Tales Of Brave Ulysses

The European Space Agency’s SMART-1 lunar probe is set to enter orbit around the moon on Monday. SMART-1 features an ion engine to brake the craft into lunar orbit, and will search for water and the origins of the moon during its mission.

Saturday afternoon and I’m feeling lazy…

• Radio Reinstall: It’s official. My benighted Dell Celeron PC gave up the digital ghost earlier this week. It’s been dying a long slow death for about the last year, and sensing the end was near, I transferred all the important files (photos, mp3’s, stories and financial data) onto my Qube server. No more Windows 98 in my house! The not so bright side, no more Microsoft Money to track those finances, and I am left with my six year old Macintosh G3 as my only computer. One bright note. I’ve been using Radio Userland on the PC as my news aggregator and I successfully transferred the data and subscription information onto my PowerMac. I was jonesin’ for my newsfeeds the last couple days. Radio is acting up a bit, but I am sure I will hammer out the problems. And throwing a ton of RAM at Radio cleared up most of the kinks. I sure am glad I installed that gigabyte of memory a couple years ago. Now I can cruise my newsfeeds in luxury.
  
• Quiz Nite Redux: Thursday night saw the return of Quiz Nite, Habitat for Humanity’s big fundraising event. No pictures this time, I was too busy. My team was cooking this time around. We led through nearly the entire contest and ended up one point shy of first place. We were done in by the ‘spelling counts’ rule. Omorosa or Omarosa? You decide. Sure seems like a nitpicking rule to me. I won’t be satisfied until I win Quiz Nite and establish my reign as lord of all trivia on Guam.
  
• Audion Put Out To Pasture: I mentioned my aging PowerMac G3. I still run System 9.2 on the creaky old box, though it is becoming harder and harder. Another piece of software I use every day, Audion, was retired this week. Since I cannot use iTunes, Audion is my primary cd/mp3/streaming audio player. I love it. But it joins the growing panoply of abandonware that I am using on my computer. I’m going to have to make the jump to OS X soon, before I am completely obsolete. Trust me, it’s not for lack of trying, but you’d think I was trying to import plutonium or something instead of a new Macintosh. Hopefully the problem will be rectified shortly. I’ll keep you posted as the situation develops.
  
• Police Story: The cops on Guam are busy these days. A shooting death down by Lost Pond on Thursday, hostage crisis at Pacific Towers on Friday.