Thu, 18 Nov 2004
Excuses, again
I hit Dublin last Friday, with a somewhat sore chest, only to discover
that none of the local cellphone carriers provided GPRS service, which
I'd been planning to use from my Treo 600 to stay in touch. As we
travelled by air I didn't bother bringing a laptop, so I couldn't
take advantage of any of the (few) WiFi hotspots. So I was
offline until I got home late Tuesday night. By which time the
sore chest had acquired a nasty cough on top.
I'm now resting up, drinking lots of fluid, and staying mostly in
bed. If I had a day job, I wouldn't be going in to work this
week, let's put it that way.
Mind you, more signs emerge that we're living in the right
century -- that is, the 21st one. This has been slashdotted to
hell and back so it's old news, but while I was away the
Liftport group successfully tested a prototype
space elevator climber -- and here are some
photos. Okay, so that's about 70 metres gone, 70,000
kilometres to go -- but it's an interesting proof of concept. (A
climber, in case you didn't know, is the ascending/descending
component of a space
elevator, which I figure is a hell of a lot more likely to
give Feorag and myself a holiday in orbit before we're 65 than
any rocket technology that doesn't involve fast neutrons.)
Back to bed, now.
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posted at: 17:04 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry
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