Parking Orbit

On the approach to the system the pilot had been nervous. Only the slightest stresses had been applied to the engine systems over the course of the voyage, and sometimes such systems developed catastrophic quirks over time...and it had been a long time.

He tapped on the glass covering each of the dials again. Each needle jiggled slightly at the disturbance, wavered, then settled back. The orbit was stable.

Perihelion would be suitably close to the star to pick up most of the small, rocky bodies orbiting the sun. Aphelion was not quite at the Oort cloud, and with time would shift inward as the perihelion shifted outward. First he wanted to let the orbit meander around the sun; solar systems are big places, and the current orbit would shift directions while staying the same shape. Later on, short, strategic burns would jettison just enough velocity that a less extreme orbit would be attained and more extensive surveys could be run on the inner planets.

Earlier radar bursts had gotten a big reflection in that area; at about six times Jupiter's mass, the gas giant was about .75 AUs out from the star and so would be a major navigational hazard. He'd have to watch that.

After staring blankly at the dials for a few more minutes, he wandered over to the Kepler Weight and Constraint Set. He liked using them to simplify the more tedious orbital calculations; just turn dials to set mass, velocity, and position of up to four masses and the strings, weights and wires would automagically give you the stable solution over the next 100 years. It didn't account for the inherent nonlinearity of the actual relativistic and gravitic equations, but it was good enough most of the time.

It was good to be back in orbit.

(Especially around a star like MP539. --Ed.)

Hieroglyphics

Upon becoming frustrated with the enigmatic glyphs on the controls of his smartphone, my dad thought of the icons on the buttons in a particular computer program:

"In Unigraphics [a jet-engine-scale CAD program], a product I used to support, we have over a thousand symbols. Years ago, mankind invented phonetic writing so we wouldn't have to remember thousands of symbols, and now we're back to systems where we have to remember a thousand symbols!"

Having just finished a class on the era of civilization in which writing developed, I was highly amused. :)

PVU

So...

I like small airports. A lot.

I got a ride from a friend at 7 this morning to the Provo municipal airport. We pulled up to the Million Air building, got me unloaded, and off I went.

Through the normal doors, turn right, wait almost no time, check bags, step through the door, put everything through their one x-ray machine showing pass and ID after the metal detector, step into the waiting area/terminal. Board by walking across the tarmac and up a ramp.

Simple, condensed. Like this verbage.

They even let me board right after first class because I have no overhead bin item.

Cold seats though. That was a shock!

Cranky

You ever look down at your gas gauge and realize that you have drastically less fuel than you thought you did?

I feel like that today.

Just Go.

 "Why, I'm going to do as much as I can until I get kicked out of BYU," she huffed. I looked into her gaze, which she was casting condescendingly down her nose.

"Is that so? Why don't you just leave?" I demanded.

Touchpads

Computers are great.

Most of the time.

Linux is great too.

Most of the time.

I just want to thank bigbrovar for his blog post about getting HP Probook touchpads to actually work in Linux. The instructions worked nicely for me exactly as he wrote them. (OK, so I used a different temp directory...) (It also sheds a fair amount of light onto how to modify the source of an Ubuntu/Debian package and then proceed to use it as modified.)

I can now scroll with two fingers. Right clicking is not a phantasmagorical nightmare. Middle clicking actually can happen.

This is a happy thing. Verrra verra happy.

Graceful Exit

There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.
-- Ellen Goodman


For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
-- Albert Camus


Thank you fortune-mod (1:1.99.1-3.1ubuntu4-1mint1)!