I remember moving from Shoreline to Everett during the week between Christmas and New Years.  

Not fun.

So, we have to move.  Reasons are... well unimportant.  All was meant well, but things just didn't work out.

item 1 -- a place.  not too expensive.  not too small.  must allow a cat.  Ideally in the 98155 zip code.   Jeri Lynn is soured on the shared household, although I think it's a viable option.  But the trick would be finding just the right situation.

item 2 -- a cull.  A not too expensive place may possibly be not to small, but it will also be not too large.  we have possessions that perhaps need to belong to others.  And possibly are worth some amount of money to others.

item 3 -- a move.  hopefully we can keep our feet in the old place long enought to move things over a period of a couple weeks, so we'll only need help with moving a 'few' large items.  

Wish us some luck and not too much adventure and pass along any tips any of you might have.

 Haven't posted for a bit.  It's a quiet eve at the Helpdesk.  

I'm thankful for:

Jeri Lynn, who makes my life better by just existing, who deals with my flaws and has none herself (grin)

My Job.  Woo hoo!  paid to help people with computers, at a hospital!  

My Friends.  Who else would I have watch all those Buffy DVDs for me?  Who else could I tell about Space Station flyover predictions?

My Family.  Both my own and my in-laws.  I'm lucky to have parents who chose _me_ and in-laws who I like a lot.

Science!!!  How boring would the universe be if we didn't have a way to find out know how things work?  Huddling in caves no doubt, listening to the latest Republican talking points I'd wager.

Dulcimers and Pondside.  A happy casual addicition and a lovely pusher.

Filk!!! How boring would the universe be if we didn't have a way of writing parodies of existing songs about cats and computers and spaceflight and stuff?  Huddling around in cave, humming whiney country music I'd wager.

Technology!  Oh keen bright double edged sword, child of science and root of all tech support.  

Mattie.  Mrawo.  Not the biggest cat, but where Jeri Lynn is my star, Mattie is my little grey moon circling on catspaws.

 Posting this latest listing for my friends and readers who would make a good fit for UW Medicine's IT Services group.

( cut because I care )</div></div>

I email this list out to some friends, but in the case someone on my friends list could use the help:


Employee Referral Program - http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/jobs/apl-uwmc/employee-referral

This is an update to my last post about looking for help with a home handywork project we have going on at the Big Green Monster.

Let me sum up:  The deck has to come down.

Originally the date of April 25th was selected for this, but there are a number of conflicts.

So we've rescheduled for May 2nd.

Michael Citrak has generously donated a prybar +4 for the effort, and at least a couple other folks have volunteered some time (Thank you Peter!)

Hopefully the date change will be a bit more convenient for other folks to come.

Jeffrey

So Jeri Lynn and I are living at the Big Green Monster, renting out the basement space and trading puns and music with the upstairs folks, Callie, Jen, Naomi and Manny.

The house is pretty darn large--3 floors, about 4000 square feet.
( and a deck... )

Thankful for

Jeri Lynn my love.

iPhone.

a new tack at an old problem and the ability to make it happen.

Mattie cat! Snuggly, furry and full of purrs.

Orange juice.

Slinkies.

My Dollar Guitar. One day I will play your chords seemlessly

I'm not sure how something I've done is going to turn out here.

Jeri Lynn says I should post everything I'm thankful for.

1. Jeri Lynn. Beautiful, intelligent, crafty, artful Jeri Lynn. Whose eyes are the color of glochophane. Who brings a special touch to everything she makes.
2. My friends in fandom. I love you guys and you know that I would do anything for any of you.
3. My friends in Taipan. Likewise
4. My friends in Filk. Likewise
5. My family. I don't see my folks nearly enough. I'm happy you will be closer here in about a year.
6. My housemates.
7. My loony coworkers. Always worth a laugh over the examples of technical duh that we encounter.
8. My cat. Mattie, friend of 14ish years. getting a bit more grumbly. I'm glad I got to take you into my house when the folks moved over to Eastern WA.
9. Good tools
10. Music

Jeffrey

As the sleep deprivation begins to wear off, all I can say is wow.

Two and a half years ago when runnerwolf asked me to run reg, I was skeptical if we would break forty members. I'm happy to get proven very wrong like this.

Here's what I saw. I came to the con with 120 badges printed. When we left we had fewer than a dozen badges not picked up. We had about 60 wild wonderful people buy memberships at the con for the the weekend or just the day, so we blew past our membership level last year by a bunch.

Everyone needs to thank Norwescon IT for their kind loan of their badge printer. The printer performed flawlessly. (actually it was also just received back from repair a few months ago, so we gave it a good burn-in test)

The location of registration was great! We had a nice alcove with plenty of room, we were within earshot of the main filk room, one left turn from the dealer's den, and had a spot for friends to congregate.

I was ably supported by my lovely wife geojlc and on occasion had the pleasure of listening to bluesmancd noodle way on his guitar.

I want to thank dornbeast for his impression of fannish duct-tape--always where you needed him, and full of enthusiasm, IQ points, and puns.

What can you say about our guests?

cahdla -- spooky, cheerfully apocalyptic, will make you laugh up your spleen if you are not careful, somehow doing the amount of art that would kill five lesser persons. Definitely needs to go to Australia, this is destiny talking here. Buy her books when they come out. http://www.seananmcguire.com

Lawrence Dean -- a wonderful British gentleman. geojlc is tickled about his Discworld songs.

Frank Hayes---what can you say? A gracious man to whom the art of cognitive simplification is oft attributed (you really didn't need those words there you know, even if they were to your own song), but who writes a mean computer technology column (http://blogs.computerworld.com/hayes), and has ample wit.

