Category: Tech

From Moon to Mars?

On NPR this morning I heard author Daniel Wilson suggest that by now, 40 years after landing on the Moon, we could have made it to Mars. But I’m sure he knows as well as anybody that the reason America went Lunar roving was not for its own sake, but to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. With that goal accomplished, the pressure was off.

My opinion is that a journey to Mars is still too ambitious and costly an undertaking. The scenario postulated in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is what I favor — a Moon base with a way station. The future was indeed set in 1969, but it was the Arpanet going online, and not Apollo 11, that changed everything.

Which reminds me. Way back in my first month of turning my old web site into this web log, and I wasn’t yet embedding audio, I said that Buddy Holly recorded only three songs in stereo. That is incorrect. There is a fourth recording, called “Moondreams”, although this particular dub doesn’t bring out the full stereo effect.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/Moondreams.mp3]

And back on the subject of Mars, my son Eric has of late taken an interest in the early works of David Bowie, who has a song on “Hunky Dory” called “Life On Mars?”.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JUL/LifeOnMars.flv 400 300]

Whoever posted “Life On Mars?” on YouTube disabled embedding, so I had to work around that. I got the poster picture of Bowie looking like Keith Richard playing the Cavern Club from a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

To the Moon! Bang! Zoom!

It was forty years ago today that Apollo 11 lifted off. A month ago, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter left Earth for the Moon. Congratulations to Professor Harlan Spence of Boston University, whose CRaTER payload is on the LRO, studying the long-term effects of radiation on humans. (I doubt that one of those effects is to turn people into super heroes, like the cosmic rays that created the Fantastic Four!)

The LRO will drop to an orbit of 30 miles above the Moon and take pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site. I’m really looking forward to seeing those. I wonder if anything’s been moved? 😉

Xbox Live, eX-Box Dead

School vacation has just begun and my son Eric’s Xbox 360 has the dreaded RROD — Red Ring of Death. (To be precise, it’s the three flashing red lights problem.) Needless to say, Eric and I are not pleased, especially after the expense and effort to upgrade the hard drive to 120 GB a few months ago.

To add further to our aggravation, because it’s Saturday afternoon we can’t ship it for repair until Monday. Going through the process of arranging the return wasn’t fun, between Internet Explorer 8 blowing up a couple of times on Microsoft’s own site, and Microsoft’s maddening voice-guided phone support. Bismo sent in his Xbox 360 twice for repair, and the second time, rather than repairing it again, a replacement unit was sent.

None of Eric’s Nintendo consoles has ever had a hardware failure. The Wii glitched a couple of times, but after using the lens cleaning kit we could see an obvious particle, and it’s been fine since then.

As far as I’m concerned, Microsoft is a software company pretending to be a hardware company. What really galls me is that the extent of the RROD problem was a known issue long before August 29, 2007, when Eric’s unit was manufactured. Have they figured it out once and for all, even now?

Speaking of video games, I’ll follow up a bit on the Tokyo Game Action auction that was held back on June 6. I was going to write something more in-depth about the death of arcades, because Good Time Emporium in Somerville, MA is also gone, but I’m afraid I lost my momentum.

This video shows the property, assessed by the town of Winchendon at about $400,000, being auctioned off for $115,000. Eric and I had a chance to thank Andy McGuire and to wish him well. Andy said he and his wife would be going to Japan as soon as possible after the auction.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JUN/TGA_Auction.flv 448 336]