Pictures from the Flood

As promised earlier here are a couple of pics from this last weekend :

Texas Flood

Nope, its not just a song by the Late Great Stevie Ray Vaughn...its also something I experienced last weekend. My mom was gracious enough to fly me up to Dallas this past weekend for a couple of reasons....One it was the weekend between my two oldest neices birthdays, and her sister and brother-in-law were coming into town. I hadn't been home in while so I jumped at the opportunity. So I went up to Hobby on Friday, hopped on board Southwest (they were early) and I arrived in Dallas about 15 minutes before scheduled. I thought "hey this is great!" So Saturday it starts to rain...and rain....and rain. My Aunt and Uncle eventually arrived, and my sister and the kidos, came over and we preceeded to have a great time. It was fun to see everyone and play with all the girls...what can I say, they love their uncle Ted. Sunday arrives, and guess what...still raining....and raining...and raining. So I hooked up with one my childhood buddies who had just bought a house, so we go over to his place to watch some college hoops, except its raining and now flooding and the main road to his house is blocked off. We finally get to his place by the back roads and the power goes out as soon as we get there. Somewhat quickly the power comes back on and we get a chance to watch some good games....Great House by the way Will.
It gets about that time and we need to start heading towards the airport so he can drop me off. We leave his place at about 4pm, for my 6:30 flight. I figure since the airport is on the other side of town and hour and half is still plenty of time to get me to the airport by 5:30. Well boy was I wrong. We get on I-35 in Dallas and realize....WE CAN'T GET OFF!!!! EVERY SINGLE EXIT is flooded. In fact the streets looked like rivers.

So because the exits are closed, and the water is now flooding onto the highways closing lanes, traffic gets backed up for miles.
Well its about 6pm, and I know now that I am going to miss my flight, so I call my Mom to see if she can tell me anything about my flight...she thankfully reports that my flight has been delayed until 7:30. I think to myself "Whew" I should make it there by then....RIIIIGGGHHHTTTT..
I finally get to Love field a little after 6:30 pm, and guess what, my flight has been indefinetly delayed.
Well an already long story short, my flight ends up getting into Love Field by about 8:30. Of course once we board is when we are informed that we can't fly straight to Houston, we have to go around the massive storm that is currently flooding Dalas. We end up flying out and around Abiline down through Junction and then around to Houston...my plane lands at 10:55pm.

I wanted to post some pictures but was having problems with Blogger, stay tuned for some pics of Texas Flood 2006.

Being sick sucks...But....

So, I get to spend my Saturday sicker than a dog, I think its a touch of food poisoning. But that's neither here nor there. So since I'm sick I plopped myself on my couch in front of the TV dozing in and out of consciousness. During one of my states of being semi-alert, one of those extra cheesy martial arts movies was on. Now I love this movies....The acting is horrible, its high on the unintentional comedy scale (royalties to Bill Simmons). Anyways as I am watching this I semi recognize the evil Japanese bad guy. Since I am somewhat drugged up at this point to help get over my sickness it took me a while to realize who I was looking at.....It was the Food Chairman on Iron Chef America!!!!
Didn't know that guy had been in any movies...oh well it was worth a laugh.

THE Rolling Stones Article

So a couple of weeks ago a co-worker forwarded out to our group an article from Rolling Stones with something in the body along the lines of "After this you will be writing a letter to the editor!" I thought to myself, "HUH" what in Rolling stones magazine would make me that upset? Little did I know.
That mountain of High Tech writing, that leader of Space journalism Rolling stone wrote an "in depth" of NASA's Vision on Exploration, otherwise known as Going to Mars......Now don't get me wrong there are plenty of things that NASA has done or is doing that deserves discussion and sometimes flat out slamming, but if you are going to do that, PLEASE I beg you get your fact straight. I am not sure where to start, but I can say I have never been more aghast at an article than I was after reading it. There are things in the article that our either Flat out wrong or stupid. One example late in the article the author states that a certain crew member "quite literally ran away" what???? I doubt someone in space has ever literally ran away from anything. The article reads like NASA doesn't understand how difficult going to Mars is? As someone that has been in meetings about NASA and exploration let me implore you how much NASA knows and understands how difficult going to the MOON is, let alone Mars. At another point in the article the author discusses Mission Controls ability to close hatches on board the ISS. As a Flight controller in Mission control, let me just say....That not possible, not even close. The article tries to slam NASA for being too far reaching in one breath and yet not forward thinking enough in the next. I don't quite understand what this article hoped to accomplish. The sad thing is, that there are some valid points in the article: Going to Mars will be extremely difficult, time consuming, hard psychologically to the crewmember and outrageously expensive. However the author loses any knowledgeable reader with some its more outlandish errors misconceptions.
Please Rolling Stones I urge you...Stick to Music, not Space.

Initial Musings

Well its a Saturday afternoon and I just finished chatting with my girlfriend. As anyone who knows me knows she is in Germany working for our company over there for the next 6 months. Makes it hard on the relationship, but so far so good, thank GOD for technology, Web Camera, Internet, MSN Messenger, and international Cell Phones have helped tremendously. I'm hoping to get over there in May, but well working at NASA, everything is revolving around the next shuttle launch, scheduled for wouldn't you know it May...that plus being the mission manager of the next mission makes it even harder to leave work for the next 6 months.Anyways rambling a little, but I hope this is a place I can share my thoughts and ideas, muse a little here and there. If people read it great, if not, well then....at least its therapeutic for me.