I made the switch last night from RoadRunner to Earthlink. All it took was a phone call. The Time Warner tech did everything while I waited. My cable modem rebooted and in two minutes I was an Earthlink customer. Didn’t even have to get a new DHCP address.

Now I’ll enjoy $30/month for six months of Internet service and then $41 afterwards. Plus, Earthlink is public hotspot-friendly.

One of the fun things about the Internet and hypertext links is that often you can follow a trail from one place and discover something interesting in a completely different place. I often get “lost” on the Net just this way: finding something even more interesting when I get where I thought I wanted to be.

I did a meatspace version of getting link-lost when I went to the library the other night. I didn’t find the book I was looking for on the shelf. Rather than browse the whole shelf or go home empty-handed, I checked the table for books to be reshelved. That’s where I found a copy of Return To Midway, by Robert Ballard, the underwater explorer who found the Titanic.

It’s a fascinating story of high-tech exploration and World War II naval history. And owing to National Geographic co-sponsoring the expedition, the book is filled with brilliant photographs.

During my sailing days, my ship came close enough to Midway Island to see it light up the Pacific horizon. Knowing it lurked just below the horizon gave it an aura of mystery to me. It was one of the places I would have loved to have visited on my Pacific deployments.

The fate of the Imperial Japanese Empire was decided here in twenty hellish minutes. The recounting of this battle – one of the greatest sea battles ever fought – is a captivating walk back in time.

I had another lucid dream (or LD) this morning, breaking a slump of sorts. I think I had already hit the ol’ snooze bar once before it began. Seems when I sleep on the “shallow” side, I tend to remember my dreams more. I think that’s why the LDs show up more often at that time.

The LDs I’ve had have hardly ever compared to the intensity of my very first one. I think my emotion and excitement helped make that first one special. My recent LDs have not been all that exciting, actually. Typically, I’ll be drifting through a dream where I’m back on my ship. Since I’m quite sure I’m no longer in the Navy, it is easy for me to recognize that I’m in a dream. At that point, things will get more vivid and I’ll try to derail whatever might have been going on up to that point.

I think what would help me in my LD explorations would be to decide beforehand what the hell I want to do in them. When I happen to recognize I’m dreaming, I come up short in knowing how I want to direct them. With no ideas to guide me, I tend to fall back into dreaming. Boooorrrrring.

Looks like my former startup company, HAHT Commerce has been acquired. They were purchased by Global eXchange Services for $30 million. This is after investors sunk +$47 million into the company since its inception.

Its kind of a sad, firesale ending to the company. At one point, I was loaded in HAHT options. It wasn’t long before I realized how diluted they were becoming. I never exercised them, and its probably for the better.

I wonder what will become of my former coworkers.
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I caught myself doing something yesterday during a demo which surprised me. I was in the middle of my speil about our product when I realized my cadence sounded familiar. The it occured to me: I’m trying to sound like Greg Fishel, the WRAL meterologist.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I just noticed that I sounded a lot like him. True, I have heard him speak on the air a lot, and maybe I admire his flow of words. It wasn’t easy learning how to speak on my feet the way I do. It helps to have a model to pattern yourself after. In this case, it’s a forecast model. Ha ha! A little joke there.

Seriously, with that and my weather geekiness at having my own weather station, things are starting to get a bit weird.

P.S. While I was fishing for a Greg Fishel link for this post, I came across a story on Bill Leslie’s new-agey CD. While I haven’t heard any of Bill’s music personally, I seem to recall he was John Tesh’s roommate at UNC. And that pretty much tells me all I need to know about his music.

Then again, I could be wrong. But what are the odds of that?

It’s deceptively warm this morning, relatively speaking for a January morning. The
NWS forecast says winds of up to 35 MPH today. Thirty-five miles per hour??? I suppose we’ll have our high temp this morning and watch all this “warm” weather scoot out the door as the day goes on.

I’ll be watching my weather station as these powerful winds blow today.

As I said, I love lots of NASA projects, like the current Mars Rover mission.

For any other space junkies out there, you can process the same Mars information the mission specialists are using. Just download the Maestro software and then add the rover data files. There are clients for Windoze, Mac and Linux and its all free! (Note that the files are pretty big, so you’d be wise to use BitTorrent if you can).

There is a community of Maestro users on the irc.freenode.net IRC network. Join the #maestro channel to find them.

On a related note, you can get a free pair of 3D glasses to see the 3D images for yourself. Just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Rainbow Symphony. Let them images come to life!
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A Roku HD1000 hackable Linux media server. Woot!

So our Fearless Leader is set to announce plans today to return to the moon as well as send a manned mission to Mars. What he probably won’t say is how he expect to pay for all this.

The two of you who know me know I am a space junkie. I grew up watching space launches. Even wanted to be an astronaut at one point. But though I still thrill when those giant rockets are fired up, even I can’t justify sending folks above low-earth orbit.

Computer and robotic advances have made sending humans into space entirely redundant. Sure, there is SOME science being conducted on the International Space Station, but its mostly space PR. There is nothing going on on the ISS that can’t be done remotely, for far less money and risk.

We dismantled our huge Saturn V rockets nearly thirty years ago, turning our spacefaring experience largely into museum pieces or scrap steel for razor blades. What passes for manned space today is essentially space public relations, usually fronting for one of the biggest money-sucking government agencies around: NASA.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of what NASA does. The Apollo manned moon missons were amazingly inspring. At a fragile time of world relations, they provided all mankind something to celebrate. But even with all the capabilities we had to get us there, all that infrastructure and brainpower, there was no denying we’d never be more than space tourists. We didn’t have the tools for anything more then, and we certainly don’t have them now.

The unmanned, inexpensive missions are now where its at. Putting people in places where robots can do the work for a fraction of the cost is bad policy. There is no compelling need to revive the enormous resources required for manned flight when the science supposedly driving it can be done with robots.

The glory days of manned space exploration are behind us and far ahead of us, too. We have proven it CAN be done, now we must now prove WHY it is done.

“Going where man has gone before” makes a lousy battle cry.