Catch All

On Photography:

I wish I were taking more photos.  From October 2004 to January 2007, I faithfully posted a new photo almost every day on my photoblog.  I continued a bit less frequently through about January 2008.  But then I stopped.  The last photo was posted in May 2008, almost two full years ago.  I didn’t stop for any particular reason other than I suppose I was busy, and less motivated.  These days, I’m starting to miss it.  I still take plenty of casual photos with my iPhone and, to a lesser extent, my point-and-shoot…but these days I only use my SLR for vacation photos.  I to pull it out more often and remind myself how to use it.  I just can’t match the feeling of a good photo with the iPhone, no matter how many app filters I apply.

On Triathlons:

Last weekend’s successful tri has me more excited about the upcoming season, and my recent adventures in learning about heart rate zones have reinvigorated my attitude towards running.  I got the good news a couple days ago that I will be able to transfer my registration from the Lonestar 70.3 to the Olympic at the race expo next week.  That’s got me even more excited.  I’m not trained up enough for a half ironman, but I know I can have a good olympic distance race — because I did just that three days ago.  So I’ll be doing the olympic distance in Galveston on April 24, and I also signed up for the Silverlake Sprint Tri in Pearland on May 16.  The rest of the season is still to be determined, but I’m thinking it’ll probably be something like:  COMBAT in Texas City on Memorial Day weekend, Y Freedom Tri in Pearland at the end of June, and TriGirl up at Lake Houston and/or Clear Lake International Tri in August.  There are some good events in September and October, but not in the Clear Lake area, so we’ll see.  As a general rule, I no longer drive all over the greater Houston area for triathlons, but there are always exceptions.

On Household Projects:

The bonus room remains in a woeful state of half-finished-ness.  About once a week, I think “oh yeah, we should finish that” and then I go back to forgetting that our house even HAS a second floor.  I did get a small start on cleaning out the garage last weekend when I was out there getting my bike ready for the triathlon, so it looks ever-so-slightly better.  But I still don’t see how we will ever be able to park BOTH cars in there, since we need space to store the lawn mower and various tools, paint, hardware, etc.  Despite the abundance of huge trucks in Texas, the garages are tiny.

On NASA’s Future:

You know, despite many frustrations with the new direction proposed for NASA in the FY2011 budget (which I wrote about here), I’ve tried pretty hard to stay optimistic about NASA’s future.  But it’s getting more and more difficult to find the silver lining.  Today, the news is reporting that the Orion capsule, which would be canceled with Constellation according to the February proposal, will make a return as a “crew escape vehicle.”  President Obama is supposedly going to announce this during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center tomorrow, and since the news is coming from the Office and Science and Technology Policy, it’s safe to say that this is not just rumor.  The Orion capsule would now be retooled to launch on a commercial rocket, fly unmanned to the space station, and sit there as a “lifeboat” in the event that the crew needs to leave the ISS in an emergency.

The problem?  We don’t NEED a crew escape vehicle.  The Soyuz is just fine, and since all crews will be arriving on a Soyuz, it logically follows that there will be space for all crew to depart on a Soyuz — emergency or not.  So redesigning a half-designed spacecraft to perform a function that we don’t need…is it me, or does this make NO SENSE AT ALL?  It has zero technical merit.  Instead, it’s full of political pandering — a move designed to theoretically save some jobs that were at risk and appeal to people in a swing state (hello, Florida).  It’s backpedaling.  It’s “oh crap, people reacted more harshly to that first plan than we thought, let’s come up with a rash and technically questionable solution.”

It’s  hard to believe that I dislike the “newer” plan that will be unveiled tomorrow even MORE than I disliked the “new” plan that was unveiled in February.