The concom. I didn't get to see some of you guys much, but thank you!

Things that are still making me giggle. Ravens in the microwave. Agorophobic ravens. Take my heart, take my hand, take the part that can stand.

Cool things. Talking with Kanef about human factors research at NASA.

Next year:

Better badge design. I got a nice critique and now I know how to make the badge much more useful (name, center on badge, larger font).

Have other people handle the brunch CD duplication and labeling.

Have stuff to decorate badges with. Ribbons, things like that. Maybe a contest focused about that

Have a song/lyrics and the ability to actually play it on the dulcimer decently. And play the guitar.

I have 120 (minus one for a transfer) Conflikt membership badges sitting on my non-coffee table right now.

And doesn't it just figure that the Vice-Chair's badge is 42....

So, you've been thinking you've had the entire year to get your Norwescon membership via pre-reg for the reduced price of $50.

Well you are right, but the year is nearly up!

At midnight the Preregistration rate goes up to $55 (until March 31st), so you have less than Six Hours at this point to go to http://www.norwescon.org/memberships.htm and use the PayPal option to get your memberships in.

If you couldn't find a great gift for that special person in your life, nothing says love (or "For Ghu's Sake, please take your Star Trek/Star Wars/Gaming/Costuming/Xenophilia fetish to somewhere it will be appreciated") like a Norwescon membership.

Norwescon memberships are calorie free*, easy to transport through international borders and depending on what season of the Star Trek shows you like, virtually content free!**

Have a great rest of the year!

Jeffrey Cornish


* the calorie free nature of a Norwescon Membership does exclude any of the food at the Con, or any of the surrounding food establishments. The membership is calorie free... mmm... membership.

** please insert your least favorite season/show of the Star Trek franchise

1. Wow, the US has an intelligent leader(-elect) who by all accounts is a technologically apt, has a refreshing humility and is actually funny. Thank you to everyone who voted!

2. Work is pretty good. We have two spots in our support department. If anyone would like a copy of the UW Medical Center IT department's open position list would like it, send me a private message.

3. The new place is... comfortable. I'm happy that Jeri Lynn is happy with it.

4. I need to practice guitar and mountain dulcimer more.

Finally. If anyone has or know's someone who has a HP Pavilon DV8000 series laptop (the monsterous large one), I need a copy of the recovery CD or the recovery partition to fix a friend's computer.

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Mother's Cookies has shut it's doors:

http://consumerist.com/5061209/mothers-cookies-goes-out-of-business-kills-off-circus-animals

Sniff.

Okay, now this whole economy thing is getting personal.

Take my 401k, take my wage earning capability, take the whole stability of the economic structure of the US.

But leave my snackfoods alone.

Well, it's a funny thing.

Or not so funny.

I received an invite from a friend, and went "Okay a social networking site, might be useful"

They have a very deceptive feature 'Scan your contacts list for people to invite to our service'

It's not opt in, it just sends to every contact on your list.

You can ignore the email. I apologize. The buttons were very shiny

Jeffrey

Elon Musk:

http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=24

Sky,

I thought of you looking at this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/plushie-kali-goddess.html

Here's the video from the third flight of the SpaceX Falcon 1 which failed to get to orbit last week.

Some points about what you are going to see.

During the count down they had an abort, triggered by the flight computer, at T-0, due to low fuel pressure in the engine. This is good. This is very good. The vehicle checks if its ready to fly and only then do the pad hold-downs release.

The problem was that the RP-1 (Kerosene) fuel was chilled. The fuel tank share a common bulk head with the LOX tank. This exact problem happened on the prior flights, and the procedure was to tank 1/2 of the fuel off the vehicle and pump in warm fuel.

The count was restarted shortly thereafter and the launch was gorgeously perfect. The video from the onboard camera has such good resolution. You can make out quite a bit of detail on the ground even at 200 km altitude.

More after the video:



What happened? SpaceX is using a new version of their Merlin 1 engine, the Merlin1C. the previous Merlin1A engine bell was ablatively cooled, that is as it got hot from the rocket exhaust, it would basically slowly melt from the inside out, with the melted hot bits taking away the heat from the rest of the structure.

The Merlin1C is a regenetively cooled engine, which means that fuel is flowed through a spiral wound tube on the engine bell this fuel is then fed back into the combustion chamber where it burns along with the fuel pumped directly from the tank.

On the Merlin1A, when the fuel stopped, the engine stopped.

On the Merlin 1C, when the fuel pump stops, the remaining hot, expanding fuel in the bell is still flowing out for a few seconds.

So the 2.5 second pause between the Main Engine Cut Off (MECO) and staging, where the second stage is seperated via springs, the first stage was still producing a small amount of delta-V from the flowing propellant.

Bump.

You can see the second stage flare to life for just a moment after that happens, but before the video feed was lost.

When the second stage engine started, it was not a happy thing.

The next bit of video is the payload fairing being jettisoned, but the second stage is in a tumble.

Elon Musk has already said that the solution is simple, wait a few more seconds before staging after MECO. That's it.

Other things to note. Even though the second stage was tumbling, the payload fairing still jettisoned properly.

SpaceX is ramping up their flight schedules.

Space is hard, but they are going to make it.

ugh. 3-4 hours sleep, and then picking up Jeri Lynn from SeaTac, then going to work.

I've got several sets of endocrine compounds putting me in a haze of 'is work done yet'-'oooh Jeri Lynn'-'sleepy,no awake alert!'-'ooo look, potato chips!'

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