The pictures of U-Ren on Saturday are up. They're over in the My Life section. Not gonna waste bandwidth and post them here.
Update: HIT RELOAD IF YOU DON'T SEE THE LINK ON THE MY LIFE PAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, it has been and interesting 24 hours. It started yesterday with me going to Bre's again to preform the phoenix thing with a winbox. It took the usual 5 hours and then I hung... err... laid in a pile on the floor with the girls until 3am. Walking down 9th to the car, someone a long ways behind me hollered, "Sir! Excuse me, hold up a sec!" Hearing that whatever was going on was a long way from me, I stopped and turned to see what the guy wanted. I felt my attacker just before he landed. I managed to turn to him and get my forehead into his nose or mouth. I'm not sure which, but it crunched a lot. Next, he got a knee to the groin. I'm not sure I did that on purpose. I'm thinking my legs had started to run without asking my eyes if the way was clear and he was just kind of in the way. I proceeded to run like hell, jump in the car, and race off. I'd like to claim that I was a big studly man and beat off my attacker but I just freaked out in a useful manner. The only smart thing I did was to run like hell. I have one hell of a headache and a bit of a limp today. I'm not entirely sure I wasn't struck in the hip with something because it's really stiff and sore today but there's no bruise. Today, when I told the girls what had happened as I left, one of them mentioned that the night before someone had hailed them from down the street the same way I was hailed. Being infinitely much smarter than I am, they ran like hell and skipped the getting attacked stage.
Wednesday, today, I took off because I felt I could use the time. While sitting at the server working in Photoshop, the server made an odd noise, kind of like a very short phasor burst. I looked at it, confused. Several seconds later, it happened again. I wrote it off as some random thing the sound card felt like doing. When I turned back to my work, I found that the machine had locked up. This is the point at which my recent immersion in the world of Windows played me false. My reaction to my Apple locking up, and event that has never happened to me on that computer before, was simply to reboot and figure it would fix itself. It did, or at least it seemed to. About 2 hours later I noticed that my desktop was a bit bare. Hmm... count the icons... One! ... um... did we already do one? Ahh, yes. Two hours ago the computer asked the discs to spin up for a read/write, something made an odd noise like a phasor, the computer froze, and now I'm an icon short. It makes perfect sense. I lost a hard drive. I contacted the First National Bank of Mom and secured the purchase of a new drive. When I got home (see adventure below), I took most of the machine apart and booted it again. I was able to get the failed HDD to mount and pull the data off of it. Thinking back, the innards of the server were really hot when I opened it up after the HDD failed. By the time I got home with the new one, everything was at room temperature. My HDD died the heat death. Needless to say, there have been steps taken to reduce the internal temperature of the case. As an interesting side note, even though the HDDs and the graphics card were uncomfortably hot to the touch at the time for failure, the CPU core temperature was only 37C. God bless PowerPC chips.
My final great ordeal occurred as I was trying to leave CompUSA with my new HDD. As I moved our of my parking spot, I felt a disturbance in the force. All was not right with the car. I quickly realized that the left rear wheel was behaving less as a wheel and more as a, well, skid I guess. Stop goes the car, out comes the jack, up goes the wheel. The left rear hub is frozen solid. looking under it, I see that that parking break cable is very slack. Operating on the idea that said cable should merely be loose when the brake is off and connecting that idea to the fact that the parking break only operated the rear brakes, I decide that the brake has seized in the on position. It turns out that I am right. The problem with being right is that it doesn't let the car roll. After much comparing the right hub to the left, I notice there's a difference in position in two pieces. Hoping that this is the lever that activated the parking brake, I attempt to force it to move. This lead to the idea of beating the hell out of it to get it to move. The only problems are that I do not have a hammer and that the space in which I have to beat is about two inches. Seizing upon the Multi-Function Blunt Object (a.k.a. jack handle) that Toyota has thoughtfully included at no extra cost to me, I beat the hell out of the brake. Of course, accounting for the space in which I was working, this ends up sounding like someone calling the farm hands to lunch with a large and badly tuned triangle. Thankfully when the clattering is done, the wheel spins freely. Of course, as soon as I pull into the parking lot at my apartment, I pull the damn brake on, so I'm back where I started.
Oh, and I bought pants. The 13th pair (literally) fit.
which member of something positive are you?
And if you don't read Something*Positive, go do it before I send a cat up your drain to steal your god damn panties! It's for his girlfriend, 'kay?
