35MPH

It was good to see all of you this weekend, Heath, I hope you had a great time, I sure as hell did. See you all in a couple weeks.

35MPH Productions
Found this in a used bin, does not contain the song we were talking about over the weekend (though i can’t remember which one it was, it’s just not on this album), But, it rocks.
Led Zeppelin, Presence (1976)

Well, if we’re posting house pictures… you can check my new place (though we’re just renting) here in Vancouver (Burnaby, actually). These pics are before we moved in. We’ve since painted, installed new light fixtures, hung pictures, got some of our furniture in place… I’ve also ripped up the carpet in the downstairs “rec room.” We’ll soon (sometime this month, hopefully) be finishing out the basement area (drywall, molding, painting, light fixtures, staining/sealing the concrete floors, etc.). Should be fun!

Well, sort of - meaning that you all can come stay with me anytime. Just closed on our house yesterday. I own property in Teton County, Wyoming - an actual piece of dirt! Here are some pics…

Some of the finishes are a little too modern and stark looking (ie, the fireplace) but I think it will dress up pretty nice. Also, we have a view of the Grand from our front yard - just didn’t get a picture of it, yet.

Enjoy and I will give you all the full tour in a few weeks! See you this weekend. Lates.

(I couldn’t link to the ArkDemGaz site because you need a subscription to view, but I was able to cut and paste. I though this was killer. I’d like to join them.)
****ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ARK DEM GAZ.****
DEVON ISLAND, Nunavut While the Discovery has been orbiting Earth, I’ve been on Mars. More precisely, I’ve been on a desolate island in the Canadian high Arctic with six people in a mock spaceship they’re pretending has landed on Mars. This is a strange exercise, but it is easier to explain than the shuttle’s mission. The Marsonauts, as these unpaid scientists call themselves, have been tromping around in spacesuits to dig up fossils and look for other signs of life in a huge meteor crater that may be the most Mars-like bit of real estate on this planet. The Discovery, meanwhile, is gazing at its navel. The astronauts’ primary mission is to discover, with the aid of new cameras trained on the shuttle, whether it’s safe for them to be up there. The answer was clear well before the latest bits of foam fell off. Sending astronauts on the shuttle isn’t worth the risk, and not simply because of its design flaws. For all their problems, the shuttles have safely returned from 98 percent of their missions, which may well be the highest success rate of any exploration program in history. The real problem with this exploration program is that it doesn’t explore anything. Three decades after going to the moon, NASA is sending astronauts a few hundred miles above Earth to conduct high school science experiments. Can you name anything—besides repairing the Hubble Telescope—they’ve accomplished? They’ve delivered cargo and people to the space station, but that could be done far more cheaply and safely with old-fashioned rockets and capsules. Phasing out the shuttle quickly would be painful for the armies of government and aerospace-industry workers who’ve made a career out of it, but it would liberate NASA. Instead of striving to produce a foolproof short-haul truck, NASA could try looking at space travel the way the Marsonauts do. They’re not obsessed with worry about a little foam falling off their ship. Most of them said they’d go on the first mission to Mars even if the odds were three to one against making it back alive. “If it was the rest of my life—the end of my life—I would go to Mars,” said Judd Reed, a 44-year-old software engineer from Santa Rosa, Calif. He’s the commander of the team of unpaid scientists here from the Mars Society, a private group of enthusiasts determined to reach what they call the New World. They don’t have the money for the trip yet, but they do have a plan for getting there, so they’re already plotting logistics. The Marsonauts are sticklers for staying “in sim,” simulating every inconvenience they can imagine on Mars. No venturing outside the Hab without at least half an hour of preparation: putting on a spacesuit and helmet, wiring a radio, and going through five minutes of decompression in the airlock. They have their own jargon (e.g., “HabCom, EVA11 is ready to begin its egress de-co” ) and their own bureaucracy. Reports are filed nightly to Mission Support and the Remote Science Team, a group of researchers on three continents who are referred to as “the scientists back on Earth.” There’s even a Martian tricolor—a red, blue and green flag flapping above the Hab to symbolize their plans to “terraform” Mars into a green planet with liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. I know this all sounds silly. I arrived sympathetic to the Marsonauts’ cause, but ready to write a wryly detached column on an amusing bunch of zealots. Their fantasy sounded like a futurist version of explornography : the simulation of exploration by people trekking through terra cognita on adventure vacations. But the Marsonauts are really figuring out how to explore the unknown, how to look for life on a place worth risking lives to reach. By the second day here, I was caught up in the sim, too. As we returned to our home on the edge of the crater, the white Hab up on the rocky brown ridge looked like a vision of a spaceship on Mars, and the sight was a bigger thrill than anything that’s lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in a long time.

After I woke up from a dream where I floated into a brightly colored spacecraft and was nearly violated by a number of instruments ending with “-ator” and “-izer,” I had this appendage semi-permanently attached to my head. Let me know if you have seen something like this before. I’m afraid it may be contagious.