Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

I can spend all day watching both real and computer-generated imagery from NASA. Coverage from past missions, juxtaposed with simulated images from projected or future missions. It would make a nice video, especially if it was set to music.

Even better would be in a keyboard-based band or orchestra, with the imagery being projected on a large screen above the band, a la Jean Michel Jarre.

What are your favorite pieces of "space music"?

Found out last night that the father of one of my friends in Buffalo passed away yesterday. I feel sad that I won't be able to be there for him at the wake or at the funeral. I know I was there for him 20+ years ago when his mother passed away.

A post in the spaceagers community mentions a Twitter thread that recaps the Apollo 11 mission in somewhat real time, 40 years after the event. Here's the post, which contains the details.

I'm long past the age of getting drunk to the point of getting sick. But there are a couple of incidents from my college days that I should mention at this time. Names are being withheld to protect the guilty.

Back before the days of the FIPG, one of the guys in my fraternity indulged a little too much and went out back to take care of himself. Lo and behold, someone took a picture of him being sick, went to Kinko's, and had the picture blown up to poster size. I think it should have been captioned "Alcohol poisoning is very glamorous." Kind of like the smoking posters from the 1970s.

Another went to a local bar and had a little too much to drink. He got sick on the way home. Someone wrote a rap song about it, and several titles were bestowed unto him. Titles like Titan of Toss. Viceroy of Vomit. Baron of Barf. Earl of Hurl. Duke of Puke. Champion of Chunder. And the Maharaji of Regurgitation.

Needless to say, these two guys cleaned up their act quickly, and never got sick from drinking again.

And the moral of this story is: Learn from the mistakes of others so you don't have to make them yourself.

1) I can reduce a whole lot of note paper if I sat down and typed some of the notes I've accumulated in the past several years, ignoring stuff that's no longer pertinent. (Information does have a shelf life.)

2) I haven't seen a Billy Mays ad since he died on Sunday. I guess all the networks and cable channels pulled them out of respect for the man.

I'm considering moving my online picture storage from Flickr to webshots.com. I'll still keep the Flickr account; I just won't use it very often. Probably only for filk con pictures.

I haven't updated my pictures on Flickr in a Very Long Time. I'm still not crazy that Flickr is part of Yahoo! I haven't even loaded the Flickr software on my laptop, and it's been just over a year since I upgraded.

As far as I know, free users such as myself are limited to three albums and 200 pictures on Flickr.

I thought about using the Kodak Gallery site (formerly ofoto.com), but that never really happened. If they had photo uploading software, I never found it. It seems that their focus is on me (and their customers) ordering prints of my digital photos. (Because that's where they make their money.)

So how did I discover webshots.com? They're a website run by my $CLIENT.

I just upgraded to Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.22 on my desktop, up from 2.0.0.21. Once I started it up, I got the dreaded BSOD. Another critical stop. And it trashed thunderbird.exe. [expletive deleted]! So now I'm downloading the full version of 2.0.0.22 from mozillamessaging.com.

Times liked these I wish I had a high speed connection at home. But I don't; I still use dialup.

Today at work, they had "Bring Your Dog To Work Day". Many people, including my project manager Andrew, brought their dogs in. There was a bake sale, a silent auction (with the proceeds to benefit a local kennel), opportunities for dog portraits, hot dogs from Tucky's for eating during lunch, and a hot dog eating contest. The winner downed 6 hot dogs in 5 minutes.

This was the first time I had a Cleveland-style hot dog -- a dog with a cut-up pierogi and stadium mustard. Think of it as French's without the yellow food coloring. Not bad.

I also got halfway through the Programmer's Challenge. I got one of the two pages working. I should be able to get the other one done tomorrow.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday autographedcat! And a belated happy birthday to starmalachite!

....that there's still a "20 first lines from 20 songs" quiz, and a good majority of them haven't been guessed. Go to http://poltr1.livejournal.com/444260.html for the quiz.

I'll post the answers next weekend.

For my next assignment, I need to learn the scripting language Python. I have enough experience in Perl and Java that I think I should be able to pick it up quickly. I picked up a copy of Python In A Nutshell from Half Price Books, and Learning Python at Borders yesterday. As popular as O'Reilly books are, my experience is that many of them are written as reference manuals instead of tutorials. (Especially the Nutshell books.)

From what I've seen of the language so far, Python is object-oriented, easy to understand, and makes programming fun. It'll be really fun if I can use Eclipse to write Python code. (So far, the frontrunner is PyDev.)

If I remember correctly, I'll also be doing some web front-end stuff, like HTML, Javascript, and CSS.