First, for those of you who didn't get to hear the live profanity at the DNC last night, here's a short clip of Don “what the fuck are you guys doing up there” Mischer as he swore at the prop guys when the balloons failed to fall as he desired. That said, I thought that Kerry put on a hell of a speech, and Max Cleland's introduction for him was very strong as well. It must be driving Bush insane — whether you agree with his “side” or not, the fact is that Bush has really been a bit of a loser his whole life, and they simply can't produce a similar “biography”.
Anyway, I'm getting a little tattooing done before I get to work today (just a final touch up so I can grow my hair again). I like to eat healthy before getting tattooed (so it hurts less, ha), so I've got a giant pan of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. Not that I mind cooking, but it really bothers me that if I go to the grocery store to get sauce, it's extremely difficult to source one that doesn't have “high fructose corn syrup” as the first ingredient after tomatoes.
Well, after a lot of fighting with the server, an experience update is in place. Thanks as always to the hard working review team, and all the authors. If you think your experience should have been in this update, but it isn't, and you haven't been rejected, drop me a line with the title of your story so I can see. Because of the mail problems I had to manually resubmit everything, and some of the ones with really generic titles like “My piercing” may have been lost.
I don't think the cover model is on IAM yet, but I wanted to share the email he sent when he submitted the photo:
This is my first tat, and the start of my decision to become an ongoing sketch book for my son. He drew me a picture of the two of us holding hands, and when I saw how he portrayed himself (his first self-portrait) I knew it had to be permanently added to my body. He then drew me the sun and added his signature... and I have what every tat enthusiast I've run into calls the coolest design they have seen. I am planning on adding at least one design per year, and when he turns 10 I plan to start on one side of my back and transition across until he hits 18.
Anyway, I really like kid-drawing tattoos. Maybe I'll get one in the future, if Nefarious turns out to enjoy drawing. If not, maybe I'll draw a tattoo for her (when she's a lot older though). In any case, enjoy the update… I'm off again, first to create today's new members and then back to the mines to keep chipping away for this vein of gold I sense must be somewhere ahead of me. Hopefully…
I've got to admit that I'm pretty happy that the first X-Prize attempt is scheduled for my birthday. That said, in some ways I'm more excited about the progress that the folks over at the Toronto-based daVinci Project have made. Rutan and his crew at Scaled Composites were given $25 million by Paul Allen. Now, $25 million isn't a lot of money in aerospace terms, but it's still a lot of money. They had tons of cash and a large team of industry professionals. No one is surprised they could do it.
The daVinci Project on the other hand, which is just up the street at Downsview airport, has built their spaceship for something like $350,000 Canadian (about a quarter million dollars USD) and almost exclusively volunteers. They're rolling it out next Thursday and are planning for a launch later this fall. If they pull it off, the money they spent to do so is a fraction of what Scaled has put into their ship.
I'm a big fan of these low-budget projects — my other favorite (although they're not Ansari competitors) is JP Aerospace who have been launching more and more impressive versions of their “inflatable” station (“Dark Sky Station”) which sits at about 120,000 feet up (and an airship takes you to it, and then you transfer to a second airship takes you into orbit itself). What's really cool about this company is that they've been giving away space for microsatellite-type experiments to local schools and so on.
