This is the future, slam, slam, slam.

This morning, I managed to slam my dominant hand in the office door, resulting in blood and swearing. The pain was and still is remarkable and the insistent throbbing discomfort is exactly like what it feels like to be living in modern-day England, only in my hand. Hooray!

I am in a bad mood, you see. Partly it's the announcement that the London Olympics will be protected by laser-guided hypervelocity cluster-missiles, presumably to blow up anything that doesn't have enough corporate sponsorship. Partly it's the miserable embarrassment we have for a government (and I'm including the loyal opposition in that). Partly it's how crap everything has become.

But mostly it's my hand hurting. That's a direct and immediate pain that takes all of my attention and is hard to ignore, unlike London boroughs farming their poor out to less expensive parts of the country, or the overly close attachment all our politicians have to people whose hideously disgusting personal wealth commands all their attention, unlike the ghastly poverty-stricken proles they pay lip-service to representing. Or the way the global economy seems to be committed to self-destructing. Or the way I'm nearly forty now and a sad and lonely speck in a sad and lonely world.

On a brighter note (magnitude -4 or thereabouts), here is a picture I took during last month's conjunction between the Moon and Venus. It's a bit rough as I was using my phone to take the pic as timing was everything.

Back Again

A busy day. Two software releases, goofing about with Google Fusion Tables, solving someone's problems with a phone I've never really used,  trying to work out whether I'm just imagining that everything changed in the one day I wasn't in the office on a work day, answering various customer and helpdesk queries, and triple-checking everything I type in case it gets all gibberishy.

 Next up, steam-mopping the floor a bit.

Tyred

The illness progresses apace. My nose is running like unto a tap whilst my brain is most decidedly not running at all. It keeps hitting breakpoints that I didn't set up and the stack trace seems to be for a different process entirely.

Yes, I am mixing my metaphors like I mix my drinks. Badly.

Given it took me an hour to fry three sausages, it was not the best time to get my car in to the garage for a Service and MOT. Four new tyres and the geometry realigned. I have to admit I Googled "tyre geometry realignment" to check that it wasn't a made-up thing because today they could probably have told me my Ring System needed a Cassini division and I would have gone for it. The only car where that might be an actual thing would be GM's old Saturn brand, which has gone the way of the Sega Saturn.

My face burns from the constant blowing of nose. Tomorrow, I must go to work and do a software release for one guy.

Flares Are Back!

Apparently I do requests now, as someone who shall remain nameless wanted me to post about this.


On Thusday night, I saw my first-ever Iridium flare! If you're too lazy to click on the link to Wikipedia (or they're SOPA'ed out again), I will explain it myself with lies and half-truths and everything.

Some years back, a bunch of rich idiots including but not limited to Bill Gates and Motorola decided that America knew what the world wanted in a mobile phone, namely a handset the size of a breezeblock that cost $3,000 minimum and a contract that would charge $10 a minute of calltime. 

The thing is that America is a big country that is sparsely populated for most of its territory. The cost of fitting conventional GSM towers all over the nation to give European-style levels of coverage would cost billions. BILLIONS! 

The solution? Well, how about bigger cells? Trouble is, for the shortwave frequencies that go furthest without needing huge antennas and frying the users head, the earth's curvature becomes a problem as the radio broadcasts only go out to the horizon. 

So, how do you see further over the horizon? From higher up. 

Instead of a network of hundreds of thousands of cell towers, they envisaged a network of seventy-seven satellites in low-ish Earth orbit, providing phone coverage not merely across the US, but ANYWHERE ON EARRRRTHHHH (and also in any nearby space stations). 

The seventy-seventh element in the periodic table is Iridium, so that's where they got the name. 

A couple of problems occurred. One was that Satellites are REALLY expensive, as are the rockets to launch them. The other was that GSM networks spread like crazy, even in poor countries that'd never had a fixed-line telephone network, as the cost of GSM kit was hugely less than millions of miles of copper cable. As more people bought GSM network gear, the cost went down and down and down. 

In the meantime, the cost of the satellites went up and up and up. Eventually, they had to settle on only sixty-six, but didn't rename the network to element 66, possibly because Dysprosium sucks as a name. 

Eventually, they launched their network and sold services to basically no-one outside of international news services and ultra-rich yachtsmen. They ran into financial difficulties and would have died a death if it hadn't been for a little old thing called war. 

