Well, actually, tonight’s just the night I go out for a belated celebration of my birthday (which was exactly a week ago).

Anyway, thankfully, the cough’s on the wane now. It only stopped me from
getting to sleep for about an hour last night unlike the nights before.

Anyway, the plan for tonight is to go straight from work to the Turf public
house, there natter and drink things ’til about 7:30 at which time we decamp
to the Moonlight Tandoori Restaurant on the Cowley Road to eat, drink and
make merry. I’m not sure there’s going to be anything after that other than
cycling home. If you want to join me, feel free.

On other matters, I got phoned up by Argos last night to inform me that my
new sofabed will be delivered tomorrow morning between 7:30am and 1pm. This
meant that last night I had to rush upstairs to may spare room and dismantle
the two pine beds (which the sofabed is replacing) and get the room in a
fit state for the new piece of furnature. I’ve still got to move the old
matresses and frames out into the garage but I can do that tomorrow morning
while I wait for the delivery.

Then, tomorrow evening I drive off down to Yately to see Rachel, Graham &
little Christopher. I’ve been having a bit of a logistical problem trying
to get Chris a birthday pressie, but this can all be worked out.

Well, things have happened over the last few days.

Firstly, a viral cough appeared on Thursday, my birthday. My parents also
arrived that evening. All good timing on the part of the virus. Ever since
I’ve not really felt well enough to do things and I still don’t.

My parents went back home this morning and I came into work to find that
our MX record had been deleted and hence we weren’t getting any external
e-mail or some internal ones either. Having sorted that out and various other
things I’m feeling rather less bouncy than I did even this morning. Indeed,
I feel as though the exercise has rejuvinated the virus. :-/

Anyway, other random happenings.. My uncle and aunt visited on Saturday afternoon
and evening to make Saturday a family get-together day. I recieved an e-mail
from one of the lecturers at 3pm-ish on Saturday telling me of a party that
evening to say farewell to one of the postgrads I know.. Of course I couldn’t
go due to the family commitments and the lack of warning.

And so, I continue to cough and not sleep much due to this. Blurgh!

I do hope the cough subsides before Thursday when I’m due to go out for a
meal with friends to celebrate my birthday (which was last Thursday).

OK,
whilst I was failing to get to sleep last night due to the effects of an
oncoming cold and a cat which was very annoied by a fence it had got itself
trapped under, I had a brainwave on how NASA can decrease the possibility
of another accident such as the one which happened on Saturday (assuming
that the tiles were damaged by the lump of stuff falling off).

My answer is:-

Use a sandwich of tissue papaer and cheesey Watsits!

More precisely, cover the underbelly of the shuttle prelaunch with a layer
of doped tissue paper, then apply a 2cm think layer of corn starch foam followed
by a final layer of tissue paper, doped.

This should be a pretty light layer and as long as the starch foam is open
enough that there are interconnections between all the bubbles it shouldn’t
explode as the shuttle gets higher. On all places other than on the leading
edges the aerodynamic pressure shouldn’t be such that  it would get
ripped off during the assent phase but it would act as a protective shield
against ice blocks etc. Even if the blocks penetrated the layer it would
still cushion the impact and decrease the level of damage significantly.

On the re-entry phase, the tissue papaer and strach would almost instantaniously
carbonise and ablate off the surface leaving the tiles beneath pristine.

So there you are, a low-tech solution to a high tech problem! 😉

After
the happenings of the last weekend and having read about all the things NASA
have been wibbling on about in the last few months and also knowing how awful
NASA has become in managing spacecraft design I’ve had a few thoughts on
what I think should happen…

Firstly, as a stop-gap the shuttle has to keep flying, it’s the only thing
we have which can do the tasks necessary in human spaceflight currently.

Secondly, the US government should request bids from all over the world for
two separate launch vehicles., a space taxi and a space truck. The former
would be manned, the later would be human habitable in space but would not
be manned during the acsent or decent stages. All vehicles should be able
to be flown unpiloted and the space taxis should be able to dock with each
other and be able to stay on standby for long periods of time (rescue missions).
Any design should be concidered, however radical and all parts of the spacecraft
should be designed to be reusable and have longevity built in.

Now, here are the contraversial bits:-

(1) All consortia must supply at their own cost one fully operational prototype
to NASA for a comparative “Rain Hill Trials” of all vehicles. (The Rain Hill
Trials were a comparative test of different designs of steam locomotive in
1829, Stephenson’s engine “Rocket” won.)

During the design and build stages of the vehicles full access to all NASA
staff and fecilities would be free of charge so as to offset development
costs.

(2) All designs will be fully disclosed to the public and competitors. Many eyes will help see flaws in the design.

(3) NASA may decide to buy a production run of any one or more of the designs after the trials.

(4) Once designed, the consortia may sell the vehicles to anyone in the world
who wants to buy them only restricted by export regulations inposed by the
United Nations.

