Aug 27
Right after I closed Windows Media Player Saturday night, following over two hours of streaming, my wife asked me if it watching that launch had been worth missing a party … I hesitated a moment, then replied that yes it have been worth it. Sure, those darn clounds had not allowed us to follow Ariane 5 in it’s climb to orbit for more than a couple of second following launch (27s to be precise), but even with that, the coverage was interesting and overall it was exciting to watch it the launch of the first ATV. Also an Ariane 5 launch is a rather impressive event … the SRB ignition is, I found, alway mighy impressive … the shock wave from it is enough to knock the camera. Here’s a YouTube video of the (most exciting part) of the launch, in case you missed it:
One thing I do miss, it’s on-board cameras. I think I ahve talked about this in a previous blog, but I can help to wish they had some. A view of the ATV floating away from Ariane upper stage will have been pretty darn sweet …
Jul 24
When I started this blog I had in mind to stay up date mainly as a developer or as a tech geek. However during this time I found out a couple of things – one is that many of the things that in the past required writing code are now part of ‘ready to use’ applications. And second that as an end-user I still have a gap to close.
The challenge that I faced in the last week was to publish some pictures/videos from my trip, which is a good excuse to share them – June ’08 Trip (apology for the non-Hebrew readers).
Ok, using Picasa is not such a thing, but downloading pictures from your camera, editing them, uploading them to a site, adding titles and putting the position on the map is not a trivial thing.
All of that caused me to realize a third thing (which is the opposite of the first two) – sometimes these so called simple applications are not so simple.
Another experienced I had that demonstrated that – I bought lately a new HD camcorder and did not understand why there is a ‘one click burn to disk’ button. Maybe it’s because I’m such a guy who always choose the advanced option when installing something or maybe because it’s not so simple to burn a disk. The task of taking a couple of videos I took, edit them a bit (just merging and removing 10 seconds at the end) and upload it YouTube required some good tech skills and a few programs. But this is another excuse to share my first YouTube video – alpine coaster (don’t miss the almost crash) – highly recommended!.
Right after I closed Windows Media Player Saturday night, following over two hours of streaming, my wife asked me if it watching that launch had been worth missing a party … I hesitated a moment, then replied that yes it have been worth it. Sure, those darn clounds had not allowed us to follow Ariane 5 in it’s climb to orbit for more than a couple of second following launch (27s to be precise), but even with that, the coverage was interesting and overall it was exciting to watch it the launch of the first ATV. Also an Ariane 5 launch is a rather impressive event … the SRB ignition is, I found, alway mighy impressive … the shock wave from it is enough to knock the camera. Here’s a YouTube video of the (most exciting part) of the launch, in case you missed it: