Category Archives: Administrative

Overdue

Andrew Sullivan has been near the very top of my blogroll since I started this blog, but I haven’t read him in months (except to follow someone else’s link to something in particular) because he seems to have come unhinged against the administration and his critics over “torture” (but I really think it’s about the gay marriage thing). Things like this are also why. I’ve finally removed him.

Busy

In case anyone was wondering over the light posting. I’m paying for my holiday weekend by frantically reviewing/rewriting CEV spacecraft system requirements and verification statements to hit a deadline.

Email Flood

Some cretin has set up a spam system to send emails to a vast number of people with the return address as *@transterrestrial.com.

While I was up at the cape, I got over two hundred emails to the effect that: so and so is out of the office, such and such a spamfilter blocked this email, etc.

All with return addresses of random names from my domain. I can’t imagine that they’re originating from my machine, since I don’t even use that domain myself for outgoing email.

Question. Other than blocking all incoming email to *@transterrestrial.com other than simberg@transterrestrial.com, what do I do about this, if anything? There’s certainly nothing I can do to prevent a third party from sending out email with a return address with my domain, though if there was, torching their genitals would be too good for them.

Off To The Cape

We’re going to go, and trust to luck (it’s about a two and a half hour drive, not counting inevitable launch traffic once we get close). No blogging until return–I don’t have wireless (though maybe I should get Verizon). See you tonight, hopefully with Discovery safely in orbit.

[Update at 8 PM EDT]

Well, another wasted day. The frustrating thing is that the weather wasn’t a problem for the launch–it was a problem for the extremely unlikely “attempted suicide in order to avoid certain death” maneuver of a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort. Unfortunately, at the last minute, as I was listening to the MMT poll, I also heard that there was a boat in the box, with no estimated time of removal.

As is often the case, the launch commitment criteria created an overconstrained system. Sometimes it amazes me that we’ve ever launched this thing.

External Hard Drive Question

I’ve been thinking that a good way to make my laptop dual boot without messing with the current Windows installation would be to install a Linux distro on an external USB drive. Two questions:

Are there any problems with this (assuming that I can boot off a USB port) and are there any external drives that get their power from the USB port (so I don’t have to find a power socket to use it)?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, the search word I was missing was “portable.” There do seem to be some available that run off the USB port.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It seems to me that the cool thing about this is that you could boot from anyone’s computer into your own system, as long as the machine was bootable from USB.

Technical Difficulties

I got in all right last night, but my laptop’s hard drive is dying (wish I’d known that before I left–I would have brought my other one). I’m posting this from work, but won’t be able to do much of that, so posting may be light this week, until I get back to Florida Friday night.

Busy

The carpenters are here today with some final cabinet installation issues, and the pool pump died, so I’ve been pulling the old one, finding a new one, and replacing it, before the summer mustard algae in south Florida crawls over the coping, creeps into our bedroom and smothers us in our slumber.