Well, after leaving a comment on wibblypig’s journal about always thinging and thinging before buying things.. I managed not to yesterday.

After finishing buying a duvet, cover, sheets and pillow covers at Debenhams and thinking about what I’d written, I got the urge to not be so responsible, so I decided to upgrade my games PC.

Basically, I popped over to Sinoco and bought a new top of the range motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra, USB 2.0, Serial ATA, RAID etc. etc.), 512MB faster memory (2 DIMMS as the single 512MB DIMMs were out of stock), 80GB Western Digital hard disk (the 120GB one was out of stock) and Gainward NVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 graphics card. Then I HAD to go and buy Unreal II from PC World to play on it, didn’t I?

Well, I’ve been having “fun” getting the machine working. I’ve installed Windows 98 twice.. and then found what the problem I was having was when I downloaded and ran memtest86.. One of the DIMMs had a one bit flaw in one word 164.1MB from the beginning. No doubt there are lots of 1 bit errors in all the software installed on the machine now and so it’ll need another reinstall. I’ve removed the didgy DIMM now, so I’m running with 256MB.

I did get to play Unreal II for a while.. but the program kept crashing half hanging the machine. I’m not sure if it’s Unreal II’s fault or corrupted Windows or just an unstable machine.

I’ll take the DIMM back to Sinoco next week.

Well, what have I been doing recently?

Other than going to and from work and being at work.. nothing.

What plans have I for things to do in the next week or so.. nothing.

Life has got back into the dolbrums.. I’m becalmed.

The next potentially interesting thing to happen will be the start of jury duty which starts on Monday week.

Well, I’ve survived a weekend visiting Rachel, Graham and little Christopher. I must admit to feeling rather tired now.

It was a fun weekend visit but I’ve been rather worn out by it with walks int eh countryside and playing with 6 years olds etc. Alec dropped by yesterday for a short period. It was good to see him again.

Anyway, I’ll not go into the details.

Here am I, sitting at home awaiting the arrival of my new sofabed from Argos Direct. I’m feeling very tired but generally content.

Last night’s outing went very well and was fun. The Moonlight Tandoori Restaurant was very pleasant, the food was excellent and there was a lot of it! I mean, how often in an Indian restaurant do you get a 12″, deep dish (not plate) of extremely freshly cooked, nicely presented main course and then the rice on top? Let’s say that those who had merely rice with their meal were bloated, those who took nan bread couldn’t finish. All this for the same sort of prices you’d get in the normal take-away where you get a meal served in a little steel dish which has probably been cooked 5 hours previously and been kept warm in a big vat.

Felicia, one of the 1st year postgrads I’ve got to know, surprised me by presenting a gift of a mini rock garden. She hoped it wasn’t too corny. She’d also wrapped it in paper with chinese writing on it. (She’s Singaporian.) That was a genuinely nice present.

The only downer for the evening was not to do with the company or the venues really, it’s that in the last pub we went to it was a bit smokey. This caused my cough, which had all but disappeared, to flare up again. It meant that I hardly got any sleep last night at all, which is why I’m so tired.

Anyway, I really enjoyed myself last night and so did all my friends who I invited, which is all you can ask for an evening out.

Bear

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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.

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