Juicy Chunks O’ Wisdom For Wednesday, May 21st

‘Cause I’m really PO’d and trying not to be, that’s why.

• As my brain shuts/melts down, the one item I try to keep on top of the memory stack is the wisdom I learned from Crash Davis: “Don’t think, it’ll just hurt the team.“
• Seven junk phone calls today to the land line, two from bots pushing political candidates and causes, two from live humans pushing political candidates and causes, and three from telemarketers. We’re getting really close to the trigger point where we take the phone off the hook until mid-November.
• Is everyone checking in every now and then with the ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment? I’ve stopped watching it obsessively (and come on, isn’t “obsession” too harsh of a word for what’s simply a deep and abiding appreciation for the beauty of our home planet from low Earth orbit?) and now just remember to pop it on a handful of times a day to see where they are. There’s about a 50/50 chance that they’re in darkness or out of range of the TDRS system or ground stations, but if they’re in daylight… O. M. G!
• We’ve all seen the hundreds of “test” sites on FaceBook where you can see which Star Wars character you are, which Gilligan’s Island character you are, which kind of storm or tree or dog or insect or house you are… Cute, for about ten seconds, but do people really not realize that they are giving away all kinds of personal information to marketing companies when they do that? You already have so much data out there and once you go to one of those sites from FaceBook, you’ve agreed to let the site have access to whatever other public information you have on FaceBook. Birthday, where you live, where you work, your marital status, where you were born, what you like, what you don’t, who your friends and relatives are… Lots of small, innocent, individual pieces but not that hard for someone’s computer to pull together into a really accurate picture of who you are in detail. Yeah, they may be using that data to try to sell you cruises and insurance policies. Or they could sell it (or they could be careless and get hacked!) and the buyer could use it for blatant identity theft. Given the risk, is it really worth knowing what kind of cactus you would be?
• Speaking of manned (or “crewed”) spaceflight, particularly on the ISS these days, can anyone explain why they’re always wearing belts on their pants when they do an interview? It can’t to prevent their pants from falling down and it seems a waste. Is it just to keep the ground-based human critters from freaking out?
• I want one of those driverless cars from Google. The sooner the better.
• If you’re watching that ISS HD site on your iPad regularly, I recommend that you bookmark an ISS locator site (here or here, my favorite) and the direct ISS HD video feed site separately rather than using the link above. It will look much better using the full screen on a tablet or smart phone. If you’re like me, you’ll actually create two icons on your iPad that will take you directly to the sites rather than simply bookmarking them in your browser — if you want to do that and don’t know how, just ask, I’ll be glad to walk you through it.
• On second thought, I want everyone else to be in driverless cars even more than I want to be in one. I want one for myself so I can do other things while travelling and not see that as wasted time. I want one for everyone else because there are a lot of really stupid and incompetent freakin’ idiots out there on the road every day and I don’t one of them to make me a dead person just because they’re a stupid person. That’s not a decent tradeoff.

Remember that other timeless piece of advice from Crash Davis: “Some days you win, some days you lose, and some days it rains.” I’ve always thought that was actually pretty profound.