The ESA is contributing to this Double Star mission by providing eight on-board scientific instruments — five on Probe-1 and three on Probe-2. It is the first time Chinese hardware and European equipment have been wired together, Liu said.

By combining the Double Star satellites and the mini-flotilla of four identical spacecraft the European agency launched in 2000 in its Cluster II Programme, scientists will be able to probe space from a six-dimensional perspective, the first time this has ever been possible, Liu said.

I’m totally lost as to what this means, long-term, for any NASA-ESA partnering. Does it mean that China will seek to become another heavy-launch operator along with the Russians? Does it mean that ESA will tire of dealing with NASA and throw their lot in with the Chinese totally?

I’m just sorta sitting here, mulling this.

My friend Peter Welle sent me a copy of the first disc by his band, Welmore Mile. I gotta say … I dig Choices Collide, if for nothing other than “Walls of Stone”.

Thanks, Peter, for sharing your music with me. I will be reviewing it soon.

When Todd done went and said: Just my personal opinion, but NOT doing something because it’s cliché is just as cliché as doing it. Write it if you want to and don’t write it if you don’t, piss on what everybody else thinks, it’s your blog! … he was right.

Except the bit about it being a blog.

Without further ado … the year in review. [Okay, so it's a slow day at work.]

(more…)

So today, the sixth day of what could have been my flu battle, my fever is gone.

Predictably, though, I have a nasty sinus headache. I guess I lost the hydration battle yesterday.

I woke up, groaned, but then realized, “Hey, a sinus headache is nothing.”

Guess I will go in to work today.

… and it’s done.

If you hate it, well, sorry. My site.

… but I will.

I’ll be taking the new layout of IJSM live tonight. If things look wonky for a while, have patience.

It’ll be more like IJSM design v2.8 than anything else, because I don’t have all the geegaws on it, but that can come with time. I want a redesign before the calendar reads 2004, and right now, I feel like crap, and this is as good as it gets.

It’s 55F outside.

It’ll be ~60F all week.

I miss winter.

I think I should move to Minnesota.

The re-design’s getting there.

[EDIT: Link removed pending final release.]

I’m still feverish on day four.

Ugh.

I think it best not to go visit my grandmother and brother tomorrow. Neither need this, and if I’m still feverish, I’m still virulent.

Having gone to teach Sunday school, I am now absolutely wiped out and back in bed.

This post brought to you by WiFi, my laptop, and the chocolate tossed my way in a stocking by Todd. [Mmmmmm, chocolate. I had to ask who sent it, though; it just appeared at the foot of my bedroom door one day, and it was a couple days before I saw Anthony and Leonard to ask.]

I have no idea why&emdash;other than the fact that it’s the end of the year and, well, I’m all nostalgiac&emdash;but I got to thinking somewhere in the middle of the night about my very few friends from my old high school.

Mind you, I pretty well hated living in Forest&emdash;I was always the outsider, the interloper. The biggest resentment that I always felt was that I had “replaced” the school’s annointed valedictorian.

Well, when I transferred away, I was replacing her no more. The fun thing? Neither one of us cared, and since high school, she’s the only one that’s tried to track me down. Jessie called me sometime during the spring semester of my fourth year in college, which I remember only because it had been some time since Mom’s stroke.

All of that to say this: in a few minutes’ Web searching, I have found her phone number [her husband has a pretty distinctive name himself, and there's only one of him in Mississippi] and also now know that my friend Benjamin Gatewood went to med school and that my friend Rhett Simmons went to dental school. Someone put those two clowns in the medical profession? Oi.

I’m calling Jessie this afternoon, just to catch up. Having plotted their street address, it was kinda hard to make myself not drive there and be there when they’d be home from church. [There's also the tiny matter that I have to teach Sunday school today, plus the fact that I'm still feverish and was wiped out by just driving to Boaz and back yesterday.]

I wonder what Greg Knauss thinks about the subject now.

It’s not to say that Weblogs are going to replace journalism, but they have fairly well taken off.

I think the dumb thing to do with marketing any emergent technology is to say, “This will replace X!” Few things are truly ever replaced. Vinyl and cassettes still happen [though 8-tracks are severely niche these days]. Radio didn’t die [although sometimes you might wish it would]. Cable and satellitte didn’t kill the Big Three … in fact, it’s now the Big Four.

All media for expression—whether commercial, artistic, personal, or all three—overlap. They rarely, if ever, replace. Technology might change the delivery, but change is rarely, if ever, revolutionary.

The folks upstairs—yeah, the same turds who “overflowed the bathtub” a couple weeks back—now have a yapper dog.

It is an extremely ugly yapper dog. I think that it’s somewhat related to a dachshund, but all I know is that the little yap is ugly.

