Miscellaneous

Filed under: Books, Projects, Science Fiction, Space, self referential — Tags: , , , , , , — Eike @ August 21, 2007 9:42 pm

Busy busy busy… apart from the usual business there are some projects that have to be pulled through in quite a hurry. Berlin DJ Zuckermann needs a new site by the end of the month plus a somewhat embarrassed staff member from the Centrum Judaicum (New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation) called to ask if I could do a small page for a new exhibition of theirs by the end of next week, which is a bit of short notice so to speak. So I won’t have much time for private stuff (only that I will still take the weekend off to visit the summer camp of the bike club Kuhle Wampe). But there are some things that shall not go unmentioned:

  • Shuttle Endeavour has landed safely. There was a bit of worry about the heat shield that had been damaged in the launch but the damage had been investigated and NASA decided that repairs weren’t necessary. Obviously they were right. Go to the shuttle mission pages at nasa.gov and look at some images – the Shuttle is a magnificent craft and I’m sorry that it will soon be decomissioned.
  • I finished Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and I still haven’t warmed up (global warming pun is accidental) to the series, partly because I still think it focuses to much on the private life of the characters but mostly because it reads more and more like a news report and less like science fiction. But please don’t let me detain you from reading it – both books are actually quite good, it’s more that at the moment I could rather do with something more escapist.
  • If you’re into german science fiction: Jacob informs us that the second edition of the magazine Pandora is soon to hit the stores – he is one of the editors there, which gives him the opportuntiy to hang out with cool people like John Clute. Dang, I shouldn’t have given up on my writing career.

Now I going to burn some midnight oil to get some things off the desk. If you came to look for progress on the content item module for Joomla 1.5 I would urge you to download it and play around (not on production sites). I do not have much time to do testing on my own so I would be grateful for any comments.

    Shuttle Endeavour launched safely

    Filed under: Space — Tags: — Eike @ August 9, 2007 11:07 am

    As a child – a space junkie even back then – I used to watch space shuttle launches with religious zeal. Compared to non-reusable capsules like Apollo or Soyuz the Orbiter looked like the first real spacecraft (like, you know, one from those science fiction books) which very well may be one of the reasons it was built the way it was built (because engineers read science fiction, too).

    I broke the habit when Challenger exploded in 1986. I loved the Shuttle (still do) , but watching astronauts die in real time was a bit too unnerving for my taste, and with every new launch I was afraid that fatal accidents would happen again – as alas one did in 2003.

    Luckily NASA was less afraid. After a major overhaul (a.k.a Orbiter Major Modification period) Endeavour was launched yesterday at 6:36 p.m. (about 0.30 this morning here in Berlin), and this time I was watching again live on NASA TV. This was, after all, one of the very few remaining opportunities to see a Shuttle launch.

    One member of the Endeavour crew is Barbara Radding Morgan, who used to teach in elementary school and was the backup candidate for the NASA Teacher in Space Program during the Challenger Mission when her colleaugue Christa McAuliffe perished in the explosion.

    If anybody ever deserved to go to space it’s certainly her – Barbara Morgan absolutely rocks. She completed the necessary training to become a ‘real’ astronaut and has been assigned as a full-fledged mission specialist to the ST-118 Mission (go read the Interviews at the STS-118 Mission Pages). If the world absolutely needs heroes I think astronaut teachers are the best kind we can get.

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