I just finished watching the special “Failure is Not An Option” on the History Channel for the second time. For those of you who have not seen this, it is based on Gene Kranz’s excellent autobiographical “Failure is not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond“, a book which I have read numerous times. The video did a nice job of enhancing the book for me - putting faces to names, actually seeing some of the footage of events like the Apollo 11 landing and Apollo 13 crisis from the perspective of Mission Control in Houston.

To me, the men of mission control were some of the unsung heros of the space program. These guys weren’t flashy like the astronauts. The wore button down white shirts, with ties, and pocket protectors. They used slide rules to compute arcane mathmatical formulas to throw a spacecraft around the moon and back. The spoke in their own little language, worked ungodly hours, and - from what I’ve read - loved it! They were the forerunner to today’s geeks - proto-geeks, if you will.

Geeks they may have been, but to those who study the program these engineers occupy a space just as important as the Astronauts whose missions they supported. One expression that I’ve read in a number of books that I just love refers to the controllers who were considered the superstars - these guys were known as steely-eyed misslemen. In modern times, I guess that these would be the uber-geeks - the Bill Gates or Linus Torvuldas types of the group.

One of the moments that Gene mentions in both the book and on the video as one of the most emotional moments of the entire space program (and given his resume, that is a fairly impressive distinction) is the point when Apollo 8 filmed Earth-rise from the moon. Several of the controllers interviewed also reflected upon the emotion of this moment - seeing our planet as (with apologies to the late Carl Sagan) a pale blue dot.

I first read about the space program when I was in third grade at St. Columbkille in Parma, Oh. I can still remember the book - it was a Time-Life history of the space race. A somewhat tattered blue book, with a picture of the Apollo 11 launch on the front cover. Twenty Five years later I can still remember the exact picture in the book that made me want to take it home to read. You’ve guessed it - the picture that Bill Anders took of the Earth from the moon that Kranz and the rest of Mission Control got all emotional about.

I guess that it’s one thing I have in common with my geek heros from Houston.

Most people have probably noticed that the site looks a bit different - this is due to the replacement of the static HTML pages I was using before with Word Press, which is used to power a number of blogs out on the internet.

This decision has been some time in coming - I had been using a combination of Eastgate’s Tinderbox and Panic’s Transmit FTP client to generate my postings and upload them to my website. One of the big strength behind Tinderbox was it’s ability to help build weblogs as well as other HTML pages. But, for whatever reason, Tinderbox and I always had a very rocky relationship with posting to the web - and one thing I discovered is that I would intentionally avoid updating the site just because I did not want to jump through the hoops I did.

Now, I’m sure that most of my problems with Tinderbox were of my own doing - things that if I was able to delve further into the software that I would have figured out. And there is a very active user community for Tinderbox, including an email list and a Wiki sponsored by Eastgate. However, I really did not have the time to put into the effort - I spend so much of my day fixing technical problems that when I sit down to post to my blog I just want things to work. That’s where WordPress is going to (hopefully) shine. Tinderbox will be relegated off to helping me do flowcharts and take notes for meeting and brainstorming - that’s an area where I’ve had the most success with it.

The big upside to all of this is that I should be able to perform updates to the site much more frequently than I have been before. Also, I’ll be able to start breaking things down into categories as I discussed months ago.

Technorati Tags: Blogging

Well, it’s been almost a month since my last site update so it would appear to be time for me to get off my backside and put something up. I guess I’m not doing too well with my plan from a few posts ago regarding posting frequency.

Beth, Alex, and I have just returned from a trip to Dayton - unlike most of my recent business travel this time I was able to stop and relax a bit. Two of the other consultants from the company are down at our client in Dayton, so while the three of us worked Beth and Alex were able to visit the local children’s museum, watch a movie, swim, and do some other fun stuff. On the other hand, we worked….

This was a fairly short trip - just Friday through Monday - but we managed to pack quite a bit into it. There was the work component, but we also were able to all go to the USAF Museum. For anyone who has not been there and who likes aircraft it is a must visit - the collection is nothing short of amazing, and in the 20 or so years that I have been going there they just seem to keep adding on. The latest additions (at least to me) are the Cold War gallery and the Missile Gallery.

Also, I was finally able to get down and visit some of my favorite relatives, my Uncle Dan (who happens to be my godfather), my Aunt Anna, and my cousins. They still live on the same farm that they have been lving at for the last 25 or so years - I place where I have quite a few fond childhood memories of.

Alex had a blast playing with the chickens, ducks, geese, and other assorted farm life. Would make an interesting video documentary - city boy goes to country.

Next on the agenda is to try and get back down again in the next month or so, but this time I need to cut that whole work component out of the mix!