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.
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.
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.
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.
On a red eye. I’m going out to dinner, then getting on the plane, getting in about six tomorrow morning, east coast time, so probably no posting until tomorrow, if then.
I’ll be in LA all week, starting this evening. I’m about to leave for the airport, so no more posting until tonight, if then. Be good in the various comments sections.
For those few of you who are fascinated/horrified by my computer travails, here’s the current status.
After removing Open Office and a Fortran compiler to resolve some otherwise unresolvable (at least by me) dependency issues, I finished the upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 4 via yum update (at least I think I did–how do I know?). I rebooted, and it rebooted. I haven’t attempted to reinstall Open Office yet, so I don’t know if that will work, but flush with seeming victory over the machine, I decided to push my luck and go from Core 4 to Core 5.