About a month ago I was one of 150 lucky people to be selected to go see NASA’s STS-134 shuttle launch in Florida. We’ve had a two week delay, but I leave Tuesday morning for Florida for a hopeful Friday afternoon launch.
Stay tuned for a lot more blogging over the next week and a bit as I chronicle this adventure of a lifetime. 
Here’s an image I found online that indicates where the NASATweetup folks get to watch, right next to the famous countdown clock:
I love Pixar, and I love food – a cool read:
Because Blu-ray just won the high def dvd wars.
 I am looking forward to it – having owned a high-def Sony camcorder for a good 2 years, it will be nice to create some discs that show off the quality of the video. Â
Last week I attended Ignite Portland, a fun night involving presenters that have 20 slides that show for 15 seconds, and then move on.
I’ve uploaded my pictures if you are interested in seeing what I found interesting.
A few months ago I created a facebook.com account, to help keep in touch with the older youth that had graduated or are about to graduate that I volunteer with at Entheos. I could only find a few of the youth when I joined, mainly the ones that had graduated last year.
The past few weeks though, the younger kids that I know have been creating accounts and adding photos and making friends. So much so that my ‘news feed’ section of facebook has mainly been full of “youth1 and youth2 are now friends”.
You heard it hear first. Facebook is the next MySpace.
The next time you see your IT person, say thank you. Why you ask?
My wife Jennifer works in IT at Nike – on Fridays she works at home, and often has meetings early in the morning before I go to work. I often overhear the conversations because of the speakerphone.
These folks work hard. They work hard planning the computer systems that run the entire supply chain for Nike. They are the unsung heros of Nike. You could have the coolest shoes in the world, but if the supply chain isn’t working, no one is going to be able to buy them.
So, next time you see an IT person at your company, say thanks. Say thanks to the unsung heros of the world economy.
This upcoming week is crazy for me, only from a keeping track of new things. Three big conferences are happening this week – the Detroit Auto Show, CES, and of course MacWorld.
Probably the three biggest things in my life are converging this week (cars, technology, and Apple) and it’s going to be busy.
Some good sites to keep track of things (I’ll be keeping this list updated as I find new sources of info):
Detroit Auto Show
Autoweek
Winding Road – a great new site I’ve recently found for autos
Autoblog
Kicking Tires
CES
If you have some good CES websites, please let me know
MacWorld
And the rumor sites (don’t go here if you want be surprised on Tuesday at 10am)
MacRumors
AppleInsider
Think Secret
Wil Wheaton wrote a weblog entry today about his comments on the RIAA sending cease and desist letters to youth who make videos to songs and upload them to various sites like You Tube or Google Video.
A great read.. the thing that shocked me though was this video that Wil points to. If you go to YouTube itself, these two teenagers have been viewed almost 6 million times. That’s television episode numbers. And Wils’ point it good, this is a ton of free publicity for the Pixies.
I know youth who have made some really amazing videos – birthday videos to different people. Very funny – I’d hate to see them get silly letters from lawyers trying to protect record companies.
This morning I upgraded my Comcast cable modem service to the 8 megabit down, 768 up. I am getting that in upload speed, but all of my download tests are showing about 4.5 megabit down..
I called up support, and they tell me that Comcast does offer actual 8 megabit download speed, but 8 megabit “bandwidth”. Which, well, seems odd to me (having worked at Excite@Home for two years).
Is this true? If I download two files, I will get 8 megabits per second download, but if I download one big file (say xcode from Apple’s servers) I won’t get more than 4 megbits per second?
Today, well, I was bored and went out for a drive. I stopped by a local Best Buy to check out the XBox 360 display, and watched the game play for a good 10 minutes. I was pretty impressed.. I watched a kid play Call Of Duty 2, and the graphics were really amazing (I’m pretty sure it was in HD). Watching it made me want to get one, which from the sounds of things on various gaming weblogs will be pretty much impossible.
I do have a plan though, which I won’t reveal online for fear of people copying me in the area.. 
heh heh.
And this ad for Project Gotham Racing 3 (Windows Media format, sorry, but it runs on my Mac) REALLY makes me want to get a box. The sounds of the cars are the most enticing to me, it gives me fond memories of going to a Montreal Grand Prix in the early 90′s and hearing the Ferrari F1 cars going screaming by at 17,000 RPM.
But maybe, just maybe I’m just falling into the hype.
Major Nelson would be proud though (he’s the only guy I know of from XBox that is weblogging) – there were at least 20 people who came by to check it out while I was there for 20 minutes. So the hype, for good or for bad, is building.