Happy Halloween!

-- Posted From My iPhone

Ares 1-X is launched!

I thinks it's awesome! After weather postponed the launch yesterday, it took off today. Looked great! Too bad it's only taken us 40 years to get back to where we were in 1969... oh, wait, it's worse than that.

Ares will carry 'Orion' which is the little Apollo-esque capsule that "will be the Earth entry vehicle for lunar and Mars returns... Orion is scheduled to fly its first missions to the space station by 2015 and carry out its first sortie to the moon by 2020."

So, it's actually going to take us another 11 years to get to where we were 40 years ago. Thank you, my government, for pissing away 40 years of work with underfunding, bad management and political paybacks. If you just let scientists and engineers do what they want, the way they want, we'd have a program that works and works a lot more cheaply.

If you take the same approach to running NASA for the last 40 years, give it a budget of nearly half the federal discretionary spending, you'd get the US military.

The difference would be that all the spending would have resulted in a gazillion amazing scientific discoveries that would have provided cheap, clean power for all (ZERO dependance on fossil fuels -- no more angry arabs), cheap sources of food/nutrition (no more starving peoples), and cheap, on-demand medical resources ('public option' not needed).

Can you say 'United Federation of Planets'? Can you say 'Star Trek' is real? That's where we'd be if the roles were reversed and the NASA budget were 30 TIMES the size of the DoD budget (and that's just DoD ops -- it doesn't include VA, HomeSec, etc.)

It would truly have been cheaper in terms of dollars and lives to develop new tech to solve the world's problems and GIVE IT AWAY than it would to try to get the world to do things the way we want at GUNPOINT.

Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

Hard Rock Cafe, Singapore

Right behind my hotel the whole time. And here I was doing room service when I thought it was too much trouble to go out late. Duh.

Too dark for the picture but there was a little girl about 4 or 5 that Aeryn would have tried to become soulmates with as she was dancing a wild jig to the beat of the house music ('80's and disco). I need to start packing Marilyn and Aeryn into my suitcase...

Update: I did snap a pic, and used a little drawing app to point out the little girl. Her parents were out of frame on the right and they let this group of strangers dance her like a marionette. That's how safe and 'family oriented' Singapore is.





Being a 'bad boy' here is not washing your hands after you pee. Being a rebel Is crossing against the light (and living to tell the tale): 'dats right...I cross on red at Orchard and Bencoolen -- 'cause I'm bad like dat! Right in front of buses -- I'm crazy B!'

Update #2: ok, now I know why I don't come here: $46.53 (US) for the salmon dinner and two beers that would have cost me $32 at TGIFriday's. But then TGIF's doesn't have a live band and dancing Singaporeans as entertainment.

-- Posted From My iPhone

Coffee that will make you poop

So i figured out how to make coffee that will caused you to dump right in your pants after the first sip -- it will be that strong.

First, start with a good strong bean or mix:

and that's a good start... but water is important too... so if we were to use water with a little bit of a kick...

now we're talking!

So, after you've made your coffee, now with twice the caffeine of normal coffee, well -- why stop there?

How about a little cream?

Ok! Now I've got a cup'o'Joe with 3x caffeine!

Yeah baby!

Ooops! Gotta go poop!

Toilet etiquette is serious in Singapore

OK SINGAPORE!
Those signs are in every restroom. And don't forget about the kid that was going to get caned for graffiti (what a tool).

-- Posted From My iPhone