The Windkey and the Lamplighter

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

There’s been too much complaining on this blog recently, at least from me. But I have good news! Finally, I can indulge my desire to watch Martian weather.

The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera isn’t a scientific instrument—no pointing control, no focus adjustment, only “basic exposure controls”—but it was included on Mars Express to monitor the ejection of the Beagle 2 lander in December 2003. The camera performed well—the lander didn’t. In 2007, ESA turned the camera back on to capture low-resolution images of Mars, including some neat crescent shots and global images that the scientific instruments and other satellites aren’t positioned to capture. They did tests and focusing all throughout 2007, and the “Mars Webcam”, as it’s been nicknamed, went live today.

This is way cool. Also, it’s a live satellite that can be used to train ops engineers:
“VMC activites are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team, and not a team of scientists. This gives operations engineers, particularly junior members, a chance to learn and practice command generation, planning, and other skills normally done at the Science Operations Centre.”

This is going right up with the VolcanoCam(1) on my list of things to go in my virtual windowframe(2).

(1) OMG, the VolcanoCam is now in HD! I love the USDA Forest Service.
(2)And thanks to Ryan Hoagland for putting up a website that I could link to when I wanted to explain what I meant by virtual window. Wherever and whomever you are, Ryan, you rock.

John McCain recently spoke ill of D&D and its players:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

It’s not clear to me why “Dungeons & Dragons” is in there. The text works just fine without it. If anything, it’s stronger for lumping all the pro-Obama crowd together. This way, most of the pro-Obama crowd can congratulate itself on not playing D&D.

Anyway, the writer responsible later forced a Save vs. Apology with a +2 bonus for humor:

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.

I love the Olympics. I was a little busy trying to graduate in 2004 to watch much of the Sydney games, but I was really looking forward to watching the Games in Beijing—especially gymnastics, swimming, diving, and sprinting. Conveniently, thanks to Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, and Liu Xiang, (among others) all those events are televised heavily. I even now own a television, so I can watch them. Great! I’m happy to schedule an hour or three out of my evening to watch video coverage, or to get up at 6 AM to watch an event that’s happening in the evening in Beijing.

When I realized that It Is The Future, and NBC would be streaming video on the internet, I was even more excited—more coverage of athletes and events that don’t normally make the TV broadcast. How can it go wrong?

Then I actually tried nbcolympics.com, and all my futurist optimism was dashed. The first blow was that the video isn’t in Flash or QuickTime or even RealPlayer formats–it’s in Microsoft Silverlight, which requires me to download a new player. Even if, technically, it might work on my Mac, I’m completely unthrilled. I downloaded it to my work computer, though, since it’s already hopelessly tainted by M$Technology, and I really wanted to watch gymnastics during my lunchbreak.

It’s even worse than I feared. I have yet to get through a more than 5 minutes of video without the player jumping back to the beginning of the video. This is irritating on a 2 minute video, and COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE in a two hour video. I think I reset the video of the women’s team beam events over a dozen times. It’s not because of my slow connection, either—the first time I got a message about a slow connection was today. Something is triggering their video to restart, often at places where a commercial break was in the TV coverage or where they edited the video to remove some of the downtime between competitors. Whatever it is, it’s definitely annoying.

And that’s not all. Even if Silverlight worked *perfectly*, I’d be really mad at NBC for their scheduling.
An example: Saturday night I checked the competition schedules for Women’s Vault, because I really wanted to see Oksana Chusovitina of Germany vault. (She won a silver medal at 33, in her fifth Olympics!!! Take that, 14-year-old Chinese girls!) It was scheduled for Sunday evening in Beijing, which means Sunday morning in Boston. Great! I can watch vaulting and still have time to get to church. So I got up, and turned on my local NBC affiliate—and got local news covering a guy getting hit by a T-train while crossing the track on his cell phone. No vaulting, no Olympics, just depressing TV news.

So I turned to the web. Surely, even if the event isn’t on my local station because my neighbors need to know about John Edwards’ latest apology, it will be online? Nope. It’s not online until it’s aired on your local station. pejoratives about greedy NBC executives excised in the interest of remaining vaguely professional. Disappointed, I tuned in Sunday evening around 8, figuring they’d surely air the meet 12 hours delayed, right in the middle of “Prime Time”. Nope. Hours of commercials, beach volleyball, and interviews with Michael Phelps later, they showed the vault competition at nearly 11 PM. AARGH! They could have at least given a detailed schedule for what events would be shown at what times, but that would have denied McDonalds, Chevy, and Visa valuable time advertising to a vegetarian who drives only small cars and doesn’t ever carry a balance on her credit cards. Somehow, I fail to see the wisdom in this.

