Well, if I didn’t like my XM radio before, I dearly adore it now.

Perhaps males will have more affinity for XM than females … there’s nothing like having 15 rock stations to choose from and flipping if you don’t like the song. A Jet song that’s not “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”? FLIP! Warren Zevon? FLIP! [Yes, he's dead, but he's been dead long enough for me to say that I don't appreciate his music.] Springsteen? STOP!

It’s not quite to the level of flippage that I’d perform if, say, I had NFL Sunday Ticket, but it’s still a lot of flippage. I spent the first two-thirds of the trip flipping from ESPN Radio to music during their commercial breaks. [Having done so, I can accurately say that the actual announcing crew of ESPN Radio only works thirty minutes inside an hour. The production people are humping it the whole time, but the on-air folks have an easy job.] Every time SportsCenter hit—really, what’s going to happen on a Sunday afternoon in February that’ll really matter to me, someone who only casually follows the NBA and college hoops?—it was off to go find music.

Anyhow, it made the drive through the Pine Belt of southeastern Mississippi and the northern fringes of the Black Belt of Alabama go quite quickly. I hag the same anxiety to be-there-already that I always get when I hit the 300th mile of I-65 [read: less than an hour until I'll be home], but the first four hours of the trip fairly well flew. If I hadn’t needed gas, I would’ve never stopped.

Of course, my legs are now quite leaden, and I shall soon be napping.

You’ll notice that the archives on this site are now done a little differently. If you haven’t noticed, you can drill down by year, month, and day. To play with this, go up to the location bar in your browser, strip off “new-archives/”, and you’ll see what the date does. Strip off the day and you get all of February 2004’s archives. Strip off the month and you get all of 2004. Spiffy, eh?

Okay, so I shamelessly ripped MtDewVirus’s Archives hack for WordPress. I need to style ‘em a bit, but … I’ve got other things to do.

[Thanks to Alex for pointing out my mistakes in getting it up and running.]

Pops’s funeral is sometime this weekend—probably Saturday morning—so I’ll be offline for a bit.

I’ll remember many things about my father’s father. I think what I’ll remember most is him reading in the corner of the living room at my grandparents’ house down in Laurel, Miss. Whenever we would come in for a visit, if he wasn’t out working in the garden—something he just hasn’t had much stamina for in the last few years, and frankly for the better part of the decade—he would be in his chair, reading. It was pretty much a guarantee that it would be The Bible.

As I stop to think on it, I never did look to see if he had any favorite parts that he liked to review. Was he a Proverbs man, seeking advice from those before? Did he often read through the Gospels, seeking to unlock the mysteries of Life found in Jesus’s parables? Did he read through the strife and debauchery of found in the Kings and the Chronicles? Was it the Pentateuch that drove him back again and again? Was he seeking something new in Paul’s epistles?

As much time as he spent upon reading what he certainly believed to be God’s inspired Word for His people, I’m sure that he read all of it, but perhaps he settled on one part or another.

But unfortunately, that chair is going to be empty of its prime sitter; Clyde Spencer Morris passed away this morning, having suffered another stroke, this one quite more serious than the rest, on Tuesday morning. It’s perhaps fitting for him to have died during the Lenten season, when Christians are exhorted to deny the excess that this world so richly affords and focus more fully upon their faith; he was a frugal, faithful man, strong of conviction.

I am shamefully stealing the idea for this from Amy, but I don’t think that she’ll mind.

I talk about some folks around here, and I think that it’s fair that you have a face to put with the name. I’d like to do what Amy’s done in the Cast and Crew, but I would prefer that I’m actually in the photo.

For example, I could use photos from Rick and Jessica’s wedding and Sean and Katharine’s wedding when compiling these. [I mean, hey ... you will never see me look better than I do in a tuxedo, eh? Especially those spiffy tuxedos that Sean picked out for us. Hell yeah, those were awesome.]

If you have a photo of the two of us [or the three of us, if you come paired with a spouse as so many of my friends do nowadays!], you let me know. If not, we need to take one.

I can’t believe that this is what UAH will wear this weekend.

My goodness.

I’ll have to work hard not to mock that jersey from Section 23.

Doesn’t Roscoe look ashamed to even be wearing that?

Tonight, Anthony, Leonard, and I sat while Heather regaled us with tales of the latest foibles with UAH’s SGA.

See, I built a lot [not all, but a lot] of what the SGA is today. Last year, I would be in the face of the people doing stupid things with “my SGA”. This year? I’m just amused at it all.

I have achieved Alumni Apathy.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to the SGA meeting on Monday night to go amuse ourselves, though.

First item:

List all items that should be on to-do list.

I keep thinking of things that I need to do, and … few of them are getting done. They only get done as people scream for them. That’s inefficient.

Tasks to the rescue.

I hope.

I want to echo Matt Haughey’s praise for Acts of Volition Radio. Acts of Volition Radio is a nifty little program that Steven Garrity puts together for download on his site. I fear that its very popularity [driven from word-of-mouth and from Haughey; I am under no such delusions about IJSM's popularity] might be its downfall, either from stress on Steven’s hosting-fu or visibility killing him on the licensing fees. [Steven does want to license the songs for use, though. Give him all credit.]

