Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Rocket Launching
June 20, 2004

Today we followed up on last week’s model rocket purchase. The kit we got was a zero-assembly-required kit. The only thing we had to do was construct the launch site, plug in the engine, and push the button.

We threw all of our equipment into the kid trailer for the bike and headed out to the fields behind Bishop Shanahan. I remember setting off a rocket or two in that field before it became occupied with a school building, and now that I think about it, the rocket that Derek fired his egg with in 6th grade ended up in this field.

It is done
June 19, 2004

I have at long labor finished the ceaseless epic of the irrepressable Comtesse Phedre no Delaunay de Montreve. All 901 pages. Characteristics of fantasy novels that I have gleaned toiling over this bountiful manuscript:

Anyway, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the book. As with most novels, I felt this one could have told its tale in many fewer pages, perhaps not as vividly in some places. There was a point about halfway through the book when I became thoroughly invested in the story, but I’m sad to say that it didn’t come until I was halfway through. Had I not perservered, I would not have discovered the rest of the book became much more interesting.

Babylon Pro 5.0 - Why Upgrade?
June 18, 2004

I started up Babylon this morning to get the definition of a word, and it displayed this huge advertisement for the newest version, 5.0. But my question is, Why Upgrade?

Babylon is a very cool tool. I use it all the time. With Babylon running in the tray, you hold down the control key and right-click on any word on the screen. Any word, even in window title bars or graphics. Babylon uses some kind of OCR algorithm to read the word, then fetches the definition from its dictionary.

Indoor Astronomy Wiki
June 18, 2004

I know that I recently mentioned creating a Wiki for my book stuff. You can find it at Indoor Astronomy. If you want to make edits, the edit password is “wikipass”, and you should use your name as the username. The Wiki doesn’t care who you are as long as you have the password.

I don’t have much online as of yet, since I’ve only been adding a few paragraphs each day, but you can see what direction I’m going in. Some of the stuff on there is inaccurate or unfinished, since it’s still a work in progress. I need to come up with a way that people can leave inline comments on the text. It shouldn’t be too hard, but I need to make a decision. For now, just use the Book Suggestions page.

Test Email message
June 17, 2004

I’m posting this message to the site using this new email script that I got from John Blade. It’s supposed to support attachments so that I can post pictures and files along with my email. I don’t know if I will ever use this feature, but it might be useful to have.

More importantly, it prevents random users from posting via the secret email address by checking the sending address against the list of valid users in the database. Neat.