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq revealed that a lot of the fancy communications gear the US Armed forces had spent billions of moneys on was in a lot of ways pretty crap. All around them, embedded journalists were running round with phones that were more reliable, more rugged and more effective than the Army's own kit. The Pentagon immediately started throwing money at Iridium and everyone was happy except for the people who got bombed and shelled and stuff thanks to a phone call but they were all non-American and thus didn't count. 

Aaaaanyway, the interesting thing about Iridium is the satellites. Ignoring the one that crashed into a Russian Strela-2M communications satellite, the surviving Iridium satellites have one very interesting design feature, a pair of large, flat, mirror-finish radio antennas. 

Around dawn and dusk, passing Iridium satellites will reflect the sun's rays down to earth, appearing for a few seconds as a *really* bright moving star (up to thirty times brighter than Venus!). Some flares are visible in broad daylight! 

The great thing is they're predictable. I have an app on my Android smartphone that takes my GPS position and works out where and when I'll see a flare (actually it cheats and asks a web server to do the hard sums). Tonight, I went out at the appointed time (18:34), looked where the pointy thing said and waited. 

Out of nowhere, a star appeared. It got brighter until it looked like the main light of a plane without the wingtip lights or blinking anticollision lights; it moved steadily north-east and then faded down to invisibility again. 

I'd seen a half-tonne satellite seven hundred miles up while it was somewhere over the North Sea, a little south of Norway! 

And that was my evening.


For you kids too cool for smartphones, you can always try www.heavens-above.com as that'll do the same job as the app.

Russia- Land of Smiles and Candy

Since I am ill, I have spent much of the weekend watching films and sneezing.

Russian films are depressing. Russian war films are really depressing, especially if they're based on historical events. I quite liked the handful of Russians I've actually met and they all seemed a lot more fun than the Finns they worked for. It seems really rather unfair that as a nation their history is like one big long miserable Blues song with Vodka standing in for Bourbon and all to the sound of Balalaikas rather than the Steel Guitar.

Case in point: Compare and Contrast "Saving Private Ryan" and "Fortress of War" (AKA "The Brest Fortress"). Spoilers abound:

Saving Private Ryan:

• Omaha Beach is a horrible nightmare but the beach is taken. Watch out Hitler, Uncle Sam is comin'! (also those rubbishy British and Commonwealth types, but they don't count)
  
• Tom Hanks nearly gets squished by a tank.
• Most everyone dies, but Ryan is saved. Mission Accomplished!

Fortress of War:

• The Siege of the Fortress is a horrible nightmare but... actually, it's just a horrible nightmare followed by four more years of horrible nightmare where twenty million more Soviet soldiers and civilians die. Nobody even knows about the defender's desperate attempts to hold out until the nineteen fifties, after Stalin's safely dead and isn't likely to get all elevated if people mention how badly the whole Buddies-With-People-Who-Hate-Communists thing went on.
  
• Everyone dies (including women and children), bar the Orphan boy and the one guy who knew the Nazis were going to attack and that the fortress is unprepared. He spends years in a POW camp and is kicked out of the Communist party after the war for being taken prisoner and not dying. Even the fat, jolly NKVD commander who randomly dances at people and is very kind and understanding to the guy who is going to be put on trial (and no doubt shot in the face) for spreading alarmist rumours about an impending attack from Uncle Joe's Bessie Mate Hitler, even he dies.
  
• The Orphan boy (who is an orphan) has his brother, his girlfriend and his tuba shot and killed. Basically everyone he has ever known at all dies horribly.
  
• Also, he is deafened by a bomb.
• Lots of people, mostly civilians, actually do get squished by a tank. 
• Mission not accomplished.

Come on Russia; let's have a single century where the average citizen's life isn't one long depressing miserable misery. Also, stop trying to defeat attacking troops by RUSHING OUT FROM HARD COVER in an attempt to bash men with MACHINE GUNS in the face with spades and WINDOW FRAMES.

Illin' like a Villain.

I am full of a cold.

What a tragedy! But the kicker is since this is CAMERON'S BIG SOCIETY, I don't get sick pay when I'm ill so I shall have to struggle to work and be ill on everybody else or be unable to pay for things like gas, electricity or the fuel to get to work. Yeah, I'm a Subsistence Software Engineer.

So I shall go to work and every one else will get my cold. Last time I was ill, I gave it to the boss. He didn't threaten to fire me, he threatened to shoot me.

Less paperwork that way.