After all that, I can hardly find room to complain that the TV coverage of the women’s all-around ignored most of the non-US, non-China competitors, or about the new Code of Points that denied Nadia Liukin a shared gold medal with He Kexin and tainted Kexin’s victory even more than the controversy over her age.

I *love* watching the pixielike gymnasts, the athletic swimmers and sprinters, and all the other athletes. I just wish it didn’t have to be so frustrating to get the video.

This story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning nearly made me start crying in the car.

Lopez Lomong, a former Sudanese “lost boy”, was kidnapped at age 6 by a militant group “recruiting” child-soldiers. He escaped with three older boys and spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya before making it to the US and into a foster home. While in Kenya, he watched the Sydney Olympics and decided he wanted to run fast. In the US, he ran in high school in NY and then in Arizone, and is now a sophomore at the University of Arizona. He became a US Citizen last summer, and made the US Olympic team this summer. He is a member of “Team Darfur”, an activist athelete’s group, and has his own website. He was reunited with his birth-family in 2007, who had believed him dead, and with them joyfully dug up the grave they’d closed 17 years before. (This is the part where I nearly cried. I can’t imagine how his mother must have felt.)

Lomong was selected by his teammates to carry the American flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. NPR reports that “On Friday, he struggled to describe what the moment means: ‘I don’t even have a word for it. I’m just so happy — very happy.’”

Lopez Lomong carries the American flag in the opening ceremonies of the Bejing Olympics

A colleague of mine won a lunch for up to 15 colleagues from a local restaurant. 6 of us went, and discovered that the free lunch was sponsored by Ameriprise Financial. Juan, our host, told us that we could order anything we like, though alcohol would not be covered “due to liability reasons” and would need to be on a separate tab. No problem. Of the six of us, three ordered sodas, one got a glass of wine, and the other two got water. Since he’d said we could order anything on the menu (after jokingly checking that there wasn’t any filet mignon on the Lebanese restaurant’s lunch menu), we split a $30 appetizer plate and then each ordered an entree. Of our six entrees, prices ranged approximately between $6 and $16.

Once we’d ordered our entrees, but before any food came, Juan gave us his spiel and passed out papers asking for contact information, “financial goals” (checkboxes, like buy a house or save for education), and asking us to choose times for a free 45-minute consultation. Several of my colleagues signed up for appointments—I didn’t, since I am not currently in need of any financial planning—and seemed pretty pleased with the idea of learning more.

Our appetizer arrived as our host left, apparently paying the bill on his way out. The service was a bit slow, so our entrees didn’t arrive until an hour after we’d been seated, but we were still more-or-less pleased with our lunch. After all, it was free (save our time).

Or so we thought.

When our meal was finished, the waitress brought us a bill. We expected it to be about $12—the guy who’d had wine had ordered a second glass when our entrees came. It was actually $60. $12 of wine, $6 of sodas, $30 of appetizer, and $12 for a kabob wrap. We didn’t order any kabob wraps. The waitress explained that the kabob wrap was Juan’s lunch.

We were completely floored. Not only had he mislead us about who was paying for the sodas and the appetizer, his lunch was more expensive than several of ours! Not a very stellar recommendation for Ameriprise. In fact, let’s see how Juan stacks up against Ameriprise’s customer promises, from Ameriprise.com. (The emphasis is mine.)

Our promise to you begins with our commitment to act in your best interests. You can expect:

• Sound financial advice
• Fair, ethical and respectful treatment
• Full and clear information
• Quality service
• Prompt, fair resolution of issues or concerns

I think Juan fails on at least the two bold items, and possibly on the others as well. The six of us agreed that none of us would be attending any appointments with Juan. As one of my colleagues said in email to cancel his appointment, “Not being completely forthright and handling our money just don’t mix.”

Note: I think wearing a skirt on a space station is probably a bad idea, unless we really improve our artificial gravity, but I couldn’t pass up the background.

The AP reports that Senator Obama has suggested a $300,000,000,000.00 income redistribution.

“We can either choose a new direction for our economy, or we can keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Obama said.