The little yap is also out on the porch now and, apparently, lonely, because he’s yapping pitifully.

I saw the youngest girl walking around outside with it earlier, and I feared that it would be their dog. [I don't know who else I thought the dog might belong to, but well, in this situation, hope springs eternal ... or something.] Then they bounded up the stairs together and, sure enough, it was theirs.

I say that Ant-Dawg and Heather need to bring over her little Pomeranian and let him yap to his heart’s content. It would be … payback?

What a difference a few months make, eh?

‘at dog is still adorable.

I freely admit to posting this purely for my mother’s sake, because I’m sure she’d love to see photos of you, Rick. But the difference in Molly is simply amazing, especially when you put her next to Jessica. Like I said Wednesday … I think your dog could end up being bigger than your wife.

[N.B. I always forget that the people that read this site might not be close friends or family. The "Rick and Jessica" above are the same ones in my sidebar. Yon tall goofy man is the guy I'd call "my best friend" if you stuck a gun to my head and made me say something so second-grade. I have many friends, even more acquaintances, but only one Richard Paul King. One is enough.]

Since I’ve been sleeping so much during the day, I wondered when I’d have issues getting to sleep.

They’ve hit. Last night, it was 3:30 a.m. or so before I finally got my eyes closed. Why? Well, I wasn’t really tired, and the book I’d picked up last night [one of a few I'd grabbed at Barnes & Noble in a stave-off-cabin-fever dash from the apartment] wasn’t putting me to sleep. It wasn’t totally holding my attention, either, but I think some of that could have just been that, when sick, my mind tends to keep running pell-mell through the halls of my brain, even if my body doesn’t really know how to keep up.

It’s fun being me. :looks around room: Really, it is.

I’m up now only because the local sports-talk station is broadcasting a HS basketball tournament. Soon, I’ll have ESPN Radio 24/7.

As I’m feeling better today, I’ve set up an install of my XM radio tomorrow afternoon in Boaz. It may be the only significant thing that I do all day, but hey … I want to get that thing in there.

Last night, before I drifted off to bed, I checked voicemails on my cell phone. Oops. My parents were calling there, not home.

I decided that my first conscious action this morning would be to call. When I woke up at 5:07, I decided to wait until a more reasonable hour.

The joy of being dehydrated [yes, I'm trying to keep up with it, but it's in some ways a losing battle, especially when you're asleep] for me is having my sinuses fill with cement. This means I get to trek to my truck to take something for it. [My stash is always in the truck. Why? I am always near my truck, no matter where I am.]

I think when I go to the truck that I’m going to forage for foodage. Because I’d planned to be out of town this weekend, I hadn’t done any necessary grocery shopping. I’m not up for that right now, but I would be up for some breakfast.

Thanks to Katharine and Rick and Jess for well wishes and offers to go get stuff. Right now, if I can reduce my fever again and get my sinuses to go away, I can sit here and ache with zero energy all day and not feel totally horrible. [And yes, "Jennifer", I'll show you how to use TrackBack someday soon. ;)]

Some random thoughts while watching the NBA on Christmas …

• Spending the last four or so years steeping in hockey, it’s really odd to watch basketball in transition, where a player can cherry-pick and be at the other end of the court long before the ball is there. It’s totally disconcerting to watch for me. I keep waiting for the linesman to blow his whistle and point his arm at the center line.
• Thinking in terms of Moneyball … when is some NBA team going to decide that they’re just not going to draft players that haven’t had three or four years of college? They could probably trade down and still get the players that they want to put into their organization and probably pick up some talent in the trade. If they don’t get talent in the trades, perhaps they get future considerations&emdash;and that’s bound to make things interesting as they develop their medium- and long-term philosophy.
• The NBA’s salary cap system is absolutely ridiculous, and it doesn’t seem to be furthering the ends of trying to get talent evenly distributed. It seems to stifle player movement, which doesn’t lower salaries. Everyone complains that salaries are too much, but all you have to do is look at baseball to see that a more free system will allow fore more rapid market corrections. It’s kinda interesting, really.

The NBA has reached new lows of relevancy. So sad. Their old slogan, “I LOVE THIS GAME!” is now more appropriately phrased: “I used to love this game.”

I was just kidding.

Honestly.

I joked last night, “I had this weird dream today when I was taking a nap that I woke up with the flu on Christmas.”

At 2:15, I had fever and chills. I won’t elaborate from there.

Whoever turned the suck knob up to 11 deserves a huge lump of coal.

It is perfectly appropriate that, on the night before Christmas, I’ll spend time with the two couples I helped to get married this year.

It’s got the potential to make me mushy enough to break my promise.

:sniffle: I love you guys …

I’ve been working on the re-design today. I’ve got the basic layout licked, the colors picked, and really only lack getting a couple geegaws in it to making it happen.