The best part is probably the format: he tries to put together a coherent playlist, and he does the old-school DJ approach to telling you why he’s playing stuff. You know, back when disc jockeys were disc jockeys and not “on-air personalities” like they are these days.

I could totally see my brother putting something like this together, and it’s one of things I’d dearly love to do if I had more time in my day. I think I have some pretty cool music in my arsenal, and I’d like to tell you why I think it kicks ass.

Good on ya, Steven.

My buddy Alex has released Tasks Pro™, the professional version of his Tasks itchware.

If you need a Web-based hierarchical task-management system for your small business, go get Tasks Pro. If you need a personal solution, grab Tasks and use it.

Me? I’m stronly considering buying Tasks Pro for the .net.

Dave Shea posts on Understanding Design:

Credibility is the issue here. You don’t walk up to a civic engineer and scribble on his blueprints. You’re more than welcome to voice your concern at a public forum, but it’s up to the engineer to take your concern into consideration, as well as the concerns of everyone else, and figure out the best way to integrate them into an existing workflow, on top of an existing project, without impacting safety and accessibility concerns, while keeping the whole thing on budget. If another well-respected engineer speaks up, you can bet that issue is weighted far higher than the voice of a member of the general public.

I replied:

This aerospace engineer appreciates the reference to my general profession. You might have all sorts of great questions as to why this or that in spaceflight construction is or isn’t done, and we’d have a long dialogue. But if we leave it surface, everyone will go, “But of course you’d want to design the crew-compartment of the Shuttle orbiter to be detachable and parachutable!”

Until you take all the design considerations and risks/benefits/costs into perspective, you get to the Good Enough Point and just stop.

I think the Good Enough Point is just not well-understood by the layman. I don’t know how you get to evangelizing it, either.

Dave’s point about credibility is a good one, and it’s one reason I referenced him when I got pissed off last week. People do speak up in town meetings about engineering designs, especially civil engineering ones. The debate is often between someone who just doesn’t want something somewhere&emdash;either for perceived aesthetic, NIMBY, or eminent domain concerns&emdash;and the lead engineer whose team has considered everything [well, except NIMBY, since NIMBY's are everywhere and should generally be ignored unless they have lots of money or are trial lawyers].

It’s easy for someone like me to criticize design&emdash;my opinions are my own, they’re worth what you pay to read them, and I can self-publish them here. But I’m clearly not a professional, and for me to speak with the authority of a professional would make me come off like a brash, arrogant jerk.

This one anecdote from Joe Torre via Peter Gammons’s February 19th column for ESPN.com shows the best and worst of sports at once:

“I was coming down in the elevator in our hotel in Boston last season,” says Torre, “and this man asks me if I’m Joe Torre. He then said not to take it personally, but given the choice of the Red Sox beating the Yankees or capturing Osama Bid Laden, he’d take beating the Yankees.”

Best: that sports is so important.

Worst: that sports is so important.

I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Bored? Need something to do? Have a thing for syndication feeds?

Go register at Syndic8, be a reviewer, and go through some of the approvable feeds. Run ‘em through the validator. If they’re good, approve ‘em.

Support the community that supports you. You might even find something you want to read. I have already.

While searching for new links on my own this morning, I found something spiffy:

Monthly Summaries.

That could prove interesting. If you think I should do it, let me know.

Now, you know that I really only follow stuff with syndication feeds nowadays. I just have too many other things I like to do on the Web [and offline] to check through a bunch of links [even though I give you most everything in my feed-list over in yonder sidebar].

Thing is … I need more stuff to read.

This is where you come in: let me know if you know of sites I should be reading. If you’re linked over in the sidebar, I’m reading your feed.

So speak up.

This makes me giddy. Giddy like a little schoolgirl.

If you’ve been using Dean Allen’s wonderful Refer script on your Weblog, you might have seen an increase in spamming of your referral logs over the last few months. [I know that I have.]

But no more. Dean points us to a Refer patch by Eric Goldberg that will wipe clean most all of the bots.

I’m sure that the bots will work up a way to get around this eventually, but for now, my referral logs can come back to mean something again, which means I’ll probably re-open them to you, the reader. I want you to see how people get here as well.

I may have almost walked my legs off at IAH, but I’m home.

I always find it funny on airplanes: I can be the chatty-type passenger, or I can be the guy who sits, silently, next to you for the entire flight. My flight from Newark to Houston: said nothing. My flight from Houston to Huntsville: talked the whole way. I always try to gauge my neighbor as we get seated on the aircraft. If they seem like they want to talk, I will. I have plenty of stories to tell a stranger. If they don’t seem to want to talk, well, I’ve got a couple magazines [always The Economist, sometimes Newsweek or Sports Illustrated, too] and maybe a paperback.

Doesn’t matter to me. I enjoy the chatty flights more, but maybe not everyone around me does. My knob always seems to be on 11.

