As the right sidebar badge indicates- my theraputic hobby of Xboxing is about to eclipse the hundred grand mark. I wonder which game will push me over the top… I hope it isn’t Lego Indiana Jones- how embarassing. 

I will be sure to update with which achievement was responsible for this historic milestone.  Surely 150k is within reach with retirement on the looming horizon.

I know Congress thinks they are helping, but for the sake of everyone that will be left here (I could personally care less, I am abandoning this industry for good)- STOP trying to “save” the Constellation program by funding it through the end of the fiscal year. Simply postponing the inevitable and forcing the workforce to do lame duck work for another four months is not going to improve morale any.

http://blog.al.com/space-news/2010/06/lawmakers_will_try_to_force_na.html

I kidnapped this video from my good friend dukkillrs site (I’m sure he won’t mind). It was just too good to not pass on and increase exposure.

My friends know that I have a limited side-hobby of writing letters to various media publications notifying them of their ineptitude.  Usually in a light hearted and humorous, yet sincere and accurate fashion.

Part of this hobby has led me to visit the NBA Live message boards on EASports.com on an annual basis to petition them for my new ideas for next years game.  While they have apparently renamed the franchise from Live to Elite (not one of my suggestions) I have been continuously thwarted.  I therefore call in reinforcements from the Blogo/Webosphere in rallying support.

In order to make the game more representative of the NBA, there should be two button actions added to the game.

1. One in order to flop onto the ground whenever you come into contact with another a player (usually while on defense).  This may or may not grant you a call (whereupon home crowds could chant B.S.!  Genius!)
2. The other is obviously lacking, and this is the b!tch to referees button.  In fact, a whole new statistical category that would rate a players effectiveness in this category (BIT being the suggested three letter acronym) could be added to the game!  (Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan would have 99 BIT).  Pressing this button too often would get you a technical foul, less BIT, the higher the chances of a technical.  (Rasheed Wallace would have 3 BIT).

Why won’t they take me seriously!?  Without such features, staking claim as the most realistic basketball game is an empty accolade.

As you might expect, there is a diverse background of college educations at the space center.  My friends and I have been enjoying a spirited debate on what has become of the Big 12 in the last couple of weeks.  Frankly, as a Big 12 North grad, I couldn’t be more displeased with the outcome.  I know that it was touted that we Big 12 North schools were basically S.O.L. if the Big 12 folded because we weren’t exactly hot on the radar screen of any of the other big conferences, but the alternative we have now been left with is even worse.

The departure of CU and NU now has the center of gravity of the Big 12 conference lying somewhere on the I-35 corridor between Dallas and Waco in Mack Brown’s pants.  Great.  Make no mistake about it, the hail mary pass that Beebe threw in order to keep the conference together was thrown exclusively in UT’s direction.

Couple this with the fact that the departure of NU and CU from the conference was no mystery that it was heavily due to the southern bias that the conference has taken on since it expanded by bringing in the Texas schools from the Southwestern Conference.  Has this gotten better in the past couple of weeks?  Absolutely not.  In fact- it is even worse.  Money talks and it was the only thing UT was listening to.  In order to give them more of it, the unbalanced revenue sharing of the Big 12 can only get worse.  KU, KSU, MU, ISU, and Baylor basically just paid UT (and to a lesser extent OU) in order to keep the conference together.

To make things worse, it seems eyebrow raising that Beebe could claim that the new watered down Big 12 can garner a TV deal superior to that of the Big Ten whenever seven of our schools aren’t even worth a damn at football anyway.  Touting the CU and NU money as on-going revenue was genius!  I think I’ll go apply for a home loan with my upcoming severance check too!!!  Whenever the new Fox TV deal comes in much lower than Beebe was selling and the departure penalties run dry, we will be right back here again in two years playing the “who is courting who” drama of college athletics all over again.

I’m most disappointed with A&M in this whole exchange.  Having moderate first-hand experience with their hatred of UT weirdness, they finally had a chance to take the lead on something and not play second fiddle to the Longhorns.  With UT thumbing their nose at the Pac-10, A&M could have left for the SEC anyway, causing the Big 12 to implode in obvious defiance of UT’s wishes.  In fact, it would have been the ultimate triumph over their rival.  They would have left on their own accord while screwing UT in the process, and he who laughs last, well… you get the idea.

Instead A&M made it readily apparent that they enjoy living in their parent’s basement whilst simultaneously chastising their folks for infringing upon “their game”.  Sounds like fun; enjoy.

In the meantime, we get two years of conference championshipless, lame duck college football games in what is obviously a toxic environment and a marriage of convenience between the institutions remaining.  So… I would like to go on record coining the new name for these Big 12 leftovers; something that defines us for what we are, and a little alliteration couldn’t hurt either-

With that- I give you: The Texas Ten!