In other words, I could roll it out in about a half hour of putting in WP variables, but if I did that, I’d just be stuck with it, and future plans for getting the geegaws in would stop.

If you want a sneak-peek, though … [EDIT: Link removed pending final release.]

The ideas are starting to trickle in, and writing about them seems to make sense…

• Red. Yellow. Orange. Warm colors.
• Collapsable lists for the sidebar.
• Rotating photo of yours truly in the sidebar. [Sorry, but if you're coming to read my words, I'm going to stare at you while you do it.]
• Fluid, two-column layout. [Although I’m not going to have them equal.
• Stylesheet switcher so Grant won’t complain about my color choice.

At some point, it will just come together…

Yeah, so I’m unmotivated today. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be even worse. At least I have some busy-work to do updating some data for a project that’s been not-so-critical the last few months.

It’s pretty sad when my most intellectually stimulating moments of the day are telling Dano not to get himself killed by trying to use H₂ in his RC airplane’s turbine and explaining the joys of 802.11 networking to Todd.

A trained monkey could do what I’m doing today. That’s probably why I’ve saved it until now.

I have never had a problem with showing you my referers; I find no problem in showing you how folks find my Web site.

However, I have noticed in the last 72 hours that a disturbing number of mass-mail software Web sites have been linking directly into my /refer/ directory. I have no idea why they’d be doing that, but frankly, I see little need to give spammers any information that their little hearts desire.

As such, I’ve had to put a simple user/pass protection on the directory. :sigh:

I now have a SkyFi. I’ll get someone to install the modulator either on Monday or Wednesday.

I have some last-minute shopping to do. I just hope that I remember everyone I’ll see!

I got back from my parents’ in just a skosh over three hours. I have no idea how that happened, other than the fact that I pretty much didn’t stop. It helps to have gone the right way; on Friday, I turned onto I-65 towards Nashville when I should have stayed on ALT US 72. I must have been thinking about Andy O, whom I need to call, like tomorrow.

This entry is being typed from my parents’ new Dell desktop. They have had it for a few weeks now; I’m presently checking my email over dialup [~26 kbps, egad] and downloading Firebird in the background [58% complete ... I don't know whether to be joyful or sad, heh]. Oddly enough, this is the first OEM keyboard that I’ve liked in some time. It’s got a good response. No, it’s not one of those 20-pound monsters like what Stephen loves to use, but it has a pretty good response for my typing tastes. Considering that I had to force myself to learn to live with my OEM laptop keyboard when I got the laptop, it ain’t all bad. [I miss good key response, but let me tell you ... Internet on the couch just rocks my face off.]

I got my parents’ DirecTiVo installed; the unfortunate thing is that the DVR service takes a day or two to populate the program guide with information. Grrrr to that. However, I think the main feature my folks are likely to use is the ability to pause live TV when someone calls at an inopportune time. As Mom noted, she’s home most of the time anyway, so recording stuff isn’t terribly necessary. Being able to pause a show she’s watching when my grandmother calls, though, will probably be very nice. Add collaborative filtering finding new shows to record to the mix, and I think it’ll work out in the end.

The other frustration is that this install has a dual LNB tuner but only the single cable running into the house. [Well, I'm 95% sure that it's a dual LNB tuner, and I'll check sometime tomorrow to make sure.] Without dual LNB’s, you can’t watch one channel and record another. I’ll check the dish out tomorrow and probably call DirecTV on Monday to have them come out and run another line at my expense. Like I told Sean when I bought this unit, “I’m going to do it up right, yo.”

Now, if I can only convince Dad that DSL or a cable modem would be preferable to running a second phone line with dialup … consider the cost, and it’s not much more to be off of sloooooooooow dialup. Maybe subliminal messages in his sleep … uhhhh, just kidding, Dad.

My geekification would be much farther along if Best Buy had stock of a Delphi SkyFi XM unit today. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and the wait to find that out pretty well stood on my last nerve. [I'm still generally hacked off at how last week went. Man, I need to let go. I'm starting to get as bitter as the Ant-Dawg. Anyhow, they didn't have the unit, so we didn't get one. Dad suggested that we go to Wal-Mart, but at that point, my patience for retail shopping had gone to nil.

Perhaps tomorrow we'll go; XM would be preferable to the small amount of CD's I have in the truck. [I was burning more CD's as a part of the Great CD Preservation Project on Friday, and I left my truck set of CD's in my office. Yes, I am a mo-ron.] I mean, I might love Guster to death, but there’s only so much Guster that this drive can handle, and I’m not really sure that Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy is a good choice for that, either. XM is the perfect appliance for a dude like me who drives long hauls as a matter of course.

I would type more, but my download of Firebird just completed, so it’s time to post and then go install that. I missed tabbed browsing.