Tag: Long

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Space Shuttle Endeavour in a parking lot, seen from the front.

Last month I had the good fortune to watch Endeavour’s landing at LAX from the office building where I work. Today I had the opportunity to see the space shuttle up close while it stopped at a parking lot in Westchester.

When I got to work this morning, the shuttle had already left the airport hangar where it had spent the last month, and was sitting in a parking lot a mile or so away. I didn’t have time to go look at it, but I did have time to climb up to the top of the parking structure and look for it.

Space Shuttle in a STAPLES parking lot, seen from a ways off.

The first thing I spotted was the distinctive tail, and I walked along the top floor until I could see as much of the shuttle as possible. It looked out of place surrounded by trees and a Staples sign, though I couldn’t help thinking, “Space shuttle? Yeah, we’ve got that.” I took a few zoomed pictures with my camera, then one really grainy with my phone for the “now” impact, then headed into the office. Continue reading →

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Chicon 7Our family vacation this summer was a trip to Chicago, partly to sightsee, partly to catch up with my brother and sister-in-law, and partly to attend this year’s Worldcon, a.k.a. Chicon 7.

What’s a Worldcon?

I grew up going to sci-fi/fantasy conventions, but over the last decade I’ve mostly been going to comic cons of one sort or another. The World Science Fiction Convention is a more literary and, in some ways, academic con than the glitzier media cons like Comic-Con International, or the celebrity-oriented cons like Wizard World. The guest list is more focused on writers than on actors or media personalities, and panels tend toward discussions rather than announcements.

Worldcon itself travels around from year to year, essentially a convention franchise where members of one year’s convention vote on who gets to put on the con two years from now. Last year it was in Reno. Next year it’ll be in San Antonio, Texas, and in 2014 it’ll be in London. Certain elements remain constant — there’s always a masquerade, an art show, a Regency Dance, and of course the Hugo Awards — but the tenor of the con can change wildly from one year to the next.

Chicago River at Night

Lead-Up to the Con

We flew into Chicago the weekend before the con, met up with my brother and sister-in-law (who were also attending the con), and spent the next few days sightseeing before the convention started on Thursday. We explored the nearby area, took day trips out to the Lincoln Park Zoo, Museum of Science and Industry, had some real Chicago pizza (this is important, after all), and made a point of getting up to one of the tallest buildings’ observation decks. (We picked the John Hancock building over Sears Tower, mainly because it was closer when we decided to do it.)

There was an allergy close call the first night there, which put us on alert for the rest of the week. And we all picked up a cold: I got it first, on Tuesday, then J on Thursday, then Katie on Friday, then Marti. You’re supposed to get the con crud after the convention, right? Continue reading →

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Update: If you’re looking for photos from Endeavour’s trip through the LA streets in October, I’ve got those too.

And that’s it. The final flight of the space shuttle has come to an end.

The last shuttle landing I saw was Discovery in 1988. My family went out to Edwards Air Force Base to watch it land. I posted a photo essay on the event last summer when the shuttle flights stopped.

The 1988 landing was a normal Shuttle landing. It landed under its own power, from orbit, and it was all business. We civilians camped out all night on a dry lake bed, kept outside a fence so far away from the landing strip we could barely see the shuttle without binoculars.

This time it was being carried by an airplane, from another airport. Safety wasn’t any more of an issue than a normal flight, so they landed at a regular airport. (Though it was escorted by military aircraft.) And since it was the last-ever shuttle flight, there was a bit of showmanship to the flight plan: Continue reading →

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Nexus 7 Tablet in caseSo, I’ve joined the tablet generation. I recently bought a Nexus 7, Google’s latest 7″ tablet.  Here are some first impressions.

Performance is very nice. The games I’d played on my (almost two-year-old) phone are much snappier, plus of course the bigger screen helps a lot.

Within minutes I was typing a lot faster than on my phone, at least when holding it horizontally. Downsides: It’s easy to hit the menu buttons while trying to hit the space bar. Editing is a pain. I miss having arrow keys or a trackball.

The screen size and resolution are just inside the edge of being able to read a full page of a comic book without resorting to guided view. This will change as I get older, but tech will no doubt improve, and I may end up using a larger tablet in the future. I just wish comiXology’s app made it easier to locate comics I’ve already purchased and want to download.

Backup/restore pulled in all my WiFi settings from my phone, which was convenient.

A tablet is much nicer for catching up on news/email/Facebook at breakfast than a phone. Or a desktop or laptop, for that matter. It’s also nice if you drop in at Coffee Bean to relax for a half hour.

