Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Firefox, Shuttles, and Childish Fascination

Just some random notes to fill space on a Wednesday morning:

Firefox 1.0.5 is out.

Of course, my browser hasn't figured this out yet, even though the download's been available all night. Mozilla delays auto-notification so the technocratic elite can get the patches first, evidently. I kid (sort of). It's an interesting topic, actually, which has been debated to death by people with far more energy than I have.

The space shuttle Discovery is set to launch this afternoon after repairs had to be done on the pad. Interesting to note that CNN calls it "emergency repairs" and Space.Com calls it "minor repairs." I guess they're both right. Enjoy your spin. I've set my desktop wallpaper to the beautiful glory shot of Columbia preparing for its first launch (STS-1), which I snagged off of APOD a while back.

Finally, on a more personal note, while eating lunch yesterday I watched a pair of street sweepers operate on Route 20 in Northboro. I got to watch them operate, empty the accumulated debris into a dump truck, which in turn covered the dirt with a sheet and turned around to drop it off somewhere. I felt like a little kid watching construction equipment at work; I had never really thought about the process of street sweeping. I thought I'd find more info on the process on HowStuffWorks, but no dice. Instead, I found this page, which talks about street sweeping from a municipal standpoint: how it improves your city to do it. This is why I love the Internet :).

1 comment:

Dave said...

And, of course, they scrubbed the shuttle launch. *sigh*