Castles made of sand…

“Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don’t say.”

– Anonymous

…

Yea, so I just stuffed the back of my car with a good size sofa chair, a 4 drawer dresser, and a disassembled futon in its box. I repeat what I discovered in May: “You never know how much stuff you have until you try to pack it all (or most of it) into your car!” With just 3 items in my car, I realize what I don’t have. That is, enough space.

I still need to pack at least a TV, my computer, toiletries, and clothes (yea, I have to wear clothes over the holidays, darn!). Besides what I have failed to mention, the rest of my stuff will wait until the next trip in January. At that point I think everything else will fit. But just to be sure, I”m going to stuff this trip as much as I can. Being an engineer helps in this aspect… I can find creative ways to stuff the car.

Any my back. Even after putting those 3 items in the car all by myself (the chair and the futon were not light, shall we say *flexes*), my back feels no worse than it has since Saturday/Sunday. And looking ahead, I know an 8 hour drive is just going to do wonders for my back… *sarcasm*

Asking for forgiveness is to be humbled. Being forgiven is to be set free.

A fantasy will vanish as quickly as the creative mind will create it. A dream will become a reality as quickly as the dreamer will pursue it.
– Me

Tim Berners-Lee blog got so many comments, pretty much all saying “Thank you”, “You changed the world”, “thanks for a job” … etc. They turned off comments his blog. It was almost increasing exponentially. 455 comments in 7 days. Most of those comments were in the last 4 days or so after the word spread that he had a blog.

As I said before, Tim is the inventor of the world wide web. He says in this post that he just put together a bunch of technologies to invent the web; he wasn’t being Einstein.

Contractor Management SUCK. Most of the people working at the space center are contractors. While they do a good job, their management is scum. Instead of having their worker bees doing what should already be their job, they insist its not in their contract and end up chewing up all the money they can get their furry little paws on.

The point of the contracts is to save money by having outside sources that specialize in the area of work do a good job at the task. Several things that these contractors are getting money for could be done more efficiently by non-contractor employees. I can’t say much more without writing a novel about the situation this applies to, but I see the situation as pathetic.

And NASA needs more money for the budget?

I took my car in yesterday for maintenance. They kept it overnight and worked on it this morning. The replace the rear wiper motor, which hasn’t been working since I got here I think. But the main thing I wanted them to look at was the oil pressure problem described in my post on Monday. It wasn’t cold enough this morning to reproduce the issue, so they said they couldn’t fix it. Lovely. So I get to do this again when I get back to SC. Its likely to be easy to produce up there.

Apparently they don’t run their free shuttle service for the dealership on Saturday. But they had someone drive out and get me anyways. That was nice of them.

Tim Berners-Lee has a blog! Imagine that: The inventor of the world wide web has a blog. So I guess blogging is a step in the right direction towards Tim’s vision of a web of information sharing.

Yep, so I have a week left here… before I come home. The plan is to drive up overnight next Thursdays to avoid traffic. That means about 8 hours of driving in the dark. What fun. I think I will be singing Christmas music all the way. Cause I have this funny notion that I can sing (yea right).