As NASA struggles to get the Space Shuttle back to flight, another side of the US government is hampering private space flight.
Bloody typical of them really…
iPod Obsessed
Now, this is what I would call iPod obsessed!
Too little too late
With NASA’s announcement of postponing Discovery’s launch date from May to mid-July, Leah and I were thinking about going down to KSC and watch the launch. The last time we went for a launch at KSC more than 3 years ago, bad weather at the backup emergency recovery site at Spain causes the launch to be scrubbed twice. It was a night launch and I was planning to propose to Leah as the shuttle ascends right after it cleared the tower. Alas, I proposed to Leah in a Orlando steak house! Not really the same thing…
But since we left it this late, all the good tickets are already been sold out, and the remaining ones are viewing from the Astronaut Hall of Fame which, although close, is more than a few miles away from the launch pad.
So I am tasked to keep my eyes out for the next space shuttle launch, the Atlantis, around the September time (KSC can only put tickets on sale for the upcoming launch). I guess it works out pretty well since the weather at Orlando around July time isn’t that great, while weather during September is almost perfect. It is a shame though that there will no more night launches due to CAIB recommendation of daylight launch for ideal lighting condition for camera tracking and monitoring.
Tiger envy
According to UPS, my copy of Tiger is still 5 days away. It is on time to be delivered on May 5th. My friend Jeronimo already received his copy on Friday and installed on his wife’s 12″ AlBook yesterday. I bet he will get it installed on his Mac Mini today. Arrgghhhh! The new 100GB hard drive and a drive enclosure (for the existing 40GB hard drive that is in the PB right now) are sitting quietly in the box. I wish I have my copy so I can install my new hard drive in my PowerBook and install Tiger on it.
Can’t wait to use the new Mail.app and Dashboard, though I am not overly excited by Spotlight, Automator, or even iChat AV but I am sure I will find them useful from time to time.
The Quartz Composer from Xcode 2 sounds very interesting, with the capability of allowing regular users to create new screen saver without writing a single line of code. Got to get me some of that 🙂
Day Off
Last week I’ve finally reached the point where I need to take some time off work. So I took today off and the plan was to play the new Halo 2 maps in the morning and then work on ecto after lunch.
The new Halo 2 maps are fantastic! Slayer games in Warlock is just absolutely bloody fucking insane! Lots of dark corners to ambush people and with the newly rebalanced weapons damage, lots of grenades were thrown. Not to mention tonnes of close quarter combat with the loser being beat down.
Containment is huge! CTF or Assault game will be great with all three types of vehicles (Warhog, Banshee, and Scorpion!) available. Lots of sniping and rocket action.
I haven’t played Turf with any other players yet (I played Warlock and Containment in custom games with people from XBox Live) but Turf’s layout will be perfect for ambushes. Lots of above street level hiding places where the attacker can be easily caught in cross fires from multiple directions.
As for ecto development, I managed to fix a few minor bugs but I got bogged down with setting up a MT test environment as well as a corrupted Thunderbird profile. This requires me to start with a brand new profile and download all the emails again from the server. Not a big deal? It is when you have 4000+ spam emails that I don’t but do want to download again. I don’t because it takes so long and so much bandwidth, but I do because I want to train the Thunderbird Junk filter with these spam emails. Thunderbird also seems to have problem with recognising spam emails that I’ve already downloaded so it tries to download all 4000+ of them again every 15 mintues! In the end, I went to the server and deleted all of them. I hate POP3 email server, why can’t we all have IMAP email server (like .Mac?).
Lost in Colonisation 