Robert W. Rose

A guy I work with recently used “Dependable Auto Shippers” and got completely screwed over.  They damaged two of his cars, trashing the interior and stealing a bunch of components he had installed.  He put his story online, which is still unfolding:

Dependable Auto Shippers Stinks

24 hours later I’m still at a loss for words. The best I can do right now is attempt to capture what I was thinking yesterday. During the mission I remember thinking:

“OK, we cleared the tower. Awesome. F9 cleared the tower twice.”

“Alright, MECO1. Code still works! Nice.”

“OK, MECO2, very nice. 1st stage worked twice in a row.”

“Sep worked twice?! What?”

“2nd stage lit?”

“We’re not spinning up! OK great, we nailed the roll control issue.”

“Nosecone deployed!”

“Dragon separated?”

When I turned around and saw the video of Dragon drifting away from 2nd stage my eyes were so full of tears I couldn’t see my console anymore. I quickly tried to shake it off and put my face 10″ away from the monitor that indicated Dragon’s orientation.

Then Dragon started slowly slewing towards its first TDRSS satellite. I thought, “Oh my God… it works, it’s working!” and tears filled my eyes a second time. I put my hands on my face, my elbows on the desk and tried to regain my composure. I was so thankful. To see F9 work flawlessly, and then Dragon kick off and do autonomous attitude control… I was done. At that point I could have gone home happy; the mission was a complete success in my mind.

But as the day progressed things kept getting more and more surreal. Dragon did everything it was supposed to do. Attitude control worked. Comm worked. The deorbit burned worked. Entry worked. Parachutes deployed. Water landing worked. When they got it back on the boat I didn’t know what to think anymore. I reflected on my perceptions of what was achievable and the reality that was confronting me and for a few seconds it made me nauseous. I had to make a conscious effort the rest of the day not to think about it.

So there it is. We did it. What an incredible team. It’s been a real honor working on this project.

Webcast video link

Honda leads Toyota in value retention back through model year 2005. In model year 2004 Toyota retains more of it’s value. “Outstanding condition” adds between $900-1000 to the retail value of the vehicle on all models in all model years.

As a former HP employee I was a little confused when I first heard Carly Fiorina was running for a US Senate seat.  I didn’t think it was real–I turned up the radio and sure enough, it was real.  My next reaction was, “she won’t last…” but somehow she has.

I’m totally baffled that she is still in the race.  She significantly damaged Hewlett-Packard, and somehow this qualifies her to run the country?  I don’t say that lightly.  Some facts: HP’s shares fell by more than 60% over the 6 years she was CEO.  She halved HP’s R&D budget, dropping it well below IBM, Apple, and similar competitors.  She sold off HP’s meat-and-potatoes (Agilent) and forced an acquisition no one wanted (Compaq).

Who knows, she might make a great politician.  After all, she has a good track record for brokering deals.  But will she push for deals that people want?

After several failed attempts, I finally managed to get the X-Plane 9 demo installed on my PC. It survived about 12 minutes on my computer before I deleted it. The program (game?) looked great and I really wanted to spend some time with it but the experience was too frustrating for me to stick with it.

What did they do wrong?

• First, their installer is a super-small download but it’s just a download manager that pulls the rest of the game from their website. This would normally be fine, except their download manager doesn’t support resume! Twice I killed it because I wanted to reboot my computer, not realizing that it was starting the 1.4GB+ download over from the top. If you’re gonna have a download manager, have a download manager. Otherwise I might as well just download a zip.
• Dialogs pause the game and fill the screen almost at random with “buy this game” and “helpful hint” messages. It’s obnoxious. And in a flight sim, where the slightest movement can send your plane off course, it impedes your ability to control your aircraft. There’s no reason for these to pause the game or fill the screen, they could just as easily be little notification pop-ups in the corner.
• The demo only lets you run the program for 10 minutes before locking you out. I’ve never played a flight sim that took less than 10 minutes to master. It usually takes hours. Instead of limiting you by time they should limit you in range or available aircraft.
• There’s no guided experience. They simply drop you into an aircraft and tell you (literally), “brakes are b and throttle is F1/F2.” That’s hardly enough to get you familiar with what the game has to offer. They should take a page from FSX and have a series of in-game tutorials in their demo.
• If you stray outside what the demo has downloaded there’s no obvious way to get back. It comes with these “scenarios” pre-installed but when I went to try them out I started getting errors about the terrain not being available. I wanted to go back to the original location they started me at but I couldn’t figure out how. When you’re trying to sell a product to a consumer you need to contain the experience to the best you have to offer.

Posting here for my reference, but others may find this useful.

2800bps, avi encoding:

mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts abitrate=128:vbitrate=2800:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2

2800bps, two-pass avi encoding:

mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=2800:vpass=1:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2
mencoder.exe %1  -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=2800:vpass=2:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -ffourcc DX50 -o %2

Putting a dog under anesthesia just to clean their teeth has never sat well with me, thus, I’ve never taken my dog into the dentist for a teeth cleaning.  Ever since he was a puppy I would routinely stick my fingers in his mouth to get him used to me checking out his teeth, and it’s paid off on a few occasions.  Like today, when I decided to try and remove the plaque from his teeth myself.

• Pin them down between your legs on the floor in area with plenty of light.
• Keep the dog’s mouth open with a rawhide chew.  Wedge it behind their back teeth so they can’t close their mouth [on you].
• Use a dental scaler, not a dental pick.  Dental picks are sharp and if you slip (you will, since you’re an amateur at this) you might stick your dog.
• Removing the plaque requires a fair bit of force.  Start by focusing on one small area and scrape it in one direction until you start to scar the plaque and you can see if beginning to lift up.  Then apply pressure to the weakened spot and try and dislodge the chunk of plaque sideways.  I found the majority of my dog’s plaque spots dislodged in small chunks.
• Apply pressure to the plaque in a direction that’s safe, so if/when the dental scaler slips it goes in a direction that won’t hurt your dog.  I always applied pressure on his upper teeth downwards, and his lower teeth upwards.

Good luck!

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/robert.w.rose/DogPlaqueRemoval#

8lbs 2oz

It was a huge day for everyone at SpaceX yesterday, we successfully launched our first Falcon 9 to orbit!

• CNN: SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches. Nominal shutdown and orbit was almost exactly 250 km… Telemetry showed essentially a bullseye: 126;0.2% on perigee and 126;1% on apogee.
• SpaceX: Video highlights at SpaceX.com
• MSNBC: SpaceX fans and foes speak out. …fans were effusive in their praise, while others were in the “damn with faint praise” category
• Economist: Feathering the Falcon’s Nest. The launch on June 4th of a Falcon 9 rocket… is a turning point in the development of private space flight. Though the industry’s coming of age is still some way in the future, this launch marks, if you like, its transition from childhood to adolescence.
• Popular Mechanics: Minute-by-Minute Lessons From Falcon 9’s First Flight. [Recycling after an abort] was in fact one of the most impressive things about the launch, because almost any other vehicle would have had to detank after such an abort and cycle for at least 24 hours.

I used to live in area serviced by Qwest.  I thought their tech support was bad, but I’ve come to appreciate them more, because their tech support people actually listen to what you’re saying.  With Verizon, you might as well be reading off their communication script yourself because anything not on that script is either rebuffed or just flatly ignored.