It’s about 0127 PST, and I'm watching the NASA channel live showing us the MER mission control room as the first batch of images comes in from Opportunity, the second of two amazing Mars rovers.
The terrain surrounding Opportunity in Meridiani Planum, is so amazing looking. Unlike the rocky surface we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on all the Mars images we typically see, Meridiani is very smooth. But, there are these amazing outcroppings of rock structures in view that are very exciting to the scientists, and to me!
I really wish JPL would give us an audio track that’s just the comm chatter, without the commentators. They’re trying to explain things, but I’d really rather just listen to the scientists and engineers.
Spirit, after getting a little sick, seems to be doing much better. Once again, congratulations to the JPL team. You’ve done amazing work, and have made me very proud.
Check out the mission at the MER Mission Home Page. They’ve gotten over four billion hits in the last 24 days. That’s about 1929 hits per second!

As I feared, Bush Jr. announced a new plan for space exploration, containing a terribly misguided “extended human presence on the moon”. I’ve come to recognize this as typical of politicians in general and of Bush in particular.
I fully applaud refocussing NASA and the space program to support sending humans to Mars. However, the science and engineering goals and constraints are best served by Dr. Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct approach.
I’m not going to try to argue the merits of manned exploration to Mars. That’s a huge subject all by itself. Thankfully, this administration and most of Washington seems to accept the need.
Typical Mars mission plans (including Bush’s) call for the assembly of large spacecraft in orbit (or on the moon), a process which requires multiple launches of heavy lift vehicles. These have been deemed so expensive as to relegate such programs to future generations.¹
Commentary I heard on NPR today suggests that we can expect the return to the moon by 2020 and humans on Mars by mid-century, at a cost of $1 trillion. Personally, I plan to see humans land on Mars. In 2050, I’ll turn 81. It’s likely I’ll be alive, but I’d sure hate to miss it because of senility or death.
Dr. Zubrin and others have for years espoused a plan that can get humans to Mars in ten years, for a fraction of the cost, by skipping the moon. There’s no scientific reason to go to the moon, and no good plan for Mars requires mining the moon or using it as a shipyard.
I’ll try to post more information on this subject soon. In the meantime, check out these links:

• NASA’s Mars Direct Page
• Mars Direct Home Page
• International Conference for the Exploration and Colonization of Mars
• NASA Ames Center for Mars Exploration

And I encourage you to read Dr. Zubrin’s book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet.
¹Zubrin, Robert M., Practical Methods for Near-Term Piloted Mars Missions.

Congratulations to the Mars Exploration Rover team at JPL for their successful Mars landing, 20:35 on 1/3/2004. By all accounts, everything is going better than expected.
I envy you guys and wish you all the best in the coming weeks.

Because of strong DVD sales and syndication popularity, the awesome show Family Guy might find its way back to Fox. Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group apparently called the series a late-blooming phenomenon that may have been aired before its time (according to an article in USA Today).
Dumb bitch (asshole?). He/she has to spin it so they don’t look like dumb fucking pigs who can’t judge a show on its merits. Family Guy aired sporadically at best, and was hardly given a chance to shine.
The same is true of the greatest show ever, Firefly. Fox aired Firefly without consistency, for less than 13 episodes, and put it up against Major League Baseball. Firefly was a complex, intelligent show, and requires time in order to grow a following. With programming like that afforded to it, it’s no wonder that its ratings were less than stellar.
Networks (Fox in particular) it seems are moving ever more toward cheating the viewing public (or at least, toward cheating the intelligent viewing public). A season of a television show used to be a solid set of weekly episodes from some time in the Fall to some time in the Spring. Now, we’re lucky to get four consecutive weeks before a repeat is aired, and no network will give a ratings-challenged but excellent show more than a few episodes to climb the ratings ladder.
But ratings must be inaccurate. How else can you explain the dearth of excellence like Firefly and the nauseatingly abundant crap like Survivor, The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire? Are there really so many more dumb cows watching television than there are high school graduates? Is public education so bad in the U.S. that someone with no more than a high school diploma is enthralled with crappy reality TV and would rather experience other people’s (supposedly real) misery rather than be whisked away to lands unimagined? How pathetic are we?
I certainly never get polled. I’ve never been polled about any of the recent shows I’ve thought were excellent but got cancelled. So I&rsuqo;m forced to wonder: who makes the ratings? What sub human, trailer-home-dwelling piece of Bush-electing shit chose what shows I get to watch?
For the record: I would pay substantially ($30/mo) for a single channel that brought me the best (and even better-than average) that television had to offer: shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Star Trek (all of them), X-Files, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Glory Days, Strange Luck, Alias, 24, The Dead Zone…the list of good programming really does go on and on! Is there a model where ratings isn’t the driving force behind what kind of programming is offered?

