Now, there is Google Mars.

(On a side note, I know the main programmer from the NASA/ASU side of this project. You can hear a short interview with him on the podcast called "Sturgeon's Law", episode 27. And as it happens, I also know the guy behind Sturgeon's Law.)

My senior year of high school, I was taking a course in physics. The teacher arranged for us to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger live, on one of the TVs in the library. All 20 or so of us were seated there, watching as the first school teacher launched into space. Our teacher was really excited– had he been 10 years younger (and, perhaps, 50 pounds lighter) he would have applied for the teacher-in-space program.

We watched as Challenger exploded and disintegrated, 73 seconds after lift-off. That image is as burned into my consciousness as the footage of the second plane hitting the south tower on September 11. Seven people gave their all in the effort to explore space and advance science. If I sound a little flowery in my language, it's only because I feel they deserve nothing less.

We still remember you.

I've written a small Google Homepage plug-in to display the current Astronomy Picture of the Day, along with the photo credits. It scales it using percentages, so the image doesn't screw up browser-window-width like the APOD feed in LiveJournal does. I'd recently switched my news-homepage setup from Excite to Google, and since they provide such a handy API, I couldn't resist.

It links the image thumbnail to the full-resolution version at APOD. It links the section-title to the APOD page itself (handy if you want to read the detailed background of the image). Lastly, it reproduces the complete photo credits section, links and all. It also produces XHTML instead of using HTML <center> tags. (But since I don't know if GH actually emits strict XHTML, this part might not matter.)

I've submitted it to Google for their directory, but until then you can add it to your homepage via this link.

Physicists in Germany have created a material that is harder than diamond.

(For my physics-fetishist readers.)

I noticed a WiFi signal when I started-up my laptop. I expected it to be the same, silly charge-per-day service they have at San Jose (SJC), San Francisco (SFO), Dallas (DFW), etc. Nope.

It seems that the managers of this airport have figured out that the cost of maintaining WiFi is so negligible as to be easily amortized over the other gouging services (food, drink, etc.), and thus it is free. And by free, I mean as in beer, not just as in speech.

I was prepared to be reduced to playing Solitaire for the next three hours. Now I can actually do something interesting.

(If there are any stories about weird happenings at Portland Airport in tomorrow's news, I promise it wasn't me. I mean, it won't be.)

(Note to U.S. Attorney General Gonzales: Just kidding.)

Though it isn't too clear (despite climbing up on a railing to get a closer shot), this is an ActiveX error dialog. It's showing up on the announcements screen for the venue of this year's Open Source Conference.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people here who can offer suggestions to the center's IT department.

Fry's Electronics now has two stores in the Phoenix metro area– one in Tempe and one in Phoenix itself. I went there today, because I left my cell-phone charger at home when I packed for this trip.

It would seem that the general surlyness and un-helpfulness of the average Fry's salesdroid must be part of the training manual. Were it not for the excessive heat ("but it's a dry heat") and the license plates on the cars, I could just as easily have been in Cupertino.

Today, at approximately 1:13PM (PDT), my company's data-centers received and handled their one-billionth call. We celebrated appropriately, with McDonald's and Finger Blaster rockets.

Being a (relatively) recent addition to the company (less than two years on staff, at a company slightly over 5 years in age), I don't know how long it took us to reach 1,000,000,000. But I'm told that we expect to cover the next billion within eight months.

Google is preparing to launch a search-based e-mail service. They are planning to call the service "Gmail" (not actually up yet).

There's a somewhat more detailed story on this at the New York Times' website (note that they require registration, and most of the "universal" IDs such as freethepresses no longer work). It's what the stories don't mention that worries me.

There is no mention of what Google plans to have as a Terms of Service agreement, or privacy policy. You'll be able to store up to a gigabyte of email and search it as though it were a well-indexed website. But what will keep others from searching and indexing your mail? And more to the point, even if Google does promise privacy, what guarantees will there be that any such promise would be upheld should they get acquired? After all, once they go public, they are just as much a target for acquisition as predators themselves.

(Found by way of Ditherati.)

What monopoly, where?

A Japanese company unveiled a 3.5-metre (11.55-foot) tall robot that can forage its way through a heap of debris as a trailblazer for rescue workers following a disaster such as an earthquake.

(Source: AFP/Toshifumi Kitamura, as reported on Yahoo! news.)

My #1, ass-kicking desktop box has been locking up at random intervals over the past few months. Now, it won't recognize anything on the first IDE controller.

Looks like I need a new MB. Crap.

Tonight's guest was Dr. Catherine Weitz, a scientist from the Mars project, who explained a little bit about the mission goals, the rover tech, etc. One thing I noticed, that Stewart never asked about, was the she was wearing a second watch on her wrist.

If you read this via the rjray_rss feed on LiveJournal, you get many, many opportunities to read each entry, as something in the RSS causes LJ to periodically decides all of the previous 40 or so messages are new.

Someone has written an blosxom-to-LJ gateway, which I will be installing and testing in the next few days. When that happens, I won't actually have rjray_rss killed, per se, but people will be able to keep track just using my plain old normal LJ account. Heck, I might even upgrade to a paid account.

I have now installed a plug-in for blosxom to support the Atom Syndication Format Specification.

Of course, I have no direct use for it personally, and I have no idea what tools or such are out there that use it. But the plug-in was there and enticing me with its beguiling simplicity. So, there it is.