Two Bones One Dog

I have two major projects I'm working on for The Pond at the moment.  One is the writeup for Ep09 of Ben-To!, and I'm not ashamed to say that it's rough sledding.  The way the episode is structured makes it difficult to write a coherent (shaddap!) narrative.  The second is a secret, but it has to do with the "proof of concept" I put up a few days ago.  That one also involves a package of 60 sets of chopsticks, double-sided tape, and more than a bit of vituperative language.

The sad thing is that the effort required to do either of them seems to be beyond me at the moment.  I wanted very much to do one or the other today, and neither occurred... along with, it must be said, anything else.  Still, there's always tomorrow.  Right?

Right? 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:59 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A New Visitor To Mars

You've probably heard by now that India's ISRO space agency put a probe into orbit around Mars the other day.  Dubbed "MOM", for Mars Orbiter Mission, this is a noteworthy success in a number of ways.  First and foremost is that it succeeded at all.

Mars has always been something of a bugaboo for human space missions.  Though NASA hasn't had a failure since 1999, roughly 2/3rds of all missions bound for the Red Planet have had mission failure in one way or another.  Some of these failures were spectacular (the Mars Climate Orbiter's metric-imperial mixup), some less so (Zond 2's loss of communication three months before reaching the planet), but there were an awful lot of them.  That a space organization got it right on its first try at Mars is impressive enough, but there's another reason to be surprised.

The entire Mars Orbiter Mission reportedly had a price tag of around $74 million dollars.  Construction, launch, salaries, catering, you name it, covered by that number.  Force India, the Formula 1 team owned by Indian businessman Vijay Mallya, has a race budget of right around $100 million... and that doesn't count catering.

Now, to be fair, all MOM did was deliver a 15kg satellite into an elliptical orbit around Mars, some 60 million miles away.  Force India, on the other hand, delivers a 70kg payload to sixth place after 190 miles or so.

Food for thought, that.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:44 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Five Long Years

It was five years ago today that we lost Momzerduck.

It's been a long, unpleasant, five years.  I wish she was still here... it still hurts.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Proof Of Concept

Yup, worked.  I'll be durned... that's exactly what I expected to see.  Huh.  Sometimes I guess I get lucky.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 12:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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OMGWTFNTRVW!

On Monday, something is going to occur to me that hasn't happened in over 10 years.

I'm going to have phone interviews for a job.  Two jobs, actually.

I don't know if I'm going to get either of the jobs.  I have no idea how the interviews are going to go.  There's even a tiny little part of me that's afraid that I'll get one of the jobs, thus ending my "vacation."

I'm almost scared I'll screw up the interviews.  Yep, this is my brain.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Skyrim Fun

I love Skyrim.  That's no surprise, I've talked about it before, about the good, the bad and the goofy.  It just looks so good sometimes!

No mods, onboard graphics, no picture editing except for size, and it looks like this?  Man, how cool is that?  Computers are spiffy.  But then, it'll also cough up hairballs like this one:

Really?   Now, Serana is a vampire, so I guess she can do things like that, but I'll be durned if I've seen it before.  She's the headless companion!

Oh.  Heh.  Never mind. 

Really, though... prettiest game ever?  Just wait until I actually slap a stand-alone graphics card into the computer.  Man, that'll rock.

Now if only I had the time...  Oh.  Heh.  Never mind.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:43 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Summer's Over!

So earlier today, in my copious amount of free time, I decided to check the weather forecast.  I had heard something about thunderstorms when I had gone out to pick up my "Keep Wonderduck Alive" pills, and I wanted to find out just when this was supposed to happen.  Imagine my surprise when this greeted me:

Dammit!  I just did laundry, too.  Now I'm going to have to dig sweatpants out of storage and do another load separately.  This has got to be a glitch, right?  It isn't really going to go down to -2°F tomorrow, right?

Dammit.  Well.  That's going to be... um...  quite the temperature swing.  I think I'm going to be not outside at that time.  Actually, best to be safe: I'm not going to go outside ever again.  It'll be better that way.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A Note On Spam

As opposed to SPAM, everybody's canned precooked meat product made in Austin, Minnesota, home of the Gear Daddies and just down 2-18 from Owatonna, at which point you jog left on 14 to Mankato where yours truly attended grad school.

Sorry.  Anyway, The Pond was recently inundated with comment spam.  Pages upon pages of comments, mostly in broken French and selling handbags and gymshoes, and almost none of it actually making it to the visible realm.  It just sat in my "edit comments" screen until I deleted it... all 17 pages worth. 

The reason I'm mentioning this is that it's possible I may have done away with a legitimate comment or two as I went through the detritus with a flamer in one hand and a bandsaw in the other.  If so, please don't take it personally, it was totally accidental.  It's not that I hate you, it's not that you comment wasn't worthy, it was just an accident.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

UPDATE:  Another eight pages of spam deleted.  Yeesh.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:25 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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(Insert Evil Laugh)

My evil master plan nears fruition.  Soon, you will all kneel down before me and praise me as your rightful lord and master!

Or, y'know, I'll have a blog post up, one of the two.  Look forward to it, either way, won't you?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:23 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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