As time goes by, I find more and more unhappy customers… not because I’m turning out a crappy product or not filling orders, but because the emails i send out are directed into spam buckets. I *assume* that this is because the emails have one or more, sometimes many, HTML links in them, and the spam filters read them as, well, spam. But an email exchange usually fixes that right up.
One problem that I can’t seem to fix, however, is orders from the “free.fr” email system. Multiple machines, multiple email systems, all messages sent to “free.fr” addresses bounce back as undeliverable because the system has, through presumably the same process as he spam filters, decided that these messages are spam, and has successfully blocked me out. So if you have a free.fr email address and don;t get a reply from me, *ever,* contact me via a *different* email.
It should surprise nobody that time passes, but it somehow still seems remarkable that the 9-11 attacks were eighteen years ago today. I was on the other side of the continent in California, working at an ICBM factory south of San Jose; and even though there were no attacks our way, that didn’t stop the rumor machine from *inventing* attacks. A truck bomb in town? Turned out to be a vehicle backfiring. A tanker detonating in Discovery Bay? Nope. A truck bomb on one of the major bridges? A truck that had legitimately broken down. The bobcat that was looking down on me from three feet above in an outdoor boneyard as I dug through ten-year-old bits and pieces looking for usable parts of cruise missile booster motors so we could get production back up and running again ASAP? That was real enough, but that was less of an “attack” and more of a “curious kitty.”
And now people who were born on that, and even several years prior, who have no recollection of a world *without* 9-11 and the resulting cultural, political military and legal changes, are adults. This just weirds me out.
… And now I can’t log into the APR Blog to make new posts or edit the existing ones. Gaaaahhhhhhrrrrrr.
UPDATE, the next day: aerospaceprojectsreview.com and the blog all *seem* to be working just fine again. If you have any trouble… sigh, let me know in the comments…
The Greeks had a lot of gods, many of which are pretty obscure today, especially given the dire state of the modern under-educational system. This may prove helpful:
CNN might have taken the top spot, but when their paid talking head started shrieking that Trump should resign, be impeached, arrested and imprisoned, I was busy not pointing my face at the TV and only heard it. So the below video where the narrator lists all the ways that SpaceX is going to destroy the planet with rocket launches – including dumping carbon black (?), chlorine (?!?) and aluminum oxide (?!!??!) into the upper atmosphere – takes the prize for today.
As part of the argument, the video includes a graphic showing that a single Falcon 9 flight consumes 147 metric tons of kerosene, meaning it dumps 150 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a single transatlantic flight. But… does it? The range of such a flight is about 4,800 km. Modern jetliners consume around 3 liters of jet fuel – essentially kerosene – per 100 km per seat, or about 144 liters per seat per flight. 144 liters is about 115 kilograms. The 777 can carry about 350 passengers, so 350*115kg = 40.25 metric tons of fuel. Without running the terribly complex calculations, it seems to me that 147 metric tons is not 150 times greater than 40 metric tons. Granted, not doing the math on that means I fall into the Other Ways Of Knowing category of addlepated imbecile who thinks that math is a tool of the cisheteronormative whiteness patriarchy, but it’s late and I’m tired, and my spirit animal assures me that the planets are aligned just right in the zodiac so that I can make a guess about which number is bigger so long as I avoid integer shaming.
This dismal piece of gormless chickenshittery terminates with a plea to end space exploration and, in the words of three generations of absolutely genetically defective morons, focus our attention instead on the Earth.
The “Major Matt Mason” line of “space toys” was somewhat before my time, but I gather that for a lot of people who were kids in the heady days of the 1960’s – at least for those for whom the sixties held more than hippies and assassinations and the decline of western civilization – those toy astronauts and spaceships hold a special spot in their memories.
It now seems that “MMM” toys might make a comeback, since it’s rare for a live action major science fiction movie to not have merchandizing, and it hardly seems likely that the associated cash grab for a movie based on a toy line won’t feature toys. And as memory serves, another set of movies that featured Tom Hanks and a toy astronaut have flooded the aisles of WalMart with mountains of toys. I suspect, though, that the next generation of “MMM” toys will be a tad different than the originals.
A few days ago I asked if people were having trouble accessing the other website, http://aerospaceprojectsreview.com. The responses were roughly split between “no problem” and “forbidden.” I’ve gotten a response from the tech support at the web host… the security software loaded onto the site that is designed to protect the site from malicious attacks needed to be reset for some reason, and in the meantime it’s become overly enthusiastic in blocking people. Resetting has been initiated, but it will apparently take 24 to 48 hours to fully take effect.
So if you’ve had issues accessing the page or one of the sub-pages, take a moment in a day or two to see if you can now access it. Let me know when things work or, come Wednesday or so, if you’re still having issues.
This is *not* the sort of thing I needed now. If someone goes to a website and the thing won’t load up, chances are fair they’ll never go back. Sales of USBP22 and USTP09, released after the site started blocking an unknown but non-trivial number of people, are substantially reduced from hat they should have been. This added stress and lessened finances right now is *not* friggen helpful.
My finely tuned, highly skilled analytical mind allowed me to see, with only a moments examination, a deviously subtle political message added to this $20 bill.
