So, does anyone know an effective way to drill through 2mm of stainless steel? It turns out that the bit that I have doesn't do it and the one I purchased to replace it isn't doing much better.

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So today, we had people visit from CNES. This meant, for me, 9 hours of meetings. During one of the meetings the CNES Mission Manager told an interesting anecdote:

So, during a particular dress rehersal for the launch of some spacecraft, CNES had food catered in. Catering in food is the modus operandi at CNES if people are required to work after hours. It turns out that the food was somehow bad, and everyone in the lauch team came down with food poisoning meaning that the dress rehersal was a total failure. Due to this, it is now CNES policy to have two restaurants from two different famalies cater during any critical operations (or pretend critical, as with dress rehersals). I consider this to be the kind of policy that is completely reasonable, but which no one would ever think of unless it had happened to them.

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It's time for another installment of "Good Idea, Bad Idea". Today's episode is about Xenosaga III. Possible Definite spoilers follow.

Good Idea: Being able to earn experience points while inside Gears.
Bad Idea: Making Gears' power be completely divorced from the level of the characters.

Good Idea: Optional bosses.
Bad Idea: Making one boss dependent on beating another, more difficult boss.

Good Idea: Shops.
Bad Idea: Having the best weapons and armor in the game in the shops at reasonable prices. What's the point in even looking for equipment when the best stuff in the game costs 10% of your cash reserves total?

Good Idea: Closing all the open plot threads.
Bad Idea: Not ever bothering to explain why she isn't named Elly.

Good Idea: Sending a character with the appropriate family name to the appropriate place so that others with that same family name will make sense in a game which is supposed to take place later in time.
Bad Idea: Promptly killing said character off (even if it was in a show of selfless sacrifice).

Good Idea: Explaining who the mysterious character that joined your party for no reason two games ago was. (And who just happened to be on the ship you were using)
Bad Idea: Jesus.

Good Idea: Not giving you a game over if you die to an optional boss.
Bad Idea: Keeping any items used when you were fighting said boss.

Good Idea: Having characters dress in a way that elludes to their successors.
Bad Idea: Giving them the same damn outfit.

Good Idea: Exposition of the backstory of the main characters.
Bad Idea: Psuedo-time travel, but its really just in your head, kind-of not really.

Good Idea: Continuing a recurring theme.
Bad Idea: Mary Magdalene

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So, I've decided to set up my UT2k4 server again. It hadn't been up (at least not regularly) since sometime sophomore year, so I figured it would be a good way to put the second core on my fileserver to use. I'm still working on trying to figure out how I had the stat logging set up before (the old UT2k4 scripts were one thing that was lost during the migration from magi to mystique), but for now it should be accessible at mystique.blade.io. It may even be visible through the listing of all internet games.

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So, this past weekend I finally got around to completing the main quest in Oblivion. After having made several false starts at attempting to play through Morrowind previously, I think I have discovered what the fundamental problem with Morrowind was: it didn't even try to engage you at the beginning. In Oblivion, like Morrowind, you start off imprisoned and are quickly released. Unlike Morrowind, the time inbetween is spent introducing you to the way the world works (i.e., a tutorial) and provides an interesting character (voiced by Patrick Stewart) to draw you into the world.

After playing through Oblivion, I may take a stab at playing through Morrowind (probably not going to try going back as far as Daggerfall). Oblivion was most impressive for its scope, but that same scope became annoying late game when I was simply running through areas to get it done. I closed at least half of the Oblivion gates that I needed to close without attacking a single enemy--I just ran past them all and grabbed the McGuffin.

Oh, and when you are fighting the Big Bad near the end of the game, make sure that you walk behind him, sneak, and do a charged stabbing attack for 6x damage in the middle of his monologue. It will teach him a valuable lesson.

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So, I've been in France since monday for an operational readiness review. Earlier today (Tues), we had an ~12 hour meeting to go through all sorts of aspects of satellite preparedness. It was grueling.

The next few days, we'll be addressing all of the issues that were raised at the ORR. Hopefully, there won't be too many open item assigned to JPL and I'll get a chance to wander around Toulouse. I'll post some picture that I've taken once I get a chance.

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Things that are not Awesome v2: Electric Boogaloo

1. Large swarms of gnats. These gnats are nearly impossible to see while biking until you feel them smacking against your face as you move speedily through them. Kill the gnats.

2. Finding out your copy of Xenosaga III's second disc doesn't work. Apparently, if you had gotten to disc two just three days earlier, they would have replaced your disc since you would have still been in warranty. Since you didn't, you get to buy it again. Fuck NamcoBandai.

