When an astronaut is in space, their time is worth $400/minute.

That's why NASA spends more per user for usability research than any other company in the world...

I have so many stories and ideas, little ones and big ones, piled up, so many 'things I need to blog' that it's hard to even start on one of them, because to do so is to use some of the little time I have outside of classes and assignments to write one story, while putting off the others.

Hey, I know that doesn't make sense, but that's brain-stem logic.

I miss the trainblog. When I worked at Yahoo, I'd take the train as often as I could, usually 2-4 times per week, and every day I took the train I'd have more than an hour each way to write. It was just me, my powerbook, and the flying countryside. I was a more prolific writer than I'd ever been, partly because of the constant inspiration flying past Amtrak's huge windows and partly because I was working without a net.

My default state when I run out of things to do on the computer is to surf. I haven't used a bookmark list in a long time, so I recall URLs in my head and type them in. This usually means I sit there for a while each day, thinking 'what else haven't I checked in a while?' Sadly, it's clear that the net is too big, and my memory to perforated, for me to get anything done as long as this modality persists.

There's a folder on my powerbook, ~kfox/Documents/Writings/Trainblog, that has close to 500 posts in it (almost all of them later made it up to this page). Even after I stopped taking the train, I still put my posts in that folder, its real meaning surviving the termination of its original purpose. Late last night I was thinking about the trainblog, and how with wireless access available at home and at school, the net demons don't give me that isolation that breeds my favorite writing,. that, and I never seem to make the time.

I need to make the time.

So I'm trying something new. I've been going to sleep around 3am lately as a matter of course, watching TiVo, working on homework, surfing the net, or talking to my timeshifted leftcoast friends. I think I'll try and recreate the trainblog here in my bedroom, at 11pm every night, until I go to sleep.

I'll take my powerbook to be with me (heck, the weather's finally starting to turn, and I need something to keep me warm!) and write from 11pm until sleep. I'll only use the net to look up URLs for the stories I write.

It's either that, or start going to New York, Boston, Philly, or DC every weekend, just for the train time...

Last June, astronomers discovered a new planet, one tenth thie diameter (and one hundredth the volume) of the Earth, but is bigger than all the asteroids put together.

Hopefully this won't turn into another 'it's a planet, it's a comet, it's an asteroit, it's a moonlet' astro-pissfight. True, it's smaller than Pluto, but it doesn't have Pluto's ambiguous orbit, and a rock 800 miles in diameter in a regular circular orbit in the planetary plane isn't a trivial mass.

The discoverers dubbed the planet 'Quaoar,' after the 'great force of nature that summoned the world into being' worshiped by the Tongva people who inhabited the Los Angeles area before Western infiltration.

On another note, I found one paragraph in BBC article amusing:

However, Quaoar is not an official name - at least not yet. In a few months, the International Astronomical Union, astronomy's governing body, will vote on it.

I like the wording they used. It just reminds me of Enterprise last season, when T'pol says that the Vulcan Science Directorate has established that time trave doesn't exist. Astronomy isn't like football, the stock market, or Paraguay. A science can't have a governing body. Sure they can vote on what to call a planet, or whether to even classify it as a planet, but I'd like to see them try to vote on Kepler's laws of planetary motion, the gravitational constant, or Chandrasekhar's limit.

So: Another planet. First new one in 76 years. Nifty, but I wouldn't want to build a summer home there.

A nice article on the Digital Resource Management movement, specifically, Apple's counterstance.

I don't believe that Apple protects its users' right to burn CDs because it trusts that the user won't, but because people like Apple better for not acting as a tool of law enforcement.

I heart Apple.

PS: I had a dream this morning about looking up my powerbook purchase online, finding that it had been assembled, it was a 900Mhz G4 Powerbook, with a slimline superdrive. Soon, my precious...

Just an interesting story I read today, on the ongoing story of Provigil [Tampa Tribune], talking more about current presecription habits and recreational uses or lack thereof. Here also is a reporter's first-person account.

It's interesting that they term using provigil to stay awake overnight as a 'recreational use.' They also use the term 'lifestyle drug' when grouping it with propecia, prozac, and viagra... That's probably a better fit.

Anyhow, I know we've talked about it before, but I'm gonna keep up on this issue as it evolves. I'm curious about the progression of cultural acceptance (or lack thereof) of medicine that changes the paradigm of life. Kinda reminds me of cloning. It was all interewsting, until it unexpectedly became a reality, and now there's the polarized (unequally, but nevertheless most people aren't indifferent) public and political attitdes about it.

But I'm not even going to get in to cloning. I just want to be able to steal time now and then.

I'm in lust. I look online every day, searching for a sign. I flit from site to site, thinking "could this be the day?" I'm just waiting for the moment when I'll take the plunge, and make the commitment.

The object of my affection? The New Powerbook G4.

Most likely it won't be substantially different from the current model, in 667Mhz and 800Mhz versions. There will probably be a speed bump up to 966Mhz or even 1Ghz, maybe a little more hard drive space, a peppier video card, and other small enhancements. Just maybe there will be a superdrive, and a higher resolution screen. The back to school promotions on the current models ran out last week, and other signs, like Apple's pulling of refurbished models from the Apple Store, point to a release in the next week or two.

The students around here are about 1/3 mac, and they're virtually all TiBooks. The ratio's greater than 50:50 amongst the teachers. They're sooo sexy (the laptops, that is).

So now I check the rumor boards each morning, hoping for the sneak-peek, or authoritative-sounding rumor report. October's a good month for Apple product releases, and now that I've decided it's time for me to get the new 'book, I can't wait for it to emerge.

I hate waiting...

Dear lord, I just got an email from the Democratic National Committee, asking me to visit their site to see a Flash animation.

I'm not sure what's scariest: that flash satire is moving out of the niche editorial market, that our venerable political parties are hawking like college cartoonists, or that it's working, considering that I am, after all, forwarding it to all of you.

Still, I think it's funny.

So today I'm planning on skipping my Communication Design Fundamentals course to go see a lecture from Stephen Wolfram regarding his new book, A New Kind of Science which I've touched on before.

The book is a tome, and it's hard to wade through it while trying to keep its pomposity from sticking to your boots, but maybe seeing him in person will provide a nice precis of the text, and either encourage me to actually work through the tome, or know enough to put it into storage the next time I have to render judgement on my books' fates.

Big mid-term today (my first ever grad school midterm), but after that, the workload will ease off for a few days, and I can start posting the plethora of content I've been building up, waiting only for time to polish and format...

But first, I must study...

It's awfully quiet around here these past couple days, what with me having been in Malibu, then being sick this afternoon...

I feel like I'm on the cusp of something I know not what. I know that sounds completely ambiguous, but frankly I'm feeling a little lost at the moment, standing on damp grass in a dense fog, with a rope around my waist with a dozen others tied to it, spreading from me into the fog like spokes on a ghostly wheel, some slack, some taut, pulling me, the spectral hub, this way and that. My scant traction between bare feet and green blades lets me exert what little leverage I control to contest the pull of a single rope, a single external vector on my current life, but only at the cost of falling to the whim of all the others.

The inability to discriminate, choosing only one axis among many upon which to actualize my will, I'm tossed around, paralyzed, on a journey not entirely of my own making, yet in the end one for which I alone am answerable, as I have the capability to act on it, if only in piecemeal and often counterproductive ways.

Ahh grad school in a distant land: How little I appreciated your power for generating novel experiences in a person who thought he had everything pretty well figured out...