Schierer Space

So the highly publicized M$ Silverlight based viewer for the online Olympics footage is inconvenient at best and painful at worst. I’ve crashed it twice already. The much publicized ‘view 4 events at once’ is useless because rather than splitting the display 4 ways, you are in a sort of ‘video control room’ where the images are less than tiny.

I’m trying to watch the women’s fencing from last night and your choices are basically watch it or not. There is a slider that might theoretically allow you to move around in the broadcast. Just like in Media Player, the slider is about 3 inches long, this wouldn’t be a big problem if the broadcast weren’t 3+ hours long. So the smallest adjustment in the slider is about 7-10 minutes. How hard would it be to have a finer adjustment?

Oh, and as expected, you’re forced to watch a commercial before the viewer actually goes active to watch the event itself.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain TOO much, after all, I wouldn’t be able to see any events other than gymnastics, swimming and basketball if it weren’t for the online feed.

Amusing note: The theme from The Rock was playing in the background before the first bout.

As usual Spaceflight Now has the scoop on the 3rd Falcon mishap. The summary is that the first stage impacted the second stage after separation. The theory as I understand it is that the Merlin1C on the 1st stage was still burning, propelling the 1st stage into the second stage after separation.

The Falcon 1 launched a few minutes ago, but had “an anomaly” according to the webcast announcer just over two minutes into the flight. This would have been just before 1st stage burnout. A slight oscillation (0.5-1 Hz) was observable in the web feed just before the video was cut off.

There will probably be an announcement tomorrow.

Update 12:40AM: Spaceflight Now has been updating their site with addition ‘details’. Nothing informative yet. The link is to their page for the 3rd Falcon mission, so it will probably get updates as they come in.

As reported by Bad Astronomer (and many others), SpaceX is making their third launch of the Falcon 1 system today. In about an hour, actually, if no further delays occur.

A live webcast is available. Watch now!

I’ll link to the post-launch videos when they become available… but that would of course have to be… right… post-launch.

With the grandparents watching Nate, K & I went down to the beach. After walking along the beach, we stopped in Old Orchard for a bite to eat. Parked at the side of the plaza was the “Conference Bike“*. Neither of us had seen such a thing and it is both a thing of creative beauty and a pretty cool mechanical gadget.

The quadricycle (double wheels at the rear) is powered by all seven riders while one steers and operates the brake and bell. Each rider has a seat and pedals (and can grab on the the circular bar in the middle) which connect by chain to a common drive shaft. The drive shaft is connected using universal joints to form a single drive which operates a heavier chain to the rear wheels.

The front wheels are turned via a steering wheel and what looks to be a rack and pinion type steering setup. The bike was available for rental at $70/hour.

There are other pics from our trip so far up on the gallery.

Yes, there really is a silver bullet. Well, at least a rather shiny metallic bullet of some kind.

I have recorded the number of gallons and trip mileage for EVERY tank of gas I ever put in my car (361 tanks as of today). This is a habit that I picked up from my Mom, which generally serves little or no purpose other than monitoring sudden changes in engine efficiency. It is not my Mom’s fault (at least directly) that I bothered to enter this data into a spreadsheet and analyze it. Anyways, it is because of this record that I am able to somewhat conclusively report that there is an easy way to improve your gas mileage.

How?
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It’s been a while since I actually made a post here, so I thought I’d use today’s nap time to do just that. Not a real lot going on here other than just day to day stuff, so it may not be real exciting.

I took Nate to the doctor yesterday. He’s had a cold and a very runny nose for several days now, and after waking up many time screaming on Monday night, I was quite sure that he had an ear infection. He most definitely did, so now he’s on an antibiotic. hopefully it will kick in today, and he’ll be a little less cranky.

Nate and I are taking a Music Together class on Friday mornings. it’s been a lot of fun for both of us. He gets to be around a group of kids his age, and I love to see him interact with them. He’s gotten out of the “babies are for eating” stage into the “I’m going to poke you in the eye” stage. lots of fun. He also seem to be enjoying the music. He gets excited when the jingle bells come out and he gets to play with them. So far a good experience.

Nate’s getting better at walking, and is almost ready to do it on his own. When we’re outside in the lawn, he walks everywhere, just using one hand to hold onto 1 of my fingers. Inside, he still prefers to hold on with both hands. I don’t think it will be long now before he’s walking on his own.

We’ve been spending a lot of time outside since the weather has turned nice. Nate enjoys it, and my gardens are starting to look pretty good because of it. Every time we walk around to look at the flowers, I pause to pull a weed or two. Even managed to trim the hedges the other day. hopefully I’ll be able to keep the weed pulling up all summer.

I’ve been doing more scrapbooking again recently. A couple of the moms I met thru the MOMS Club have been getting together fairly regularly in the evenings to scrap, and I’ve been joining them. I’ve been working on a simple photo album of Nate’s first year pictures. Just a regular 2-up 4×6 album that I’ve been making little 4×6 mini-pages to journal on about the accompanying photo. Goes quite quickly once I get momentum.

Well that’s about all I can think of right now. Gotta get back to the laundry. Maybe more to come soon, but I wouldn’t count on it.

What? You can’t see any difference? Well, you shouldn’t but believe me when I tell you that the code is COMPLETELY different.

I’ve converted our theme into the modern WordPress era by Widget-izing the sidebar. Yeah, I know, you don’t really care, but this will make it easier for us to tailor the site to our whims and change the look from time to time.

I also had to create a brand new WordPress widget to support the Gallery Image Block you see on the left. This will be my first ‘real’ submittal to a project like WordPress, so it will be interesting to see how that process goes. It’s written as a plugin which activates the widget (like most widgets are).

If you care, you can read more about the External Gallery 2 ImageBlock Widget.

So rant number one is the ridiculous amount of money I spent on the 105k service for my car. This is weak, because I haven’t had a car payment in years, and this definitely didn’t add up to more than 3-4 of those.

The real rant is the loaner car. They loaned me a 2008 Acura TL, which at first blush would seem to be a pretty nice car. It had leather seats, a navigation system, XM radio, a great sound system, a funky key fob with a switch blade like key deployment method… all of which LOOKS very cool, but doesn’t really do much for the driving experience. Ok, sure, it has some power, disk brakes, fancy suspension… but it had an automatic.
And not a very good one.

I hate automatics.

Hate.

Why on earth can’t they make an automatic that shifts even remotely like a human? Read on… in all seriousness, I think I know why, because I’m a geek and I’ve been thinking about it all day.
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As has been mentioned previously, we’ve been having a truly stunning run of nice weather here in the Syracuse area. Earlier this week we had a series of ultra-clear days, so I took a trip up to Fenner to get some shots of the wind farm there. You can read more about the Fenner wind farm at the windpower project website. Their site is somewhat limited, so you might actually glean more info from the pictures I took of their tourist signs*. The center of the farm is about 10 miles north-east of where we live, and is one of several wind projects in the area.

I’ve often been torn on the issue of wind power. People complain that they detract from the natural beauty of an area, which I can understand, but at the same time I find them to be beautiful in a sleek modern way. The turbines are a landmark that can be seen from any hilltop or vantage point in the area by day or at night (by the red collision lights perched on the hub). Of course, I generally get to view them from afar, not like the people who live in their shadow.

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