I've started running again, for those people who don't follow me on twitter or aren't facebook friends. There's an iPhone app that does GPS tracking, time/speed/distance, etc etc. So I've been using that. Plus, I can listen to music if I want.

Anyway, today I finally got back up to running 3 miles. I did it in just under 29 minutes. This is not really all that good, but considering for the past two weeks-ish (i.e. since I started) I'd been well under that, it is a pretty significant milestone for me.

Next step is to get the time down, obviously. There's always room for improvement. And why am I all of a sudden doing this? Well...I'm gonna play this one close to the chest for a while, and see. It'll be divulged eventually, one way or the other.

Heeey, guys? People who read this? Wanna do me a favor?

I know you have a computer, because you're reading this. You might even have two. So you probably have files, too, don't you. Ever wished you could access files on one computer from any other?

Enter DropBox. It's a free (no, really, free) file storage service. It's one of those new 'cloud computing' kind of things.

See, you install the DropBox client (runs on Win, Max, and Linux [for you neckbeards]), and you get a drive icon on your computer. Files you drag into this folder are automatically uploaded to your DropBox...er...box. Then you can access 'em from any other computer that you've installed DropBox on. Or, if you're on a managed computer and can't install the software, you can use the web interface. And you can create shared folders, or link individual files to friends, if you want.

You get 2GB of storage for free. Actually, by clicking the sneakily-implemented referrer link up there in my journal entry, you get an extra 250MB (and so do I). Still free. If you wanted to do something crazy like upload your whole MP3 collection, you can pay for increased storage limits (50GB: $10/mo or $100/year; 100GB: $20/mo or $200/year).

It also does nerdy stuff like version tracking (and it allows reversions), file syncing via deltas (so if you're editing huge files, it goes faster), and all your uploads are encrypted, so it's reasonably secure.

Yeah, this was all just to get you to sign up under my referrer link so I get more disk quota, but hey, it IS kinda neat, you gotta admit, right?

(I should note that neither of us get the bonus space until you install the DropBox software somewhere.)

Today, the President awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the 300 surviving Women's Airforce Service Pilots. During WWII, over a thousand woman pilots performed flying duties on the home front, freeing male pilots to be sent to the front lines. They flew everything from the simplest trainers, to the fastest fighters, to the heaviest bombers. Thirty-eight died.

When the war ended, their employment was terminated. They were not given veteran's status, nor any military benefits, nor recognition for their duties. All records regarding their service were classified and sealed for the next 35 years. It wasn't until 1977 that the records were unsealed.

Today they get theirs.

Part one of The Launch That Wasn't has been uploaded to FB and Flickr.

Olustee Civil War Battlefield. It was hot, there were bugs, and it smelled like sweet ashes. No individual notes/comments (yet) because I have a terrible, terrible headache.

I've posted photos from the US Space and Rocket Center here in Huntsville. But not here. iPhoto makes it dead-easy to upload them to both Facebook and Flickr, so they're up there. If you're not a Facebook buddy of mine, check the Flickr gallery here.

I haven't got comments posted to Flickr yet, but they are on the FB gallery. I'll see if I can't somehow automate that process as well...

The Launch That Wasn't will have its photos up at some point later on.

Space Shuttle Endeavour's launch got scrubbed at 12:30AM-ish this morning...right as I was rolling into St. Augustine, after 10 hours on the road. It's going to be at least a four day slide.

Soooo I'm gonna turn around and drive home tomorrow! But I'll get to stop at stuff along the way...there's an aviation museum and I need to get some peaches in Georgia. Maybe stop a a civil war battlefield or something.

I'd type more but it's been a long day.

So, there's this third-party server that harvests publicly-shown AIM/MSN/Yahoo screen names of people who use things like LJ, Facebook, etc, and randomly connects two people who've recently posted to that source through a third screen name (usually ending in 'salmon').

I just got hooked up to a person from the same Indonesian city that I delivered aid supplies to after an earthquake struck there in 2006. It is a small world.

I've had other stuff trickling through my brain but now that I've sat down and actually have the motivation to write about whatever the hell it was, I've forgotten about it. Go me.

In other news, though, I HAVE A PLAN. The space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center on Saturday at 7:17 AM Eastern time. I am going to work on Friday, and leaving directly from there...which will put me in Titusville, the nearest public area to view the launch, at about 4AM.

Then I'll crash at a Motel Six or something and drive back on Sunday. It's gonna be awesome.

6) Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

This book. THIS BOOK. This book is more of the concentrated WhatTheFuck that is Mr. Warren Ellis. This man is incredibly, ridiculously inventive, and he uses the entirety of his powers to think up crazy fucked up shit, which he then turns into graphic novels or, in this case, his first actual novel. The reality is that most of the stuff in the book actually does exist. So, with that said, Ellis brings the brunt of his talent to bear on making this already-existing bizarre shit just a little more bizarre...and infusing it with the strange brand of humor that is his own.

Mike McGill is an incredibly down-on-his luck private investigator in New York, who just so happens to be the ultimate magnet for everything that is fucked up and wrong. This is why the heroin-addicted White House Chief of Staff has sought him out. He needs to find the lost secret Constitution of the United States; a book that will allow him to, as he puts it, return our country to the glory days of the past when nobody was fucked up, there was a car in every garage, and a docile wife in every kitchen. And he's offering a shitload of money for its return, so Mike sets off on what's quite probably the most fucked up journey ever put to paper.

Five out of five stars.

I've made it through my first week here. Something I hate about myself (and really there aren't a lot of those things) is that I'm absolutely terrible at moving into a new environment. I get reclusive, afraid to act and talk to people, and generally live in fear for a week or three while I acclimatize.

Work is great, though. I like what I'm doing, which admittedly isn't a whole lot because I don't have a computer in my cubicle yet. But I've been spending my time reading up on the helicopter I'll be working on/with/for/whatever, as well as some of the more basic engineering principles behind helicopter flight, design, and performance. The project I'll eventually be working on sounds neat and within my abilities, and when it's done it'll have meaningful results, which is about the most I could ask for.

Plus about twice a day I just get that "overcome with how awesome what I'm doing is" feeling. You can't buy that, folks.

On other, non-work fronts, I did make the effort to actually get up and leave the house today, unlike Saturday. I went to the US Space and Rocket Center, which was pretty neat. They have a Saturn V inside on display, laid out like they do at the Kennedy Space Center, which is always impressive.

What's more impressive is the full-size replica standing up outside the entrance. Saying that it's 36 stories tall does not do it justice. Even the pictures I took don't do it justice. It's one of those "you really have to stand there next to it" things. It's amazing. It should say something that I can see it every day as I get on the highway to work. From five miles away. I'll get pictures posted eventually, probably.

I also went out and bought another round of books in my travels. That Barnes and Noble membership is definitely paying off. I've now got a stack of books about 18 inches high sitting, waiting to be read. That should keep me entertained for, oh, the next month. In a completely unrelated event, dinner tonight was two packs of ramen noodles and a Diet Coke, certainly not because I spent all my money on books.

I also got another moleskine notebook. This one's bright red, a red that makes it look like it should be sitting next to the hotline to the Kremlin, or maybe filled with classified information. I am a sucker for these notebooks and I don't even use them half the time because I can't ever think of what I want to put in them now that I don't need a dedicated notebook. When I was still navigating they were excellent for jotting down notes about upcoming missions, names and numbers, hotel data, and what-have-you. They feel good in the hand, have great paper, and look classy.

And finally, dammit, I'm getting old. I have heartburn, and I've been noticing it happening somewhat often lately. Thanks, dad, for passing that little genetic tidbit on to me. I really appreciate it.

Hey, I read more books.

4) The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin

Three hundred years in the future, society unearths a man from our time, suspended in a stasis module, buried deep in an abandoned mine. With revivals now commonplace, they bring him back to life. But in this society, things are different. (Wouldn't be much of a story if they weren't. right?) In the future, people have personal stock. EVERYONE has stock. When you're born, 20% of your future earnings goes to your parents, for raising you. 5% goes, irrevocably, to the government. And the rest is parceled out; want to go to college? That'll be 15% of your future earnings. And so on...by the time you're entering the workforce, you'll be lucky to own 35% of yourself. Whole economic classes live on the government-mandated 25%-ownership line. But what happens when you have someone who's just woken up from a long-ago era? Someone who ISN'T incorporated?

This book was okay. There were several neat ideas, primarily economical and sociological, in it, and the central question of ownership and freedom was handled pretty well. But there were other side issues that were added in and seemed, well, unnecessary, even if they were good ideas. Not only that, but they weren't really RESOLVED very well (one in particular involving the adaptive programs in people's PDAs). And the ending was pretty unfulfilling; it seemed to have been slapped together at the end in an effort to just wrap everything up. When I have 30 pages left and I am wondering to myself how the hell they're going to wrap everything up, that's not a good feeling for me. I'd have been happier with either a longer book, or a better-crafted setup to a sequel novel. Or perhaps with the excision of some of those side-stories and a focus on the closing of the main story. Oh well.

3.75 out of 5 stars.


5) Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

What makes someone successful? Why do people like Bill Gates have their meteoric rises to the rarefied heights of success? They're outliers; the people who somehow have something unexplainable, right? Well...not really. I haven't read any of Gladwell's other books, though after this one I may have to pick one up to see how it goes. Reading a lot of other people's reviews I find that he's taking flak for being not-too-original and not-too-in-depth about his topics. I don't read nonfiction as much as I do fiction, so I tend to go with what's entertaining to me in any event. That said, this isn't a superbly crafted, ironcladly-researched book about sociology. But for what it IS; namely an easily read book that makes you go 'Well...huh,' it's good. That's what Gladwell writes.

So anyway, Gladwell looks into the history of a few successful people, the Canadian junior hockey leagues, and airline pilots and crashes, among other things, and tries to uncover just what got them there. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. One of the big tenets of the American culture is, well, the American dream; we're all created equal and we all have an equal shot at success, right? The uncomfortable answer is, again: not really. With detailed examples, Gladwell shows that who your parents were, what year, or even what MONTH you were born in, and what culture and country you come from, can really matter a lot in how successful you can be. More than that, he shows that to be a true 'outlier,' you've got to have the occasional lucky break. And, above all that, you need to work, and work hard. It's an interesting look into the background of success. Whether or not it's a rock of modern sociology is debatable, but it's a fun read.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Grades are out! I should stop trying to forecast this stuff; I'm about as good as a meteorologist.

(My poorly forecast grades are in parentheses, for comparison)

MATH 231: B (A-)
MATH 225: A- (B+)
PHYS 211: B+ (C+)
FR 101: A- (A)
CS 101: B (B)
CS 196: A- (A-)
AE 199: A (A)

Semester GPA: 3.43 (3.38)
Cumulative GPA: 3.50 (3.47)

I've been reading lately! So I'm gonna write about what I read! People who don't like words should...I dunno, go watch TV or something.

1) The Ramen King and I by Andy Raskin

I really liked this book at first. Basic premise: 40-year old writer, still single, tries to figure out what's wrong with his personal life and adopts Momofuku Ando, the inventor of Instant Ramen, as his spiritual guide. Raskin's writing is light and humorous for the most part, even as he describes the various personal issues he faces and discovers within himself. I was also a big fan of his descriptions of Japanese culture, since I was out there for a couple years myself; it's obvious that, while he probably exaggerates some things slightly for literary benefit, he knows what he's talking about.

The book does seem to jump all over the damn place, chronologically speaking, however, which is my only real gripe. It wasn't exceptionally confusing but a couple of times I found myself wondering where I was in this man's life. At the end, he seems to have figured himself out, but I couldn't shake the feeling that nothing really important ever happens.

Overall: 4 of 5.

2) The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

This book is a classic of the military SF genre, and how I managed to go this far without actually reading it is beyond me. Haldeman is a Vietnam War veteran and the book reflects that, but still stands today on its own merits. Basic premise: In 1996* mankind encounters an alien race shortly after mastering interstellar travel. Mankind gets its war on, and the protagonist, William Mandela, is drafted. Space warfare, however, is difficult and dangerous, so only the smartest men and women (with IQ's above 150) get pulled.

The book follows Mandela's career, spanning private to major. However, at relativistic velocities traveling between the stars, the universe ages centuries while only months pass for him, and the enemy he encounters isn't quite the same one he was drafted to fight. And the Earth he returns to is not the one he left. It's definitely an allegory for Vietnam, though still poignant and meaningful today, and many literary critics have called it the antithesis to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

*The book was written in '71. Don't let that scare you off; it's smart, tightly written, and stands up amazingly well against the SF of today.

Overall: 5 of 5.

3) The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney

It's a soldier's memoir. Mullaney attended West Point, graduated second in his class, became a Rhodes Scholar, and spent two years at Oxford before deploying to Afghanistan as a platoon leader. The book takes you through all of that, showing the trials and hardships of training, and the struggles he faced leading up to (you guessed it) the unforgiving minute; for him, the instant he learns that one of his soldiers has been killed in action in Afghanistan. Past that, it shows his response, how he struggles to make his relationship with his fiancee work (it does), and how he deals with coming back to a country that no longer gives a damn about his war, because Iraq took the spotlight.

This book was powerful, probably moreso to me because of my service in the Marines. To see this man, who by all rights has excelled in everything leading up to that critical point in his life (and indeed through it; he handled the situation as best anyone could), still see himself torn by doubt...well, it's something I can sort of sympathize with, though I only can share the tiniest fraction of his feeling, given the nature of my service. It also really made me think about myself, and realize that you know, I don't know if I could do what it took to be an officer of his caliber.

