[Note: The dangers of blogging.

I put up a regrettable post last night. The title of it is all that remains (well, also comments), but it takes on a whole new, and appropriate meaning. As I said in it, I was grumpy from lack of sleep, and frustrated from a seeming inability to post all day, but that’s not an excuse. I can’t even claim that I had overimbibed, but that’s not an excuse, either–no one (at least as far as I can remember) has ever strapped me down, cackling, and thrust a one-gallon funnel down my gullet. Short version of it: I was childishly whining because I couldn’t log on from the conference.

I’m not deleting it completely because that always seems a little Orwellian, but it was, as Keith correctly notes in the comments that I am leaving up, an epistle that the AIAA neither would or should appreciate, and it should not remain on the web (this note is mainly for those who might still manage to read it if Google was so unfortunately overdiligent as to have cached it last night).

Even if it were true (I understand now that it was not), it was completely unjustified, and simply a symptom of how spoiled we (or at least I) have become in the early twenty-first century, with expectations, if not outright demands, of the instant gratification of ubiquitous abundant bandwidth. I have had my differences with AIAA over the years, but they are a vital institution to this industry. Like NASA, they are staffed and supported by great people operating under the constraints of their institution. This conference in particular is great (of which I’ll write more later), and despite that churlish growl, I do appreciate them much.

Mark Twain once wrote, “A dog will not bite the hand that feeds him. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog.” Although you can’t always tell on the Internet, I am not a dog.]