Some of you might have noticed I was out of state overnight. I was in PA attending my father's launch of his new rocket bubba. I blogged about his parachute a while ago. There's a new page about the launch up. It's not done, so you may as well wait a few days before you go look at it, but there it is. The interesting bit will be that my dad now has a link to my website. I wonder what will happen when he finds my blog?
Ty -
There has been minimal improvement and you are still having problems of proportion, perspective, and value relationships. Also, your drawings fall short of their full potential. -Spaces are indistinguishable forms and volumes are not fleshed-out.
C- Insufficient!
And you wonder why I didn't like the art program at OSU!
However, I do know when I will be back again. I'm flying out on Wednesday morning to go to Florida for a few days. I'm supposed to be back very late on Sunday or mid-morning on Monday. During this time, I don't expect to have net access. I'm hoping to get to a Starbucks or the Orlando Apple Store every other day or so to collect email and touch base with the outside world. If you need to get to me in a hurry you can send an email to 16142863904@mobile.att.net. A very short email that is, my phone will only show me the first 255 characters. You can also send an IM to +16142863904 to SMS me. I'll be checking my voice mail but not answering my phone as I will be roaming. You can also call Mich since she'll be with me.
As I was getting ready to leave tonight, I was describing to Michele how to power cycle the server should it become necessary. I deftly pointed to the BRS with my toe, forgetting that the reset switch for the PSU was just below. That was a bong I did not want. So I'm back to <1d of uptime. Sigh. Oh well, 10.3.4 is supposed to be out this week or next so I'll have to reboot soon anyway. God damn laptop has been up 20 days and the stupid server hasn't been up 20 minutes. Grrr. Oh, I managed to pack in 2 cubic feet, I'm relatively happy with that.
So far, this is trippy. We don't fly out of CMH. Instead, we are flying a Public Charter out of LCK (Rickenbacker). LCK is an ex-(ish?)military base. It is... very odd here. The place is trying so hard to be a real airport. There's a cute little two gate terminal, a cafe that's just two vending machines, and a single check-in counter. The building is designed in that uber-modern industrial ethos that was so popular at the end of the 90's. Somehow, it fails to escape feeling like it's the 50's. Looking out onto the tarmac, there's planes sleeping casually at seemingly random stations. A DC-3 sets next to a civilian C-130 cargo plane. Off to the left, a row of DC-9's screens off rank upon rank of military heavy-lifters. Inside the terminal, ethereal strains of early rock are barely audible over the talking heads. The place is almost totally empty, furthering the temporal displacement. It's a vignette from a creepy art flick.
Oh, we're flying on a plane labeled "Hooters Air". Don't ask, I don't know either
I'm in Orlando now. Ass it turns out, we did not fly Hooters Air. At the last moment a different plane showed up and we flew on that instead. The flight was... interesting. First of all, it was odd to be able to roll straight away from the gate, taxi onto the runway, and take off. I can dig this no waiting thing. We flew higher than I've ever been before. Unfortunatly the captain never made the usual flight statistics announcement, but of the 2 hour flight, I would guess that we were in level flight for only about 20 minutes. We were high enough that the top of the sky was noticably black. It was kind of cool. 2/3rds of the way there, the cabin was filled wilth a piercing high pitched tone. Upon investigation by the flight crew, it turned out to be the emergency exit window. Dunno if it was leaking air or some kind of an alarm was going off. Upon landing, we arrived at two gates. We pulled up to the first one and sat in place for 30 minutes. The damn gantry was broken. So they hooked us up to a tug and pulled us next door so we finally could get off the plane. My parents met us at the airport and drove us back to the condo. I slept for the next four hours and am about to do so again.
Why do we go on vacations? It's the same stuff as home, just more expensive and hot.
