Schierer Space

With NBC providing thousands of hours of Olympic coverage with broadcast, cable and online viewing available there is an overwhelming amount of viewing available. Now I hate watching the 45 second highlight clips intermixed with 45 minute human interest stories that make the prime-time Olympic magazine show. I want to sit down and watch some event to see what it is, or how it works and become an armchair judge (or in the case of Laser sailing… maybe learn something).

So I’m VERY disappointed in the NBC broadcast listings on their website. At first glance it seems like a lot of thought went into organizing the event and broadcast information, but extracting useful information from the NBC broadcast megaplex is nearly impossible.
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Vincent Laforet, who is shooting the Olympics for Newsweek, is running a blog documenting his experiences. I’m not sure if I will follow this throughout the games, but his post about packing for the trip is pretty interesting.

If you can’t be bothered to read the post, at least flip through the image gallery of his packing.

All I can say is: “Mmmmm….. gear.”

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.

So Nate unfortunately learned that wasps are ouchy today. We were out on the back porch and Nate was sitting on the chaise lounge. None of us realized that the yellow-jackets had started a nest underneath.

I was talking with my Dad and suddenly Nate started crying loudly and shrilly. I noticed the insects circling around him.

Ouch.

He was stung on his right forearm and the on his left elbow.

Double Ouch.

Grampa D is allergic, so we are monitoring closely, but so far just some local redness.

I’ve been waiting for the release of the latest John Scalzi novel, The Last Colony since I finished the previous book, The Ghost Brigades, months ago. I’m too cheap to buy it in hardcover though, so I’ve been waiting for the “mass-market paperback”.

Well it’s finally out and I bought it today on the way home from work. I’m already more than half way through. I could probably finish it in another couple of hours but I really must sleep now.

K & I spotted these signs on a local walk some time ago. I had forgotten about it until today.

So if you work for National Grid and you’re wondering what to put in the Orange Collection Containers:

Hmm.

This is not a real post. You are seeing this only because I am trying to figure out why Evil Eyebrow’s feed is weirdly unformatted.

Peace.

I can conclusively say that the theme has nothing to do with it (although I had to edit out the call to the random quote engine.. but I seriously doubt that’s related.)