My toddler loves the tablet. A few days ago while I set up his breakfast, he grabbed it off the table, set it on the floor, opened the cover, and tried tapping on the screen to wake it up. So far I’ve let him play Fruit Ninja and a couple of interactive kids’ books. He doesn’t quite have the coordination to avoid the edge of the screen, though, so he keeps bringing up a search or dropping back to the home screen while he’s trying to play. I need to find an app to temporarily lock in the running app, so that (a) he won’t get too frustrated and (b) I can look away for 30 seconds and not worry that he’ll end up clicking on an ad for something.

Reading a novel in ordinary indoor light was just fine, and comparable to reading on a Kindle 2. It’s not that great in bright sunlight, though.

Book Navigation on the Google Play Reader takes some getting used to. I’m reading Year Zero, which has a lot of footnotes. You can tap the number to jump to the note, but I kept missing it, or missing the link back to the source. And then trying to return, I’d accidentally tap the slider, jumping forward 1/3 of the way through the book, and reflexively hit the Back button, which doesn’t go back to where you left off, but goes back to the home screen. By the second chapter, I’d stopped reading the footnotes as I got to them and figured I’d just read them when I got to the end of the chapter, which of course removes them entirely from context.

I don’t really mind not having a camera (except the front-facing one for conferencing), because it’s a bit bulky for a camera if I’m not going to get the benefit of actual optics out of it, and I usually have a phone or actual camera anyway.

I am sort of regretting that it’s Wi-Fi only, though, because intermittent access does limit things a bit. Anything you’ve already downloaded is fine, of course, but Google Docs Drive is virtually useless without a connection. I definitely need to look for some sort of local word processing app for writing offline notes. On the plus side, it reconnects automatically to remembered networks, and Gmail at least seems to sync immediately — both with incoming and outgoing mail, so you can read, compose and “send” offline, and new messages will go out as soon as you’re back in WiFi range. (Also, I don’t have to add another $25/30 monthly data plan on top of both our phones.)

Overall, I’m liking it a lot. It’s great for casual reading, communication, and games, and it looks like it’ll work well for writing. I need to look for a decent image editor and offline word processor, and fix a few issues with my WordPress install (I’m using a CDN tool on this site that doesn’t play nicely with image uploads from the mobile app), and I think it’ll be great for travel as well.

Update: Nothing to do with the tablet itself, but I can’t believe WordPress’ Android app still has the bug where if you upload a draft, it pre-fills the publication date so that the post ends up being back-dated when you finally finish it.

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We attended Planetfest in Pasadena yesterday. It’s still going on now, a two-day event by the Planetary Society timed to match tonight’s landing of NASA’s Curiosity space probe on Mars.

Inflatable mockup of the Curiosity Mars rover.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but it was basically a bunch of space enthusiasts and people in the industry. SpaceX has a mock-up of their crew capsule, and other sponsors had exhibits with things like space plane mock-ups or geological drills. There was a life-size inflatable model of the Curiosity rover. There was a single track of programming with speakers on topics from the actual science of Martian exploration to the question of just why we explore space in the first place. Katie caught the Sally Ride tribute while I walked J around the exhibits, and we both watched Bill Nye’s talk about “Our Place in Space,” which he finished up with a fun science demonstration featuring liquid nitrogen marshmallows, gas toruses, a candle, and Robert Picardo.

SpaceX crew capsule mock-up.

The exhibits for “kids of all ages” turned out to be for kids from 4 on up. J wasn’t really interested in the Martian soil uplift demo, or the dirty snowball CO2 comet demo, but he liked watching the Xbox Mars Lander game, and he was fascinated by the robot that picked up and tossed basketballs. He had fun hanging out with grandma and grandpa, at least, and playing with a magnetic meteorite. (The tiny fragment of verified Martian meteorite was carefully mounted on a slab with plastic wrap to protect it from skin oils, but they had a couple of non-valuable rocks that you could pick up and hold.)

A robot that plays basketball.

A family friend invited us to the after party at the mall across the street. It was divided into two main areas: the sci-fi-themed dance floor out on the plaza, and a set of tables on the terrace above for the sit-and-talk crowd, where the main event was a participatory art project: A group had set up one blank postcard for each day of Curiosity’s journey from Earth to Mars, and was asking attendees to draw what they imagined the probe would write home about.

Planetfest party at Paseo Colorado in Pasadena