Florida drivers are bad. Seriously. I'm from Ohio, I know about bad drivers, and DAMN, yo. Everywhere we drove today I thought I was going to die. We first went to Universal Studios, not the main part, but the Adventure Island (or something like that) part of it. Some of it was cool, some of it was damn lame. The hulk coaster is just stupid. It's a long wait for no point. There's no real drop and the twistings aren't creative enough to make up for it. We did the Spiderman ride next, which is actually kind of cool. It's a 3-axis motion simulator on a tracked vehicle. The ride is set within a typical movie/theme park type environment with 3D (via polarization) movie projections to tell the story. There's a great bit where you appear to be dropped down a giant apartment building that does an amazing job of fooling your brain into ignoring the signals from your butt and inner ear. We rode Fire and Ice next. It's a pretty basic suspended metal coaster (think Raptor but not as groundbreaking) of the racer variety (a la Gemini). While fun overall, it's nothing to write home about other than the outside loop where the two tracks run feet to feet. It looks like you're about to kick the other train. Finally, we went to Poseidon's Adventure, which is a stand/walk through SFX show. Overall, it was kind of dumb, but if you're of a technical theatre persuasion, then there's some really cool bits. To leave one of the rooms, you walk through a tube of flowing water. There's a large tube of acrylic (>10ft diameter) which is dry when first exposed. High velocity water is fired tangental to the inside of the tube at the bottom. The water is travelling so fast that it sticks to the inside of the tube all the way up and around and back down on the other side. You then walk through a gentle rain on a suspended catwalk to get to the other side. When you eventually get to the final room, there's a series of projections done onto falling water. This is a really clever way to make a movie screen because the location of the screen can be changed simply by varying which nozzles are active. Oh, aircraft navigational strobes should be illegal for indoor use!
We're staying at one of my parent's condos in Kissimmee (the city Disney is in). Tonight we went to dinner at a little grill in the back clubhouse. It was wonderful! It was also surprisingly cheap for Florida. Dessert was a inhumanly good chocolate cake layered with malted chocolate mousse. Mmmmmm. After dinner, we went over to Disney's Boardwalk where Michelle and my mom spent 10 minutes catching a damn cockroach. One of Mich's friends collects bugs. Oi. Boardwalk is a recreation of a early- to mid- nineteenth century east coast American boardwalk. It's actually kind of cool and worth walking around just to look at. The only thing I actually like about the Disney properties is the fanatical attention to detail. I appreciate that everything is done and done well. Nothing gets left out or overlooked. So many places you see a interesting idea with half-assed execution. Not so at any of Disney's properties.
On the way home tonight (we got a little lost), I saw a sign saying "Internet Cafe", so I hope to post and check mail tomorrow. We'll see if they live up to their signage.
Eh.
Disney created Celebration, an entire community for people who don't live there. Celebration is at the junction of I-4 ad FL-192. It's composed entirely of buildings so individual they all look exactly alike. It has exactly one of everything. One bank, one movie theatre, one Japanese restaurant, one ice cream parlor, one relator, one fire station, one dry goods store, and everyone drives eggs. So really there's a lot of eggs, but everyone has one. The eggs are to golf carts what a Segway is to the scooter you had as a kid. I don't think anyone really lives in Celebration. It would spoil the perfection of the image. Even the people who stay there year-round just kind of have their stuff in long term storage in their attic. Driving through it is a very odd experience. It's a kind of horrific post-modern performance art piece writ large. It feels exactly like any one of Disney's other rides (It's a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, or The Energy Pavilion) and somehow a fake version of life is the theme. If you'd like to enjoy the Celebration experience without travelling all the way to Florida, just watch any 1950's anti-Communist propaganda film. Remember, the milkman always knocks twice.
This morning I set off in search of the elusive Net. Leaving the house, we drove west to the far end of the strip. Arriving at the "Internet Cafe!" we had seen the night before, I inquired about WiFi. That was a resounding no. I then asked if there was an empty port to plug into. Again, no. Call it a miss then. Of course, they had no idea where else there might be Net access. Driving east along the strip, I decided to look for a Starbucks. We called home and asked them to look one up in the Yellow Pages. In the meantime, I thought I recalled having seen one is Celebration (yes, it's really called that). Having only a vague idea where the town in question was, I set of in that direction. Vaguely. After having circled the shopping district several times, I gave up. Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks. East again we travelled, this time in search of Sand Lake Rd. The strip is labeled with a series of Markers. We're staying somewhere around Marker 3. Way out in the uncharted territories beyond Marker 15, we decided that Sand Lake Rd did not, in fact, intersect Florida 192. Turning around, for about the 12th time that morning (thank god u-turns are legal in FL!), we headed west. Around Marker 10, Michelle spotted a banner proclaiming "INTERNET!" below the sign for a coffee shop. Stopping in, I discovered that they had no problem with me plugging in rather than using one of their terminals, but the price was $5 for 30 minutes. I bent over and took it. Some of you caught me online. While I was there, I grabbed the 10.3.4 update and D2X. For those of you out there old enough to have earned your stripes, D2X is a wrapper that ports Descent 2 to MacOS X. Feel free to rejoice. Descent 2 was one of the coolest games of all time and I was hard-core addicted to it. NWN can go suck it, D2 is in the house!