Overall: 5 of 5.


In other book news, I got signed and numbered collectible copies of John Scalzi's Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades and they're really really nice. I've got his third, The Last Colony, on preorder.

My dad does ferry work for a local airplane broker who specializes in warbirds. When he got a call to go move a T-28 from Pontiac, MI to Rockford, IL (i.e. Home), he asked if I wanted to tag along.

( Of course I did! )

This weekend has been...busy, I guess. I don't know where I went from 'nerdy guy who doesn't have many friends' to 'holy shit I have people to meet all weekend,' but apparently it happened. That's not bad.

( Insert overly self-critical messed-up headspace rambling here )

I should sleep, that'll clear my head. Probably.


In less introspective news, I am blatantly stealing a friend's idea: Read a bunch of books. Admittedly this is probably an idea that has been thought of before. In any event, I'm gonna read a book a week from now until whenever I get sick of reading, which is probably going to be never. As I told my friend, my problem has always been picking out books to read. I've got a terrible, terrible habit of just rereading old books I like over and over. I need to stop stagnating.

To that end I bought a bunch of books today.

Also, it is uncomfortable as hell to wear daily use contacts for more than a day. Especially if you sleep in 'em.

I'm sure there's lots of weird little habits that I picked up during five years as a navigator. There are two big ones, though.

-Without a watch I feel downright naked. I *need* to be able to know what time it is. All the time. Without digging my cellphone out of my pocket.

-When I want to know the weather, I don't go to weather.com or wherever you normal folks go. I go to the Aviation Digital Data Service because that's where I got all my baseline info for preflight weather (i.e. before the military weather office gave me my formal briefing). And I know how to read TAFs.

Also, in an unrelated event, I didn't sleep. Well, I slept from 7pm-11pm yesterday and have been up ever since. With no classes to go to, I seem to have lost the desire to be on anything approaching a normal human schedule.

I've actually got some other stuff I kinda want to touch on, but I don't know if I want to bore both myself and any readers type it all up. I'll just let it percolate in the back of my head and see what happens.

Calculus final tonight at 7pm. I will ideally be spending whatever parts of the day that are not devoted to sleep studying. Actually, studying's a bad word; I won't really be studying, which implies that I would be acquiring new knowledge. I'll be reviewing, which is more of a 'knock the cobwebs off the stuff I already know' type of thing.

At about 3:40 pm today, Trent Silver passed away from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, at the age of 20.

Trent was--is and always will be--a fraternity brother of mine. When I arrived he'd been under treatment for about nine months. He had a remissive stage, but about two months ago the cancer recurred. Three weeks ago he came back to Champaign and went on supportive (read: palliative) care; oxygen, painkillers, and blood products to keep him comfortable until, well today.

This sucks. Nobody should be dead at 20. I thought when I left the Marines I'd be done with seeing people I knew die young.

1) Go read the Hugo and Nebula awards nominations lists for the past ten (or more) years.
2) Read everything you can by every author mentioned.
3) Go on wikipedia and look up every author mentioned and find who they're compared to.
4) Read everything by this second round of authors.
5) Fail your final exams.

Step 5 is optional.

In no particular order...

Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Orbit by John Nance
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

Yeah. I'm bad at this studying thing. They're all good books, though.

Okay, time for What Jason Guesses He'll Get For Grades This Semester:

MATH 231: A-
MATH 225: B+
PHYS 211: C+ (Physics department calls 83% the cutoff for B-)
FR 101: A
CS 101: B
CS 196: A-
AE 199: A

Semester GPA: 3.38
Cumulative GPA: 3.47


Let's see how it turns out!

I feel sort of guilty that there are more 'recent tweets' auto-posts on my journal than anything else. But, as I was telling catalysticat, a lot of the time these days I'm not feeling like writing huge entries, but I do have time (or motivation) for a quick post to the Twitter.

In other news, Dreamwidth has given me a couple invite codes, so for any of you who want to drink the kool-aid for free, drop me an email or a comment. The service isn't perfect yet but I have hopes. And it's a way to stick it to LJ for having questionably intelligent standards for content. I'm big on the 'you should be able to say whatever you want' thing. Even if it's creepyweirddisgusting.

Anyway, scholastics! I got a 93% on my final French oral exam this morning, which is way better than I thought I'd do. I also got an 86% on my last calculus quiz. (I thought I did way worse.) I guess I'm a pessimist. Still to do today:

-Math 225 take-home quiz
-Physics 211 homework
-French composition rewrite
-French workbook
-Turn in AE 199 final report

I'm not even going to get into the whole 'study for finals because they're next week' thing.