3. Getting your OLPC and finding that it has a single stuck pixel (green). At least the pixel is near the edge.

4. Going to work for a 7am telecon that actually starts at 8am.

5. Stale Oreos.

6. Falling asleep on the couch for like 8 hours.

7. Not being able to store empty directories or empty directory trees in a Git repository.



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Last night, I finally got around to going through and labeling all of the 004 show recordings that I hadn't ever uploaded to the website. All together, there were 26 full or partial episodes and one that appears to be broken somehow that I'm still working on. You can download the epsidoes at the usual place.

If you have copies of episodes that aren't on the official website (I'm looking at you Andrew), then let me know and I can update them.



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Things that are not awesome:

1. A person trying to beg money from you for Easter dinner while you are loading your car up with groceries. They're begging from you because they don't want to ask their friends who they are going to be going to dinner with soon. If you can lower yourself to beg from stranger who definately don't care about you, you can lower yourself to beg from your friends who at least might¹.

2. Being told to go play HaKox, then after beating the 10 levels that have just been exposed, not being able to save again until after 45 minutes of cutscenes plus a boss fight. If you're going to make us play the minigame, at least let us save before you throw us into a boss fight! At least it is better than II.

3. Kenny vs. Spenny

4. Owing the Indiana government $108 when I have refunds from both the US government and the California government. Serious, why can't Indiana properly withhold money from my paycheck?

5. Watching all of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 in 3 days then having to wait a month before new episodes come out. Even then, I won't actually be in the country when the new episodes start coming out so I'll have to find another way to see the first one.

6. Crimson Tears

7. Multipath routing in Linux.

8. StumbleUpon being full of top N lists and blog posts about blogging. No one cares about metablogging blog posts. I have taken to tagging every top N list on StumbleUpon that I find with the tag topnlist and I suggest others do the same.

9. KML. OK, here's the thing that I don't understand about modern languages which have graphical description as a major component: why don't you let me do per-vertex coloring. I'm not even talking about advanced shaders or anthing like that; I'm talking about something akin to OpenGL's ability to set the color for each vertex of a polygon and then do bilinear interpolation inside the polygon. I can't do this in SVG. I can't do this in KML. The libgd framework doesn't support it out of the box. Come on people, OpenGL was designed in 1992. We should at least be able to do 2d drawing as well as it can when we're specifying new graphical description languages.

--
¹ My response was to say that all I had in cash was a roll of quarters that I needed for laundry. This was a lie; I had plenty of cash. I just don't like giving things to strangers. Also, the whole "Easter dinner" thing isn't going to engender much sympathy from me since I was planning to have spaghetti alone for dinner.

This top N list has N = 9.

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So, I'm in Suitland, MD again. Earlier today, there was a meeting at NOAA that I had to go to. It was primarily an internal review as to their ability to support launch, but they invited everybody involved in the project.

Unfortunately, this trip, coupled with the daylight savings time shift, has totally screwed up my sleeping pattern. I haven't slept more than 4 hours continuously since Saturday night. This results in me being constantly tired. Hopefully I'll recover this weekend...

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So, JPL has recently started a drive to become more prepared in case of disaster. Although I'm sure they are well intentioned, I find it troubling that they have failed to adequately prepare for the inevitable scenario of the zombie apocalypse. This is especially troubling to me since I occupy a building whose defensibility, from a zombie infestation standpoint, is woefully inadequate. If a zombie scenario does affect JPL while I am on lab, I would be at a serious disadvantage. Hopefully they will expand their preparedness to include this serious danger.

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The Witcher is less stable than Windows ME BonziBUDDY edition.

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So, my father just left. He had arrived on Thursday to visit me. We went out to eat and I showed him a bit around lab. Overall, it was a very standard visit. Nothing of note occured.

In other news, I have finally found a piece of software to facilitate the monitoring of my computers. I'm using a tool called Hobbit to monitor all of my machines. It is suprisingly easy to set up. I'm still working on how to set up custom tests, but I think it should be pretty straightforward. For a look at what it does, you can take a look at my setup.



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Someone has begun to pollute the StumbleUpon information space (further than it already was). This person has introduced "stumblecards" (Idiotic). These things are nothing more than people attempting to grab revenue through ad placement without bothing to provide any real content in return. I advocate giving every single one a thumbs down or possibly google-bombing the stumble-cards tag.

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So, today I was going to give blood at the JPL blood drive that happens every few months. I was going through the standard routine where they take my temperature and such, when the person asked if I usually had high blood pressure. Apparently, mine was 142/110. This is problematic. Even just 2 months ago (when I last gave blood) my BP was 124/82. I'm guessing that my high BP is due to stress; this week has been pretty rough. Nevertheless, I set up an appointment with my doctor for Monday.

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