quiet despair » News from the front

No one speaks and no one tries

Maker — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:18:00 +0000

Strangers passing in the street By chance two separate glances meet And I am you and what I see is me And do I take you by the hand And lead you through the land And help me understand the best I can
Pink Floyd (formed 1965 in Cambridge, United Kingdom) is a British band noted for psychedelic rock and progressive rock music, philosophical lyrics, avant-garde compositions, sonic experimentation, innovative cover art and elaborate live shows. One of rock music’s most successful and influential acts, the group have sold an estimated 73.5 million albums in the U.S., and over 300 million albums worldwide.

We’ve just lost one of the founding members of the most influential bands of all time. Today Richard Wright passed away at age 65 of cancer.

december 2007

Maker — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:47:49 +0000

It’s been all quiet on this site of late as pointed out by ojuice. I’ve been working a lot more and when I’m not working I try to keep a routine. I tinkered with the armory xml: http://quietdespair.com/alts/. View the source to see what else I’m parsing. So that was kind of fun for a short while. I got a ginormous raise at work, which was exactly what I needed.

Disruption

Maker — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:10:00 +0000

I will be moving tomorrow to somewhere in central Orange County. I can’t say where, because its Tustin Ranch. I’m not sure yet if it’s a real city. Anyway, my point is that some services will be disrupted while enterprise is being moved. DNS should be fine, but obviously anything thats hosted or running on enterprise will be unreachable. I should be setting up enterprise’s replacement in the next couple of weeks, with an actual data center for it to live at.

Goodbye ideas

Maker — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:34:18 +0000

From NewScientist:

NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into futuristic – and often far-out – ideas in spaceflight and aeronautics, officials say. The controversial move highlights the budgetary pressures the agency is facing as it struggles to retire the space shuttles by 2010 and develop their replacement.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was established to “give an opportunity for people outside of NASA to develop really revolutionary and creative concepts for future aeronautics and space missions”, says Robert Cassanova, who has served as the institute’s director since its inception in February 1998.

The institute, which operates from an office in Atlanta, Georgia, US, receives about $4 million per year from NASA. Most of that is used to fund research into innovative technologies; recent grants include the conceptual development of spacecraft that could surf the solar system on magnetic fields, motion-sensitive spacesuits that could generate power and tiny, spherical robots that could explore Mars.

Now, the future development of those and other projects has been thrown into doubt, since NIAC was unofficially told by NASA last week that it was to be shut down, perhaps in August.

I suggest we see what NASA can do with a total operating budget of $2,000 USD, while at the same time asking more of them.