Category: Misc

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

- Douglas Adams

Lori has recently joined me in watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica. I'm noticing that it's got a lot of religious themes in it. Which is a bit mind-boggling, when you really think of it - robots that believe in God? I find this quote to be particularly appropriate. We're both enjoying the show quite a bit, by the way. I didn't originally ask Lori to join me, as I didn't think it would appeal to her much. But after accidentally watching an episode or two while waiting for Carter to fall asleep, it's piqued her interest. The depth of the characters on the show is really pulling us in.

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

- Douglas Adams

We have had quite a string of bad luck over the last few months. Each event taken seperately is not that terrible, but taken as a whole it is starting to seem a little overwhelming. First, I discovered that the framing behind the front porch and the headers over the garage were rotten, and had to be repaired. Then, the ground froze before I could get concrete footings poured for the new porch - so we are porch-less until the spring. Next, we got hit with an ice storm that left us without power for eleven days. When the power finally came back and we tried to come home (two days before Christmas) the heat didn't work yet. Once the heat started working and we were back in the house - which was Christmas Eve at this point - we lost the power again, at 2:00 AM on Christmas morning. The day after Christmas, my laptop died - totally bricked. It's still out for repair (it was thankfully still under warranty), and I have no idea if they will be able to fix it without wiping the hard drive - which contains all the work I've done since my last backup, including our Christmas pictures for this year (which is why I haven't posted them yet, in case you were wondering). And then last week, the whole family started getting sick. Come to find out (yesterday), Carter has bacterial pnuemonia, Lori has a sinus infection, and I've got bronchitis. And to top it all off, we had to bring the van to the shop yesterday, as it had started giving Lori trouble with the power steering. Sweet merciful crap! I thought bad luck was only supposed to come in threes?!? Sorry to post a rant, but it feels better to get it off my chest. :)

If any of you have taken a look at the moon in the last week or two, right at sunset, you might have noticed two bright points of light right next to it. Those weren't stars though - that was Venus (the brighter of the two) and Jupiter. How cool is that?

This guy does some amazing work. He uses modeling materials meant for building model railroad dioramas, and build amazing little worlds under glass. He has an keen ability to "capture a moment" - even knowing these things are just plastic and foam, some of them seem almost alive.

I don't know if any of you have been following all of the data coming from Mars these days, but they are finding lots of interesting new things. The MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) used radar to find something pretty interesting - huge glaciers under the surface. It looks like each of these glaciers might cover an area larger than a city, and be almost a kilometer thick. This discovery could have serious effect on the planning of a future mission to Mars, and could even serve as a drinking water reservoir for a future Martian settlement.

I recently received an email from a friend that was one of those "get-to-know-each-other" chain letters. Normally, I would send those straight to the bit bucket. But this one actually made me sit and think for a bit. Instead of replying to the email, I've decided to turn this into a blog post to give me a little more breathing space to explain what I like about these books.

I'm well aware that few (or possibly even none) of you will care about this. If you fall into that mammoth category, feel free to skip this post. But for the few who do care, here is my list, with the books listed in order of increasing wonderfulness. Also note that I've leveraged a self-imposed rule on myself to not include more than one book from any one author. Otherwise I would have to include all three Lord of the Rings books, as well as a slew more from Orson Scott Card - which would make for a boring list.

Continue reading "Best Fiction I’ve Ever Read"

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

- Douglas Adams

In the evenings over the last couple of weeks, I have been doing some research online into how to go about starting a garden. Next year, I would like to start a garden somewhere in our yard with the kids. The goal here is threefold. First, I'll learn something new and have fun doing it. Second, the kids will (hopefully) have fun helping, and (again, hopefully) learn how hard work can pay off in the end. And third (and potentially most importantly), we can save some money on our grocery bills. I'd also love to grow enough to can some of our harvest, so we can enjoy it through the winter. And making some homemade salsa from ingredients that all came from our own garden would be pretty cool, too.

I love these things. The couple that builds these uses items found at antique stores and bits and pieces from the hardware store. I'd love to make one of these myself. They're cute and charming. I showed Sean the website, and he loved looking at the pictures of all the robots.

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

- Douglas Adams

I know, I know - it's been a long time since I posted one of these. But lately I've taken a renewed interest in increasing my posting frequency. So here's to the resurection of "42 Words of Wisdom"! This one hits especially close to home. As some of you may know, I recently discovered that the previous owner of our house had built the front porch himself, and had botched it. When he attached the ledger to the house, he didn't bother using any flashing. So due to the lack of $10 worth of flashing, water has been seeping behind the ledger for years. Once I tore down the porch and pulled off the siding, I found that a significant amount of the house's framing that was behind the porch had rotted out. At this point I've got all of the rotted wood replaced, and that section resided. But now I've still got to build a new porch - hopefully before the winter sets in. This going to end up costing us hundreds of dollar, and costing me hours and hours of time, just because someone couldn't be bothered to spend $10 and 5 minutes to install flashing - which is not exactly a closely-guarded secret of professional contractors. On the plus side, I was never really happy with the original porch and don't mind the chance to rebuild it the way I'd like to. I just would have preferred to hold off until next year to do it.

I think it's been almost a year since I last put up a "Scenes from Space" post, but this is a special occasion. On June 13th, at 12:05 PM, GLAST (the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope) was launched into orbit. One of the instruments on that satellite is called the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), and I was involved in the software development effort for that instrument. So good luck GLAST! And if anything goes wrong, I swear it wasn't me. :)