I visited some relatives this morning in Phoenix, and then drove back this afternoon. From a sunny day in the eighties to a gloomy evening in the sixties at the beach, with rain in the forecast for tonight. I love it.
Category Archives: Administrative
Hitting The Road
I’m driving over to Phoenix for the conference, and unfortunately, it’s bad timing, because there’s going to be a 2 PM EDT teleconference with high-level NASA officials to flesh out the new plans. I guess I’ll find out what they are when I arrive this afternoon.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“Major Tom” comments over there that the purpose of the announcement is to define the roles and missions of the centers in the new direction.
[Evening update]
I arrived a few hours ago, but this is the first time I’ve gotten on line. Alan Ladwig of NASA is describing the new plans. Not in the mood to live blog, though, and I have to think about what I’ll say on my panel in an hour or so. The topic is technology requirements for transportation beyond low earth orbit.
[Bumped]
Comment Blockage Issue
Several people have had problems commenting recently. I’m guessing that the issue is that I recently added the word “Successful” to my blacklist, because I was getting so much spam from malicious morons using that as a user name. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t distinguish between strings from user names and content, so that was probably the problem that commenters were having. I’ve removed it, and we’ll see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately, it will recreate the problem with my moron spammers.
As an aside, I have to say that I’m very unhappy with WordPress’ inherent comment-spam-blocking system. It seems to me that multiple comments to multiple posts from the same IP in a few minutes should be automatically blocked, or at least held, but it doesn’t seem smart enough to do even that. MT, for all its flaws, could do that years ago. I have to look into a better solution.
I hate to go to a captcha system, but that may be the only solution. I’ve always wanted to make commenting here relatively painless, but apparently the spammers are going to ruin it for the rest of us, as they have with email.
[Monday morning update]
OK, per advice in comments, I’ve added the WP-Spamfree plugin. We’ll see how it goes.
Yeah, We Felt It
We were at Lowes, buying some casing for a new front entryway that I installed last weekend, and you could feel the entire concrete slab that the store was on start to gently roll. It went on for many seconds, and equipment hanging overhead was gently swaying. I told Patricia, “That’s a big quake, somewhere, many miles away.” When we got to the car, and turned on the radio, we heard that it was down in Baja, probably about 180 miles or so southeast of us. They got a lot bigger jolt down in San Diego and the other border towns, I’m sure. I haven’t exinspected the house here for damage, but I’d be surprised if there was any.
[Update a while later]
For those interested, it was at the Lowes in Hawthorne, at the end of the runway of the airport. And SpaceX is right across the street (Crenshaw) from it.
What Happened To Technorati?
When I search for posts related to this blog, it comes up empty. But I know that Glenn Reynolds has linked me in the last week. Does it no longer track incoming links? If not, what service (if any) does?
Off To Mojave
Probably no posting until late afternoon.
[Update later afternoon]
I’m back, but recovering from being gone all day…
In Case You’re Wondering
We didn’t feel a thing this morning. Slept right through it.
Teevee Deals
I’d upgrade to a fifty-plus incher
But if you buy one from the link, it will help me get one, too. Not to mention buy my next bowl of gruel…
And it’s nice to see electronics continue to drop in price, even if space access doesn’t.
Graphics Card Question
So my Samsung LCD monitor gave up the ghost (less than a couple years old, I think), and I went out to Frys to get a new replacement. I was looking at the displays and some of them looked like crap (blurry letters). I asked the salesman, and he said that they were being fed with VGA analog, whereas the sharp ones were digital (DVI or HDMI). If I were the manufacturers of those monitors, I’d be pretty unhappy with that situation, but I digress.
Anyway, I determined to not only get a replacement monitor, but to upgrade my video card as well to digital output. So I bought a new LG 21.5″ screen, and an MSI card with an NVidia N220GT engine, and a gig of DDR2 memory.
I got home, put in the card, and it turned out not to work without having to update Linux drivers from NVidia. But in changing it out, I also noticed that the old card (also an NVidia, with 128M of memory) had a DVI output, so I didn’t really need the new one in terms of digital output support. So I’m running with it now.
Question: I’m not a gamer, and don’t do anything really graphics intensive, such as video processing. Is there any point in updating drivers and reinstalling it, or should I just take it back and get my sixty bucks back? Will I see any performance improvement from it?
[Monday morning update]
Thanks for all the input in comments. I don’t need any of the things that y’all say the card will help with, so I’ll be taking it back. If I ever do need it, I’ll get a better one, cheaper, at that time.
So How Sick Was I?
So sick that this is the first time I’ve used a computer in over thirty hours. Just to explain the lack of commenting, posting and moderating. If you really want to know how sick I was, go over the fold, for TMI… Continue reading So How Sick Was I?