(5) Crew safety is paramount. Options for safe crew recovery from all possible
situations should be catered for. (eg. Hardened crew quarters during decent
which have their own secondary heat shielding and are capable of sustaining
life in such an incident as that which played out on Saturday.)

I’ve not been up to a great deal, as has been mentioned before.

Yesterday (Saturday) I woke up very tired as I have been having problems staying asleep rather than getting to sleep. I’d just managed to have breakfast and was about to leave home at about 11am when Rob Newson phoned me up. For the next hour and a half I helped him with Linux problems.

Following this I went to Sainsbury’s and got home at about a quarter to two. I put the shopping away, made some sandwiches and turned on BBC News 24 for the news.

It was just before 2pm and after the weather the newscaster trailed that they’d be covering the landing of the shuttle live at about quarter past then started on the news headlines. Following a few stories, at about 5 past two they mentioned that NASA was having problems with communications with the shuttle.. I thought “Oh bugger. It’s broken up during re-entry.”

It was about 10 minutes to a quarter of an hour before reports of “multiple trails” being seen over Texas, but the news people still kept on saying that even though the shuttle was late that NASA was still only having comms problems when it was obvious to anyone with any slight knowledge of space flight that the shuttle was never going to land in one piece.

Continue reading →

Lots
of people on Bullet are going on about how the world’s gummed up with metres
of snow. I want to know where the snow order went to, it must have all been
dumped down south as there was very little which landed here and most of
that has melted during the day.

Oh well.

No snowmen for me to make today.

Well, it’s been a couple of days since my last posting.

Not a lot’s happened other than I kept waking up last night and I’f failed to build KDE 3.1 on our Solaris systems.

The quiet life continues.

Which OS are You?

…if I should start making things up to spice up my LJ.

My life seems so stable and dull relative to other people’s. Maybe I should
add some virtual angst to make it more of an interesting read?

I think I’m just comfortably in one of the Universe’s back waters, gently
rotating in the eddie behind a rock as the gushing flood thunders by taking
other people’s lives with it. In that way I think I’m blessed and lucky.

It’s
Monday morning. I’m feeling tired and not ready for the week ahead. I’m sure
I wouldn’t feel this way if things had gone differently last night…

The weekend, on the whole, was quiet but I managed to keep myself reasonably
entertained by just tinkering. Saturday saw me buying a replacement CPU heatsink
for my “big” computer because the old one was so noisey that I couldn’t stand
it after a while. This had come to a head on Friday when I was using the
machine to work from home and the whine from the CPU fan was driving me nuts!

The new heatsink (a Global Win TAK58) isn’t quite as good at cooling the
CPU (the temperatures are a couple of degrees C higher than with the old
unit) but it is as quiet as a mouse, or quieter as it doesn’t squeak. The
main noise from the PC now comes from the two big fans in the back, the PSU
fan and the other one I put in to improve case cooling. It’s a low pitched
white noise which is acceptable and most of that is actually coming from
the power supply fan.

Anyway, back to the weekend. Saturday night was involved with trying to get
the Linux side of things to use power management better so as to keep the
CPU as cool as possible and testing out what the maximum and normal temperatures
I was getting with the new heatsink.

Sunday morning was spent in bed ’til 10:30, listening to Radio 4’s Broadcasting
House programme instead of “Breakfast with Frost” on the telly as that was
just getting plain boring. Various householdy things were done after getting
up, followed by lunch and the weekend talk to my parents on the phone.

Most of the afternoon was spent tinkering with power settings whilst watching
the “Dune” mini-series on Sci-Fi Channel. After this came the World Rally
Championship and Time Team on Channel 4.  Now, this is where things
started going down hill. I had planned to watch “Bremner, Bird and Fortune”,
the satirical comedy programme at 8pm, however, a phone call from Rob Newson
put pay to this as he wanted advice on building a Linux 2.2.23 kernel on
his machine. 2.5 hours later, having gone through a step by step configuration
of every option over the phone with him he had a working machine. The one
personal item of news I gained from the whole phone call was that he was
“off to visit people over February, so expect lots of phone calls asking
about Linnux things in March.”

Anyway, by now it was gone 9pm. I flopped down in the chair after the mamoth phone call.

After watching the BBC news at 10pm I went to bed feeling drained. I can’t
see how call centre people manage. Doing technical support on the phone is
tiring as hell. Anyway, 10:15pm, off to bed.

11:20pm.. *RING* *RING*, *RING* *RING* (the phone starts ringing).

It’s Lindsey. It’s nice to heard from her, but at this time of night I just
want to sleep. Still, it was an enjoyable phone conversation. I get back
to bed at about 12:10am. 12:30am *CLATTER**CLANG* a cat outside knocks something
over… so I finally get back to sleep.

At least it’s a lovely morning outside. The sun and moon are shining and the sky is mostly blue.