In the afternoon, we tried to go have fun at Wet n Wild. Wet n Wild is a water park like Wyandotte Lake or The Beach back home. No, scratch that, not like them at all. Those things are at least fun, this place SUCKED ALL ASS. The wave pool was tiny, crowded, and pointless (i.e. the waves weren't fun). All of the rides were shorter than I had ever seen before and featured hour-plus lines. I think we were there for all of 40 minutes. There, were, however, two activities that we would have liked to have done. The first was a giant (100ft diameter), air-filled rubber hemisphere with water flowing over it. There were ropes so that you could climb to the top, bounce around, fall off, and slide back down into the pool. Mich and I were both too tall play. :( The other point of interest was a funnel into which you could shoot yourself. For those of you that remembered COSI before it sucked, think of the penny funnel where they went around and around getting faster and faster before they plunked into the bottom. This ride let you that with your body. It woulda been cool. The line wasn't. We went home.
Actually, that's not quite true. Before going home, we had to play an exciting game of Hunt the I-4. Florida has this huge problem with signs. They place them, if they bother to at all, precisely .75 seconds beyond the point at which you could possibly have acted on the data displayed. Given the speed at which traffic flows, this means most of them occur about 25 feet past the point at which the turn disappears over the horizon in your rearview mirror. So leaving the park, we followed the large sign pointing to the right bearing the inscription "TO I-4 EAST/WEST". This was, as you will see, a grave tactical error. This is because, and it's very important that your understand this, is that each location in Florida gets only one sign. Let that settle in. Yes, I do, in fact, mean that if there are 5 turnings between you sighting the sign and reaching your goal, you get only the one sign. So, there we were, going round and round, waiting to reach some kind of escape velocity of frustration and leave the consumer driven hell of neon and Cheap T-shirts Here. Eventually, we got lost into the Universal Studios parking lot, which has it's own private on ramp to the I-4. By some oversight during the road-planning process, it actually pointed the way we wanted to go.
Ah, that's another thing about driving in Florida. Though the urban and tourist centers are very dense, there's a lot of space between them. So, if you miss your exit/turning (see: signs, paragraph III) it's a long god-damned way to a way to the next exit. A half second's hesitation can easily cost you 30 to 45 minutes of driving. I never thought I'd miss driving in Ohio
Oh, on the way to the water park, we noticed a sign (strangely, before the turn off) proclaiming the existence of World of Orchids. On a whim, we dove for it (Explorer across 3 lanes of traffic denser than rush hour in Columbus, moving at 60mph [in a zone legally 35mph]). It turned out to be really cool. There were some really cool looking orchids and a lot of other neat stuff. There were some of the biggest carp I have ever seen, as well as some other odd fish I couldn't identify. There were four or so different species of terribly toxic frogs and an assortment of very fidgety lizards. One side of the conservatory had many kinds of parrots. Interestingly, none of the birds had their wings clipped. It was cool that they left them as birds. We spent about half an hour looking around and sweating our balls off (we were in Florida and they were actually adding humidity to the air in the greenhouse. Uck.). So I guess that made the day worth while. We're supposed to go to Shrek 2 tonight. Hopefully that will be cool.
We went to the Kennedy Space Center today. The cape is about 100 minutes from where we're staying. Let me reiterate the stupidity of Floridian drivers and the DoT sign department. The Center is much reworked since my last visit. Unfortunately, the Then and Now tour was sold out by the time we arrived. The TaN tour takes you along the launch sites of the Cape Canaveral AFB where the US space program started. You visit the launch sites of the early test rockets as well as the Mercury and Gemini launches (You can't visit the Apollo launch pads because we shoot the shuttles off of them now). I took the tour when I was very little and enjoyed the hell out of it, so I would have liked to do it again. The basic ticket now includes a lot of cool stuff. You ride a bus out past the VAB and the 3 OPFs. Lemme tell ya, the VAB is HUGE. It's such a shame that it's out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to which to compare it. After moving past the OPFs, you go past Launch Control. You see the inside of Launch Control in every shot of NASA technicians hunched over consoles ever, but I had never seen the outside of it. As it turns out, the big blue clock isn't in front of Launch Control as the media makes it seem, it's really across the road by a pond. Both of the Crawler-Transports were parked in the same area. I was surprised to discover that the orbiter is not directly on the C-T. I had always assumed that the C-T and the platform with the mounting points for the orbiter were one piece. As it turns out, the mounting platform is a passive jig that the orbiter gets assembled onto. When it's time to move from the VAB to the pad, the C-T scoots under, lifts the jig and orbiter off it's stand, deposits the jig and orbiter and the pad, and takes off. The C-Ts look funny without their hats on. Eventually, you are deposited at a observation gantry about a mile from LC39-A/B. You walk up this observation gantry and can look all around at the surrounding area and see LC39-A/B as well as most of the pads at Cape Canaveral AFB. Suspended in the center of the gantry structure is one of the main engines from an orbiter. It extends through three stories of the gantry. The thing is god damn big and it's still dwarfed by the SRBs or an engine from a Saturn V. There's also some displays and a movie of questionable value onsite.