I love my new 15" Aluminum PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz, backlit keyboard, SuperDrive) very much (many thanks to my facilitator at Apple who helped make it a reality). It’s mechanically much more sturdy than was my TiPB, the fan runs almost never, and the backlight works (which is why I replaced my otherwise fine TiPB). I also think Panther (10.3.1, build 7C107) is a huge improvement over Jaguar.
However, I’m starting to have serious problems, and I don’t know how much of it to blame on Panther and how much to blame on the new hardware.
It started yesterday or the day before, when I restarted (I can’t remember why) and all of sudden my separate keyboard and mouse stopped working (I typically connect the PowerBook to my 22" Cinema Display which has a black/clear Apple keyboard and mouse connected to it). I have an Apple ADC adapter which is normally plugged into the DVI port and the USB port on the right side of the PB.
The USB devices had no effect on the UI, and the mouse light was dark. After a bit of unplugging and re-plugging, I discovered that if I plugged the mouse directly into the port on the left, everything came back, and I could plug the mouse back into the Cinema Display.
BTW—I’ve noticed that unplugging or plugging in a USB device causes a sleeping PowerBook to wake. I understand this to be a problem other PowerBook/Panther users are experiencing, and not just on AlPBs.
I came into work this afternoon, plugged everything in and opened the lid on the PowerBook. Everything came up fine. I read through the day’s mail (Mail), checked to see who was online (Adium), listed my bugs (IE; normally I use Safari, but Bugzilla doesn’t work quite right with it), and then headed for lunch with the group. When I came back, both screens were dark, and hitting keys on either keyboard failed to wake the machine (this is the kind of problem I’d been having on my TiPB prior to Panther).
So, I held the power button until the PB shut off, pressed it to start it up, and ran into the same USB problems described above, but slightly different. Before, the mouse’s light would not come. This time, the light was on, but the mouse had no effect. I unplugged it and plugged it back in to the Cinema Display, but now the light was off for good. I finally discovered that I had to plug the ADC adapter into the left-hand USB port to get those devices to work at all, but they still had no effect on the UI (although the mouse’s light would at least come on).
Apple System Profiler shows two USB roots. Nothing under the first, a hub under the second, a hub under that, and an Apple Optical Mouse under that.
Now, here’s where it gets much worse: the PowerBook thinks there’s no BlueTooth and no AirPort! They’re not off, they’re simply not installed!
So I restarted a couple of times throughout all of this, trying various things (e.g., I removed the Cinema Display from the mix altogether). The PB now recognizes that there is BlueTooth hardware, but refuses to see the AirPort card. And no amount of restarting or USB device permutations seems to make USB work. I just tried plugging the mouse directly into the left port, and the light comes on feebly (just sort of flickers, and not in the way it does when you move the mouse and it gets brighter), but the cursor won’t move.
At this point, I’m at a loss. I’m writing this entry using the PB’s own keyboard and mouse, and hopefully that will hold out so I can get some work done today.
Oh, one more issue: I got into a situation a couple nights ago where the keyboard backlight refused to come on (or be adjusted). The room I was in was very dark. I had to restart to get it straightened out.