For a whopping 20 seconds or so, NASA lit up the night sky with its launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor this morning (at 2:28am). Then it vanished into the clouds and the show ended quite abruptly (not because anything went wrong with the launch — it just wasn’t visible behind the cloud cover that had earlier represented the biggest “threat” to the launch window). Here’s the video I shot of the launch, from Space View Park in Titusville, FL (it’s about as close as a lowly “civilian” like me can get to the launch pad — there is a theoretically “closer” location, that NASA sells tickets for ($52 per head, ugh), that immediately sell out within minutes of being made available). Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Cool Geeky Video

In case anyone is even remotely curious (and, to my astonishment, 157 people so far have been ), I recorded a (decidedly amateur) video of NASA’s launch of Shuttle Discovery on Tuesday of this week. You can view it on YouTube. While you’re there, you can catch another video of my friend performing Stuff Like That There from her talent show appearance this past Thursday.

I’ve got a couple gigabytes (yes, that’s with a “g”) of photos from the last year uploading as well … that takes a long time since the United States is mired in this laggy, bullshit asynchronous broadband hell in which I can snarf down a CD image at almost a megabyte per second, but can only upload stuff back out at the snail’s pace of 50 or so kilobytes per second. That’s okay, because I’m also assuming my web host is going to shit a brick when I set the gallery off to the task of importing those 4,500 images It’s set to de-prioritize all of its work, so it won’t step on anyone else’s site performance, but who the hell knows how well this will work

The new camera has been well-behaved so far; it’s capable of taking 3 megabyte pictures (with JPEG compression), but fortunately it has more sane settings that drop that down to 500-600k or so while maintaining the same resolution and picture quality.

In the meantime, enjoy the videos!

del.icio.us is a “distributed bookmarking” site; by installing a plug-in on your favorite browser (IE and Firefox are supported, along with several others), you can replace (or supplement) the built-in bookmarks (IE calls these “favorites”) facility in your browser with a much more useful one:

• Your bookmarks get stored on del.icio.us’ servers, and local copies are kept synced on your local browser. If you use multiple workstations, you now get to automatically keep your bookmarks synchronized no matter which machine you’re working on. Synchronization happens periodically on its own, and you can force an update as well if you’ve just made a bunch of updates. Even if their servers go down, your browser still keeps a local copy — you’re not dead in the water.

• You can “tag” bookmarks with an arbitrarily long (i.e. as many as you want) list of descriptive tags. I have quite a few related to Willfe.com here, all tagged with “willfe.com.” My bank and PayPal stuff are in a “banking” tag. Read the full story...

Ah, I miss the short-lived remake of Fantasy Island — Malcolm McDowall as Mr. Roarke was seriously menacing and was deliciously perfect in the role. Anyway … I digress.

NASA got Discovery off the ground today and put seven astronauts in orbit. Kick ass, guys! It was a night shot, which I’m told are seriously breathtaking, and I even knew it was going on, but I was watching a stellar (heh) performance by my friend S tonight and missed it. Ironically, she had a break right when the shuttle’s engines ignited and she got to watch the sucker climb majestically into the sky while I was inside watching the first movement after the intermission. Whoops Was still worth it though. She’s a remarkable singer. Read the full story...

[acidfree:1211 align=right title=’Cherenkov Radiation’] Hot on the heels of my recent post about the Saint Lucie Power Station that’s nearby comes more digging and happiness — for whatever reason, nuclear power is an interesting topic to me. The grand “red herring” of nuclear fusion is something we’ll eventually turn into something usable, not just a joke (and the pictures you get from that stuff are just stunningly beautiful). Note the person taking the picture of that live, operational reactor is completely safe from the radiation it’s producing — a simple pool of water is plenty of protection. Not a bit of radiation gets past it (just don’t go for a swim or take a drink ).

Click on that picture and then try to tell me you’re not at least mildly impressed

Or maybe I’m just easily amused by glowing things.

“From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”
— Dr. Seuss