempting to turn off the bathroom tap, somehow it reminds me of The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
• Discover that the bathroom lacks a floor drain (or someone installed a barrier between the main floor and the shower drain). Either way, mopping is necessitated to contain the flood to the bathroom. Tap now only drips minimally. Turn mains tap down 5 turns or so.
• Puggle wants to put his AppleWorks clip art creations on a blog for other people to see. And write music. His ‘typing of search terms’ skill has been translated from YouTube to the AppleWorks on-line clip art library, which is kind of cool.
• Inspired by the early morning productivity, catch the bus to work, with a nice walk from the Hospital in a continued attempt to up my energy expenditure for the week.
• SF@Pub. Meet new folks. Eat black pudding (not bad) for the first time. Have dinner with a snake, for the first time.