Travels and Images
WEEK 15 2006
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Saturday 15 April
2006
Saturday
- mowed the lawn in back, tried to air out the damp downstairs. It started to rain in the afternoon however.
Friday 14 April
2006
Friday - on the road,
heading north for the Easter weekend. The traffic wasn't bad - there
were the usual number of idiots, but not bad. Weirdness: someone
pulling a large fixed keel sailboat (on a trailer, silly!), two log cabins - very wide, being towed along, a couple of strange gizmo's on a flatbed - hovercraft?
Thursday 13 April 2006
Thursday
- "little stuff, that needs to be taken one step at a time."
So, I go in this morning, thinking things are just about done, I can
get pressure coefficients, I can generate pressures, I get normal
forces and moments for different alphas' and betas', I'm ready to crank
through some data, it's all good. Except...just a niggling detail. When
I plot up some results the moments don't seem to quite zero out at zero beta. In fact, they're relatively huge, well outside any margin of error. Hmmm. So I spent all day on that. Sheesh. And it's probably something really simple and stupid that I'm overlooking.
Watched a pretty good Supernatural tonight, with a haunted painting. Smallville was just filler. House
on Tuesday was sort of mediocre this week (though it did have Cameron
in a red dress!); last week's episode with Dawn, Buffy's kid sister,
was better.
Here's a viewgraph of the three proposed space shuttle replacements,
from the mid-1990's. The one on the right was chosen, and failed due to
technical problems, basically gumption and materials engineering stuff,
and never got more than half built. The one on the left was from
Rockwell, and essentially looks like they scaled up an old space
shuttle to the point where the entire external fuel tank would fit
internally. A far less risky proposition - I wonder if it would have
worked?
Why do I bring this up? Because the current "Apollo on Steroids" system
is already over budget and behind schedule - and they haven't started
yet!
From RLV News (via Transterrestrial Musings)
NASA's various attempts to develop new space transports, particularly
fully reusable launch vehicles, in the past decade or so have not been
successful. However, rather than revealing poor planning and
management, NASA said those failures proved that RLVs were not feasible
with current technology. So if the CEV program collapses due to
overruns colliding with a no-growth budget, I guess that will prove
that capsules on expendables are not feasible with current technology.
Wednesday 12 April 2006
Wednesday
- just sort of plodding through the day at work - little stuff, that
needs to be taken one step at a time. It was warm and sunny so I had a
nice walk at lunch.
It was warm and sunny when I got home as well. It's odd - I get used to
winter, and the relief of going into the house, away from the gray cold
outside, and the warm sunlit afternoons shocks me every year. Still sunny at 6:00pm!
I've been leafing through a copy of Joel on Software
that I picked up used. Very interesting stuff. I'm not actually sure
what sort of software Joel's company writes - I'm just dipping into the
book here and there - but a lot of the comments seem spot on. For
example, clients that don't know what they want:
"The
damm customer kept changing his mind. First he wanted Client/Server.
Then he read about XML in the Delta Airlines' in-flight magazine and
decided he had to have XML. Now we're rewriting the thing to use fleets
of small Lego Mindstorm Robots."
Tuesday 11 April
2006
Tuesday - went home after just 8 hours at
work. It felt weird. It's turned gray and drizzly, but is supposed to
improve a bit in the next couple of days, then worsen for the weekend.
I was thinking of heading north, but maybe not...
So the cat feeder goes off, a few minutes ago. The beeper beeps loudly,
the gears grind - a two small pellets fall out. Phoebe, sitting next to
it, does not ever look at them. He looks at ME,
rather, outraged. Who says cats can't speak? Cats can have very
expressive body language - I laughed out loud. The poor little pig of a
cat - I gave him a handful of food gravel, then put some food in the
other, low-tech feeder, and set it for the same feeding time
(morning feed) as the useless great big computerized feeder. Which does
have a beeper, after all.
MATLAB is a powerful program. I wrote a gui graphical interface to plot an aeroelastic
model and pressure coefficients in eight or nine lines (I could have
done it in fewer, but I prefer clarity to cleverness). Unfortunately MATLAB
costs quite a bit - there was a bit of a hoohaw around the office
recently, when people discovered that the license was expiring shortly,
and no-one had budgeted for a new one... Money was found, but one of
these days I need to come up to speed on Python.
Monday 10 April 2006
Monday - I noticed that the "week" labels
on these pages were all messed up. Hopefully weeks 12, 13, 14, and 15
(current) are now correct.
It's always something...
Sunday 9 April
2006
Sunday - a nice day, though not as nice
as Saturday. I did a bit of work around the house, and went over to
Barnes & Noble but didn't buy much.
Picture of
the Week
Photo Notes:
This is the West Brother's lighthouse, near the Carquinez Straits. It's
on an island in the middle of the Sacramento River, and is now a bed
and breakfast.
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