Space...

I just spent a goodly amount of time, using my Christmas-gift Amazon Kindle Fire HD to watch YouTube videos on the International Space Station.  Fascinating stuff.  If you get the chance, do some searching, and watch.  Honestly beats the heck out of old Star Trek reruns. 

I was particularly amused by a series of Q&A videos done by Astronaut Greg Chamitoff.  Apparently people could email in questions, and they were given to Chamitoff to answer.  The questions are fairly lightweight, and some are quite offbeat.  But Chamitoff answered them with a good sense of humor, and gave some interesting answers.  (I was particularly caught by one answer where he talked about the "smell of space."  Odd, but fascinating...)

Of course, me being me, I had to do something odd and tenuously related to the subject at hand, so I ended up dragging out one of my old IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPads, and started putting it through it's paces.  Why, you may ask?  Well, because the ThinkPad is the only laptop cleared for use on the I.S.S, of course.  (Watch those videos.  The damned things are everywhere.)

So, I've got my old Lenovo R40 out, trying to do upgrades.  This one is running WinXP, and Microsoft gags on the upgrades.  Mainly because 1) I'm running XP, and (by far the worst crime) 2) I don't have Explorer set up as my default browser.  (Blasphemy!!!)

I'll probably be damned to watch the Ballmer Monkey Dance for all eternity....

And, yeah, I know this is all pretty pathetic.  But we strive to make the totally unnecessary a way of life here...

Now, will someone explain to me why they're not running Oddities on the Science Channel?