I’ve been running cables and speaker wire for the move of the television from the living room to the new family room created by opening up the kitchen walls. And packing. I’m back to CA in the morning, for the week. Wall patching will have to happen next weekend.
Oh, and I’ve added a couple new sites to the space blogroll, Michael Belfiore and Jeff Foust’s Personal Spaceflight blog.
In addition to dropping Andrew Sullivan, I’ve added Space Cynic to the roll. I don’t always agree with the posts there, but they’re usually provocative, and occasionally present good devil’s advocate positions to help hone arguments, one way or the other.
Andrew Sullivan has been near the very top of my blogroll since I started this blog, but I haven’t read him in months (except to follow someone else’s link to something in particular) because he seems to have come unhinged against the administration and his critics over “torture” (but I really think it’s about the gay marriage thing). Things like this are also why. I’ve finally removed him.
In case anyone was wondering over the light posting. I’m paying for my holiday weekend by frantically reviewing/rewriting CEV spacecraft system requirements and verification statements to hit a deadline.
Some cretin has set up a spam system to send emails to a vast number of people with the return address as *@transterrestrial.com.
While I was up at the cape, I got over two hundred emails to the effect that: so and so is out of the office, such and such a spamfilter blocked this email, etc.
All with return addresses of random names from my domain. I can’t imagine that they’re originating from my machine, since I don’t even use that domain myself for outgoing email.
Question. Other than blocking all incoming email to *@transterrestrial.com other than simberg@transterrestrial.com, what do I do about this, if anything? There’s certainly nothing I can do to prevent a third party from sending out email with a return address with my domain, though if there was, torching their genitals would be too good for them.
We’re going to go, and trust to luck (it’s about a two and a half hour drive, not counting inevitable launch traffic once we get close). No blogging until return–I don’t have wireless (though maybe I should get Verizon). See you tonight, hopefully with Discovery safely in orbit.
[Update at 8 PM EDT]
Well, another wasted day. The frustrating thing is that the weather wasn’t a problem for the launch–it was a problem for the extremely unlikely “attempted suicide in order to avoid certain death” maneuver of a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort. Unfortunately, at the last minute, as I was listening to the MMT poll, I also heard that there was a boat in the box, with no estimated time of removal.
As is often the case, the launch commitment criteria created an overconstrained system. Sometimes it amazes me that we’ve ever launched this thing.
I’ve been writing a column for National Review on the upcoming Shuttle launch, and reviewing CEV system requirements. Busy.
I’ve been thinking that a good way to make my laptop dual boot without messing with the current Windows installation would be to install a Linux distro on an external USB drive. Two questions:
Are there any problems with this (assuming that I can boot off a USB port) and are there any external drives that get their power from the USB port (so I don’t have to find a power socket to use it)?
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, the search word I was missing was “portable.” There do seem to be some available that run off the USB port.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It seems to me that the cool thing about this is that you could boot from anyone’s computer into your own system, as long as the machine was bootable from USB.
I got in all right last night, but my laptop’s hard drive is dying (wish I’d known that before I left–I would have brought my other one). I’m posting this from work, but won’t be able to do much of that, so posting may be light this week, until I get back to Florida Friday night.
Back to LA for another week. I may check in tonight.