Really.

I promise.

We’re done; my customers are on their way to JFK, and I will soon leave here and head to EWR, where I get the fun of squaring up my ticketing with the counter agents [after having run the gantlet of TSA] and then cooling my heels waiting for a 3:05p.m. flight … to Houston, and then home to Huntsville. Things are hopping at work, and I need to be home so I don’t get behind. I hate the feeling of being behind, of not treading water.

Oi.

Home soon.

Well, that’s what ol’ Al Greenspan would call it, anyway. Looks like I won’t be coming home early after all. Some of the final cleaning and paperwork won’t be finished at the end of the workday, so I’ll be here in the morning, perhaps with my customer [who did change their flights already], perhaps just by myself, reviewing the quality paper.

Thankfully, my father and my buddy David, affectionately known as “Captain Quality”, have trained me well. If I’m the last guy here, it’s okay. David trusts the vendor’s quality department, and so do I. They do good work. I’ll just be reviewing all the paper, making sure that i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.

Unfortunately for me, I’m beginning to feel like absolute crap. Have been all day. Even if I’m here all day [we may yet find available travel on Friday afternoon] and into Saturday, right now, about all I want to do is sit and read.

Yeah, yeah … go get your violin.

[UPDATE: I'll be booked in about another five minutes on a 3:50p.m. flight back to Huntsville Huntsville via Houston. Sweet Home, Alabama ... Lord, I'm comin' home to you ... I think.]

NASA has cancelled the RFP for the design, development, and delivery of an Orbital Space Plane.

Smart move; any OSP design either needs a STS-like ET/SRB system or would have to be towed up to high altitude before launched [see X-15]. The former system is, generally, what NASA seeks to move away from; the latter hasn’t been done for decades.

I think this is a sign of a return to the crew capsule days. While NASA-philes [and the greater American public] might consider that to be outmoded, it’s certainly been effective for the Russians for the entirety of their spacefaring days [which number more than 40 years, for those keeping track].

NASA also noted that an STS orbiter modification would not be carried out as originally planned. In both Challenger and Columbia, the crew survived the initial infarction and perished as a result of the impact of the crew compartment. Design modifications were being considered to make the crew compartment sturdier, but with STS on the way out, it doesn’t make fiscal sense when the risk of crew loss is so low [<2%] and the development time is long [4-5 years, at best, with every modification requiring a re-fit that would probably take a year], almost as long as the planned life of STS.

Well, crap.

As Mike notes, I’m very much a company man. I drove to Jersey last time, and I offered to drive again this time if it were cheaper than the cost of the plane fare and rental car. Unfortunately for me [and fortunately for the company], the plane tickets were pretty cheap.

Even more unfortunately for me [and fortunately for the company], it looks as if we will complete all our activities today, and it appears that flying back on Friday will be cheaper than another day of hotel, car rental, and per diem. So much for the plans to try to 1) reclaim the holiday I lost on Monday by travelling and 2) head over into the City and hopefully see Jessie and Jerrod for the first time in many years and possibly meet up with Anil.

As Robbie Burns once said, “The best laid plans of mice and men oft go gang agley.” Yeah. Wiseguy.

… I’m still a passive/aggressive punk.

At least I can admit it. Admittance is the first step to acceptance. Acceptance is the first step to … well, I don’t know just yet, but I’ll tell you when I know.

Having fun in Jersey.

Well, as much fun as you can have in New Jersey.

To quote my friend Jessie last night, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in New Jersey.” My reply: “You’ve not missed much of anything.”

Nothing like a little downtime being used to Weblog. I’ve also been audioblogging, oddly enough. Well, it’s not audioblogging until you publish the files, eh? My little DVR is getting some use, though. I feel the need to encapsulate my thoughts, and the spoken word’s kinda spiff. I’ll edit up the files tonight and post them tomorrow.

Behind me, there’s a discussion between my Korean-American vendor and my Japanese customers on Buddhism. Don’t they know that you don’t mix business and religion?

I keep debating as to whether or not to take my laptop with me on this business trip.

I don’t know why I’m so darn ambivalent about this. I guess it’s because I worry about the server doing something stupid while I’m gone, but I would love to leave that all behind.

:shrug: I will probably end up taking it, but man, I’d love not to take it.

I will try not to be a brat and tell everyone how old you are. I did that when I was five and you were 35; I think I told every single person within earshot at the grocery store [or was it the commissary?] that day that you were 35.

Funny, that was 20 years ago …

So much for snow … we were anticipating a couple inches, but instead, it’s dumping 3-6″ up in southern Tennesee, and none here.

What a difference 30 miles makes, eh?

It’s not all bad. I need to do a little shopping before I head to New Jersey tomorrow. Lovely … travelling on a TBE holiday. I actually need to go in at some point this weekend to find out what all I need to do re: time-charging for tomorrow. That, and I need a printout of my itinerary.

I’m debating as to whether my laptop is going with me. It probably will, but I can pretty well assure you I won’t be online much.