little red planet » planet

A Global Village Sitting Just This Side of Cyberspace

dale — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:08:27 +0000

Well, It’s been one helluva week for global communications at my house. First my computer decided to chew up the operating system and spit it back out on the screen in convenient little chunks. I decided to reformat one of the hard drives and install an Ubuntu Linux derivative, Mint as an additional operating system. Usually I’m a Zenwalk man but I got irritated with always running into good Ubuntu software repositories and very little for Zenwalk. I also couldn’t get the Raw Photo plugin for GIMP to work in Zenwalk for some reason.

Anyways, that’s pretty geeky stuff. I know most would be completely uninterested in it. Let’s just say the computer is working on all levels at the moment. Whew! I then decided to upgrade my WordPress installation on my server. I know, I must be a real glutton for punishment. I stared the upgrade and left for work this morning expecting the files to upload and all be sweet. I’ve done this many times before. Here again, the electron gods were not smiling on me. I got to work and hit my site only to notice that there was nothing there! Nada! Not a single line of code or anything!

OK, so that’s all sorted now. For this week’s Creative Photo, I’m gonna appease those Electron Gods and produce a real virtual Global Village suspended in Cyberspace. Hope this changes my luck!

On a side note … see the circuit board in that photo? It’s no longer causing me any troubles

Doodle Week – Doodle Space

dale — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:32:49 +0000

This is day two of Doodle Week and the theme for today is Doodle Space. Here’s my Doodle Space Doodle. You can check out all the Doodles at the Flickr Doodle Week Group.

For today’s Space Doodle, I thought I’d give you directions to the little red planet. If you happen to be rocketing around the Solar System, be sure and drop by for a visit.

cheers!

Big Mountain on Little Red Planet

dale — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:27:31 +0000

In celebration of the 25 May 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander’s touchdown on the Little Red Planet, I decided to republish some of my earlier Mars related edutoons.

From Wikipedia:

Phoenix is a robotic spacecraft on a space exploration mission on Mars under the Mars Scout Program. The scientists conducting the mission will use instruments aboard the Phoenix lander to search for environments suitable for microbial life on Mars, and to research the history of water there. The multi-agency program is headed by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, under the direction of NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program is a partnership of universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, the Philippines, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and other aerospace companies.[1]

Phoenix is the sixth successful landing on Mars, out of twelve total international attempts (the sixth successful landing of seven American attempts). It is the third successful static lander and the first since Viking 2, and as of 2008 the most recent spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. It is also the first successful landing on a polar region of Mars.