Patricia’s up in Orlando this weekend, so I’m driving up this afternoon. We may go over to the Cape to see the launch tomorrow.

I just installed it, and am having problems configuring it. I’m not going to bother with the gory details here, unless someone pipes up, though.

This is (roughly) the ten-thousandth post on this blog, which I started a little over six years ago. (The exact numbers for both bloggiversary and numbers of posts are uncertain, due to the loss of some of my earliest posts in blogging software changeovers/upgrades).

When I started, back in October of 2001 (a few weeks after 911) I had no idea how long I’d do it, or where it would lead. It has provided a lot of entertainment and visibility for me, in ways I wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated. I hope that at least a few of my readers have been entertained and enlightened by the efforts.

I don’t know if the most recent cowardly troll is a new Anonymous Moron, or the old one with a new IP address (it seems to share a lot of features–lousy grammar and punctuation, sneering tone, use of the fallacious and idiotic “chickenhawk” argument, refusal to use its name), but I’ve banned it.

[Bumped at the end of the day]

I just banned another one (at least partly because I suspect it’s the same one–just with a different IP). I leave the comment up to show why I banned the commenter. I hope it’s obvious.

My patience grows thin over this kind of off-topic drive-by crap. This is not a site for BDS graffiti.

Can anyone imagine why, when I drag a wmv file over to my local drive from my file server, and play it from the local drive, the file transfer occurs quickly, and Windows Media Player plays it fine, but if I try to play it directly from the server, it runs like molasses?

Does anyone know a source for US combat deaths by year for World War II? I can find numbers overall, but not broken out by year.

I’m at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, waiting for a flight to Dallas that’s delayed half an hour (or at least I hope that it’s only half an hour). Going to a family wedding this weekend, so probably not a lot of posts until Monday.

Well, OK, just this one. Here’s a scholarly treatise over at Cracked on five potential and even semi-plausible zombie apocalypse scenarios. I know it’s a little late for Halloween, but heck, these holiday preps are moving earlier and earlier, so think of it as the first Halloween 2008 story.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.