Liquidation sale at the Watergate Hotel before they start renovating.
(WGHsale.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Tiles, Cavuto, and Contractors
While Endeavour STS-118 was in orbit and tile damage was on NASA’s mind, I noted with some amusement a link from Space Pragmatism to this op-ed on Fox News: “Earth to NASA: Fire Someone!” — in which Neil Cavuto demands that NASA dismiss whichever contractor manufactures the Space Shuttle’s thermal tiles, since they keep getting damaged.
Those more acquainted with the history of spaceflight than Fox News talking heads should know that the issues of foam strikes and tile damage are merely an offshoot of the whole engineering problem of flying an orbiter too large to be perched atop a launch rocket and too massive to use ablative thermal shielding less suited to the mass and surface area of a vehicle the size of the shuttle, thanks to outdated Cold War specs demanded by military interests connected to the Shuttle program. That’s a whole other book all by itself.
Much more amusing, however, is the fact that the contractors about whom Cavuto is ranting, the ones who manufactured the shuttle and its tiles in the first place, were Lockheed and Rockwell — now Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing are not only the two largest aerospace and defense contractors in the world, but are also advertisers on Fox News, as revealed here and here.
Perhaps Fox should allow Cavuto to continue his on-air demands to have NASA dismiss these two aerospace contractors: “And hey, that whole Constellation thing? Forget it!” I’m sure both Boeing and Lockheed will be quite happy to reward his extensive knowledge of aerospace engineering with a sensible response towards the Fox News advertising group.
For more info, see these articles critical of the Shuttle program:
And more basic shuttle program info from NASA and the contractors themselves:
Saturday in NYC
Amy and I were up in New York Saturday, to check out the Central Park Zoo and see a show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Steve had some work up.
The zoo (zoos, actually, if you include the Tisch children’s zoo) was nice, despite the $8/person entrance fee, but the trip to Williamsburg was a lemon. We got lost around the Marcy Ave train station, and when we finally found the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center after wandering about in the heat, it was closed for the Labor Day weekend.
Still, it wasn’t a total loss of a Saturday; we got some nice photos at the zoo, and had a delicious lunch of dim sum and Yang Chow fried rice at “Good Dumpling House” on Grand Street in Chinatown. (This is a few blocks up from the “Excellent Dumpling House” near Lafayette and Canal Streets, which makes me wonder if there’s a “Mediocre Dumpling House” somewhere on Houston St., and a “Terrible Dumpling House” in Midtown.)
Zoo photo highlights:
Note the poetry sign closeup. One thing that struck me about the zoo was the zealous quantity of poetry scattered through the park at various places, which was nice at first, but became quickly tedious. By noon I was suffering from poetry overload.
More photos here, and video of the polar bear and spectacled elders soon if I can get the files off my damaged SD card.
Blue Heron of Lock 2
Mobile Catchup
Owing to intermittent Flickr mail2blog problems, mobile content has not been getting properly posted, so here’s a quick catch-up on cellphone photos taken on the go in recent days:
(Top left) A black squirrel in Foggy Bottom.
(Top right) New Le Pain Quotidien coming to Georgetown.
(Middle left) Cloudy gray sky over Pennsylvania Ave NW.
(Middle right) Arch of a bridge over the C&O Canal.
(Bottom left) Broken torchiere lampshade.
(Bottom right) Family of traffic cones.
Hopefully Flickr can get mail2blog functionality working consistently again, otherwise I’ll need to start looking into other solutions to push mobile content to this stream.
Harpers Ferry Honeymoon
Two months since our wedding, Amy and I still had not gone on a honeymoon for lack of time and money; so we decided to go on a quick weekend getaway to Harpers Ferry, WV, that famous little historical town at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. To stay relatively cheap and completely car-less, we opted to take the commuter train, and stay at a place right by the station in Lower Town. Just the town itself and the immediate walkable area offered far more than enough historical and mild sport activity to fill a weekend.
More after the jump.
Also Flickr photoset here, and DC Metroblogging companion piece here.
Caturday!
(Hiding from the Vacuum uploaded by amy kow.)
Today’s Pandora photo comes to you courtesy Amy’s shiny new Flickr photostream. These are Pandora’s tail and paws as she flees under the couch from the noise of a vacuum cleaner. (She does likewise during thunderstorms.)
Switched to uStream
You may have noticed a change on the webcam page: the live cam now runs on uStream.tv rather than Stickam.
See my Metafilter post about Stickam for details on the whole pornography controversy. But even outside of the whole “AVS-and-porn” brouhaha, I was more swayed by the fact that my Stickam password has been hacked at least once and the Pandora profile pic replaced with that of a winking blonde punk girl going “Pow!” with a pointing index finger (I received no phishing mail and there are no keyloggers on my system, so I suspect an XSS or other injection exploit was at play. Kudos to the hacker for successful and somewhat witty pwnage.) There have also been several occasions that Stickam has forgotten my saved settings and put me back in text-and-video chat mode with sound on, rather than the muted broadcast-only mode I kept trying to set as my default preference. So, given the insecurity and general cruftiness of Stickam’s streaming app, I decided to go with another new arrival in the growing live video market.
uStream.tv is more geared towards streaming broadcast than multichannel visual communication, and lacks the friend-and-chat functionality which shapes Stickam’s user experience. Introvert that I am, I consider this lack of MySpace-ish community features a definite plus. uStream does have a Flash/IRC chat feature you can embed alongside the webcam stream, but my aim is a “watch the cat” stream and nothing more, so the IRC box mostly stays off. It’s also worth noting that uStream’s Flash streaming app runs just fine on my old iBook G3, which chokes on Stickam’s memory-intensive app after more than a few minutes, when it manages to start up at all.
This should all make little difference to the webcam page itself, since both services offer a simple HTML embed snippet, and all I needed to do was paste the uStream embed over the Stickam one. Probably my main complaint about uStream in this stead is that they have only one remote Flash player option with only one size allowed, as opposed to the six remote player styles Stickam had. But eh, this is fine.
So there you go. The cam’s pointed at the room, but Pandora has taken to sleeping behind the video rocker rather than on it as of late, so you’ll only see her when she goes over to her food bowl every now and then.
Caturday!
Sorry it’s taking me so long. Lots happening, and only halfway through writing my travel log from last weekend. To amuse you while I’m busy, here’s a pair of cat photos:
(This entry backdated to appear as a Saturday post.)
Harpers Ferry Preview
We’re back from Harpers Ferry. It’ll take me a bit longer to write about our honeymoon and upload and caption and tag the rest of the photos, so enjoy these sneak peeks for now:
Back soon with more photos and a detailed travel log.