I saw this ad posted for a PS3 bundle as a “Gift for Dad”…

http://www.amazon.com/PS3-250-Fathers-Bundle-Playstation-3/dp/B003L56Z00/%20ref=pd_ms_vg_36?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&tag=gamingbits-20\

Man-Rated rockets are the minimum-wage of rocketry.

Allow me to explain. Human spacecraft development programs (commercial or otherwise) are constantly beleaguered by the decree that the booster which must loft them into orbit be “man-rated” before any humans are allowed on-board. This accepted fallacy has led to an endless cycle of white paper studies and analyses of systems that must be made triply redundant, cross-coupled, and even heterogenic. Unshockingly, the costs associated with these changes are then deemed too exorbitant to justify investment and the booster’s prospects for carrying passengers becomes a non-starter and white paper studies are destined to begin again at some unknown future date.

However, whom decided this substance as to what man-rating consists of? Is not man-rating a booster simply to define a level of safety sufficient such that someone is willing to ride on it? Isn’t this level of safety driven by the market and not by a public aerospace servant? Why not find out what the willing passengers are willing to bear in terms of risk? And if we can’t find any willing passengers, then maybe those that strap themselves on top of launch vehicles at present need to question whether or not they truly possess the boldness that is required in being a pioneer.

Hence the minimum wage comparison. Minimum wage should be the minimum amount that people are willing to charge for their labor. But it isn’t. It’s the amount that the government decided is the minimum satisfactory amount. And man-rating should be the minimum amount of safety that customers are willing to accept to ride a rocket. But it isn’t. It’s a level of over-engineering decided by the government which is the minimum satisfactory level.

The Atlas V has had 20 out of 21 launch successes, and even the failed launch reached a safe (albeit lower) orbit. It is not “man-rated”. But it is “James-rated”; even without further modification- I would hop on it at the earliest opportunity.

Am I the only one completely and utterly exasperated with climate change talk of any kind whatsoever? I remember all the way back to 5th grade having the importance of Earth Day crammed down my throat and being told that because I’m alive and breathing, I was obligated to plant a tree (which I did) to make up for my CO2 production. Apparently your carbon footprint is the environmental version of original sin…

I don’t doubt that most don’t realize the climate change movement for the altruistic, anti-anthropomorphic endeavor that it is, but how many kids got sapped into the movement before they even had the reasoning or capability to know what hit them and then never returned. Of course, if James Cameron can make over $1B on a human-deriding climate-centric storyline, then the number has to be terrifyingly large.

Spam on blogs is completely out of control.  I’m talking- everyday is a Red Day. 

Initially, I had a forum enabled on the website which lasted approximately twelve hours before I had to disable it due to registration/comment abuse of the red-light district in Amsterdam variety.  Apparently the spammers have been busy over the years writing sophisticated bot-software which combs the Internet for form fields and proceeds to rapid fire information into the fields in hopes of publishing marketing links to genitalia growth products.

I had been reserved to manual acceptance of comments so that I could filter through them individually, but I should have some time this weekend to look into plug-ins which support “Captcha”.  In lay-mans terms, Captcha generates those squirrely looking, sometimes hard-to-read characters on websites that you then have to re-enter in order to prove that you are a carbon-based life-form.  This is purely speculative on my part, but it does seem that the spammers have even made strides against Captcha in recent years as it seems that the characters are growing increasing difficult to read over time.  So much so, that often times I apparently provide the incorrect response to captcha forms upon which it rudely clears all form fields.

I also have been busy working with my new Windows Home Server which was a Happy Birthday to Me gift.  It has a ton of exciting features, but one in which I am planning to also delve into this weekend is the Microsoft IIS server.  Windows Home Server comes with a web-hosting capability which is meant for remote access to the server, but could easily be extended to support general web-hosting.  As WordPress (this blog software) runs on Microsoft ASP.net, I’m going to attempt to transplant my blog from the godaddy host site it is running on right now to the Windows Home Server if my office for the sake of saving $5 / month.  If all goes well, come Monday, you shouldn’t notice any difference.

Hopefully my DSL can handle intermittent web hits without introducing dynamic latency on my Xbox Live connection.  :-p

So I’m starting my day off like I usually do (heavy sarcasm), by researching House Resolutions.  Seriously though, a lot of folks around the space center have been touting (errr…. hanging on to the end of the rope) that Constellation cannot be cancelled by the President without Congressional approval.  I set off to find H.R. 3288 proper in order to set the record straight.  Regardless, in my hunt I came across a unique yet amusingly unsurprising warning message:

 Maybe we should downsize?  What do you think?