The bus next deposits you at the Saturn V Complex. This is quite new, and fairly cool. You first see a movie about the Russians launching Sputnik, the Gagarin. It leads into an overview of our Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, replete with funny footage of rockets falling down and blowing up, turning over and blowing up, stopping in mid-air and blowing up, and finally, not blowing up. The film does a wonderful job of making the space race interesting while not trivializing the science or the loss of human life involved. The next room is a re-creation of Launch Control as it was during the Apollo Program. The machinery on the set is the actual machines used during that period. It's a wonderful setup with the stations actually functioning and processing their way through a launch (Apollo VIII). The set it topped by three large screens showing footage of the launch timed to run with the events on the set. It was pretty god damn cool. Look at the launch of a Saturn V sometime. The first few feet after the main engines are the very fires of hell. Passing through another set of doors, you enter a theatre with a screen and a stage textured like the moon. A movie is shown about the first lunar landing (Apollo XI) accompanied by props moving around on stage. I never knew the landing of Apollo XI came so close to catastrophic failure. The telemetry from the Lunar Lander kept dropping out and then the computer threw Error Code 1202, shortly followed by Error Code 1201. The problem with these codes was that the engineers had considered the failure mode so unlikely that they'd never practiced it or worked up a response to it. The was further complicated by the fact that no one knew what Error Codes 1201,2 were and the documentation couldn't be found. Eventually, as the computer tried to smash the Lunar Lander into the rocks, the astronauts took manual control and landed somewhere else. I find it interesting that so much attention has been focused on Apollo XIII, yet no one seems to realize how close Apollo XI came to getting the crew killed. Outside of the theatres was an actual Saturn V rocket. The thing is motherfucking huge. No, seriously. It required the creation of the largest building ever built (by volume, record stands to this day) to house its assembly. It's amazing that so much had to work so hard to launch so little (the bit that made orbit accounted for <10% of the launch mass). Fun facts to know and tell:
Upon arrival back at the Visitor's Center, there was still a lot to see. There was a mockup of the Orbiter to crawl around and an actual SRB/EFT combo to look at. More interesting to me was the Rocket Garden. In the Garden, many of the rockets from the space program stand about, as well as some of the capsules. It's amazing how tiny everything is. Having looked at the Saturn V, or hell, even the Saturn I-B, it's amazing the poor little Mercury-Redstone was able to lift a chimp, let alone a human. The Mercury-Redstone is so small as to be almost cute. I could probably wrap my arms more than half way around it's circumference. Mich is taller than the capsule. I can't believe they shot someone into space on it. Even the Gemini rockets are small, though those at least don't look like models. The difference between the Mercury-Redstone and the Saturn V is just staggering. Without the real benefit of computers, NASA went from making planes to putting people on the moon in 12 years. To do that, they went from launching a few tens of thousands of pounds, to launching more than 6 million pounds. That's one hell of a roman candle.
I guess that, more than anything else, is what struck me this time. Scale. The scale of things are impossible to relate to normal life, or even to each other. The buildings and machinery are immense beyond imagination but seem no larger than construction trucks due to the vast amounts of space in which they set. The program started out with a small rocket, it's capsule shorter than Mich, barely capable of pushing a man outside of the atmosphere and ended with a beast taller than two Statues of Liberty and wider than a city bus is long capable of launching three men out of our gravity well and three-quarters of a million miles to the moon. The difference in scale are too staggering to really put into words. All you can do is stare, awestruck.
