fauxstor.net

00100000 = 2⁵ = 32

Other fucked up things that happened on this day in history:

1869 - Amsterdam typographer strike.

1914 - The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off the train of diplomatic events that led to the outbreak of war in late July 1914. 

1960 - John Elway was born.

1978 - UNICEF chooses rock group Kansas as ambassadors of goodwill.

Posted by justin at 12:32 PM | Comments (2)

I want people to call me the Space Cowboy.

There are many things I could do for a living. Most folks strive to find a job where they love what they do, and I suppose that I am no different. Unfortunately, there are some professions that simply won't put food on the table because the jobs do not exist yet.

Take, for example, my dream job: Intergalactic Bounty Hunter. I could do that all day and not even feel like I was working. The problem is, as long as all fugitives remain Earth-bound, I can't make a dime in that racket.

But there is hope: in just a few days, the first non-government, privately funded manned spaceflight will take place. Scaled Composites will be sending SpaceShipOne into outer fucking space for the first time in a test flight that will hopefully enable them to go on to win the Ansari X Prize.

In case you don't know what the X Prize is, here's the gist: $10 Million for the first crew to put 3 living human beings into outer space (at least 100 kilometers - whatever those are), then take 3 people up again within two weeks in the same vehicle.

So, you basically get a prize that amounts to about 4% of your total cost of investment. How can it not make commercial spaceflight a reality with whopping subsidies like that?

The real benefit comes from the creation of new jobs. No, I'm not talking about "spaceship factory janitor," I'm talking about something way better than that - the Intergalactic Bounty Hunter, of course.

Here is what I propose for Scaled Composites:

Payload #1: The ship's pilot and 2 passengers: Osama bin Laden and, umm, somebody easy. How about...Scott Peterson.

Payload #2 (two weeks later): The ship's pilot and two passengers: me and some hot anime chick. Oh, and a fuckload of guns. Osama and Peterson will have gotten a two week head start on me, so there should be a pretty big price on their heads. Like, maybe 50 million units of some yet-to-be-invented currency. Well, maybe only 2 million for Peterson.

According to the organizer of the X Prize, it should be in the bag by summer's end. Which means that my dream is only a few months away.

Even better, Scaled Composites aren't the only suitors for the $10M prize. There are about a dozen other efforts in the works. However, I must admit, the others don't look too promising. For a good laugh, have a look at some of them here. (This one is my favorite). Seriously, I half expected to see Calvin and Hobbes bombing around in their fucking wagon in one of those photos.

No matter. If Calvin and Hobbes go on a killing spree and skip the atmosphere, I am more than willing to hunt them down -- for a price, of course.

Posted by justin at 7:51 PM

Pix and Linx

Now that I have a separate links weblog (like everyone else), as well as a separate moblog (like a select, but growing, few), I can more thoroughly neglect to make posts to my regular weblog. In fact, this post counts for nil as it is only a meta-post about not posting.

The truth is, it is much easier to pop a link or two a day and take some pictures with my t616 than it is to find something that gets me pissed off or inspired enough to hammer out more than a couple lines.

What does this say about my site as an online journal/log/diary? That 10 years from now, when I look back on my archives, I will remember my online experiences (and offline experiences as documented therein) to be no different than my memories of early childhood: spotty little snippets and low-res imagery.

Perhaps as the technology improves, so will my memory. That is to say, once my phone is rocking 3 to 5 megapixels instead of 288x352 artefacted-to-hell postage stamps, I will be able to better recollect that I did not have 20/400 vision those few years.

But, like my childhood memories, I cherish the indistinct recollection - the type of events that you try to reconstruct with your friends, such as "do you remember that TV show with the hoopty-ass dune buggy that turns into a dope-ass dune buggy?" Sometimes your friends remember, sometimes they don't. And when they don't remember, it remains a mystery where you cannot tell if you simply imagined it.

Well, I didn't imagine it. The show was called Wonderbug, it was made by Sid and Marty Krofft (of course), and you can get it on DVD. Thank you for ruining everything, internet.

I do, however, have the power to continue shooting pictures of I-can't-tell-what-I-am-looking-at-here. I own a Canon S400 for any trips to the Great Wall of China. The rest I happily delegate to my phonecam.

Posted by justin at 10:20 AM