Work and music and movies

Today’s QA briefing was mixed. My center, ZMP, is doing the best in the nation at avoiding class A/B errors. However, in the past nine months we doubled the previous year’s amount of class c and proximity errors. So, if you fly through ZMP airspace you’ll be perfectly safe, though one of [...]

And so they return!

My family got back from Florida yesterday, yay. They saw shuttle mission #128 successfully take off. And I now have a t-shirt saying as much, YAY. They came home with swag and sunburns and dirty laundry, and I am very pleased to have them back.
Cavorter took a video:
[...]

Inglourious Basterds [SPOILERS]

I saw the new Tarantino flick, Inglourious Basterds this afternoon. I have to say I didn’t like it.
Here’s the thing — I thought there was a lot to like about the film. I liked, for instance, that the Nazi villain — the Jew Hunter — was portrayed as intelligent. A worthy bad [...]

Shelob

Well, today is the first full day of me sans family. I got home at midnight last night and promptly had to feed the caterpillars more leaves. Which involved going out into the dark yard with a pair of scissors, cutting twigs off the apple tree, and transferring the caterpillars to the new [...]

Cecropia moths and other household matters

My family leaves for Florida tomorrow — an eight-day venture that will involve seeing the space shuttle launch, the ocean, and very likely some Disney-related activity. I’m staying home due to work and vacation. This means I am in charge of the household menagerie.
Let me explain.
Here are the rules of pet acquisition in [...]

G.I. Joe

I went and saw G.I. Joe this evening. I carefully set my disbelief suspenders to maximum, and I switched my brain to “off.” With that in mind, I only balked and rolled my eyes at two points:
1. Ice floats in seawater, it does not sink.
2. In order to “weaponize” the nanostuff, [...]

Obligatory adorable kid post

M went to get a haircut yesterday. I discovered, on arrival home from work, that the kids’ haircut place had been doing gel-dye jobs for free. So K has a red streak in her hair, and M . . . M has blue gelled spikes a la Astro Boy.
Well, not quite. [...]

Okay, I don’t like TweetDeck

I’ve been using TweetDeck for a couple if days, and I don’t like it. Here’s why it doesn’t work for me:
1) When it notifies me I have new tweets, it just says “notification.” Twhirl, on the other hand, displays the tweets at the bottom corner of my screen. I can glance [...]

The contract

A couple years ago, my union, NATCA, failed to reach an agreement with Bush’s administration about a contract. The air traffic controllers in the U.S. have been working under a set of imposed work rules since 2006. The administration called these imposed rules an “agreement.” It was not ever an agreement. [...]

Friday it is.

1. I have a cold. I called in sick to work, because I have a sore throat and general ick.
2. NASA moved up the day of the launch one damn day. It’s ten days from now. Changing hotel and plane reservations at this point is . . . challenging. [...]