Space Travel

As a youth I used to like reading Robert Heinlein's novels geared to youth. My favorite was Farmer in the Sky which is about a trip on the Mayflower to Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons. It was fund to speculate about space travel in those days a few years before it became reality. Oddly, my interest in Science fiction waned and I've rarely read any since that period of my life.

In the January/February issue of Technology Review (the MIT alumni magazine) there is an article about an interview with five individuals (rich ones of course sine the price is now $35 million) who have each occupied the passenger seat in the Soyuz capsule on a trip to the International Space Station. Each person was interviewed separately but the article intersperses the responses as if it was a group interview and since there was so much in common between the five trips it makes a sense and is a good read and is available online as above.

Apparently NASA vets all the communication sent by these tourists - among other things they worry about product promotion. Charles Simonyi reports that they caught what he was writing in a blog entry where he said "Wow the champagne on launch day wasn't that great. The next time I will bring Dom Pérignon."

I am not really a football fan, honest...

Today (Sat) we said we weren't watching any NFL games - it's the first weekend of playoffs and there are two today and two tomorrow.

Sometime this afternoon I said let's check the score and I turned on the TV even though we didn't care who won between the Falcons or the Cardinals (unlike nature, the Cardinals beat the Falcons). Many hours later at about 11:30 we saw the Chargers beat the Colts in overtime; it was an exciting game and I discovered I was rooting for the Chargers (after all it gets pretty tiring to see Peyton Manning in all those dumb commercials so it's nice to see him fail). For spwebdesign it was 4:30 am and well worth staying up to see it.

Tomorrow we are not watching any games!

I did notice that the Tivo is picking up 5 hours of stuff tomorrow night as the holiday hiatus is over.