Envy, and Night of the Living Headhunters

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Okay, so.

I’ve been working on a very large job for one of my clients, a huge retail chain that’s in the process of taking all their design and advertising in-house. They’re also in the process of upgrading their existing workstations, and they’re going with Power Macs and Apple Xserves rather than Wintel boxen.

So for the past four days, I’ve been setting up a bevy of dual-processor G5 systems. My client has twelve shiny new G5 boxen (each with 3.5 gigabytes of RAM and a brand-new 23″ Cinema Display), two new Xserve servers (each with a three-terabyte Xserve RAID array), and the desktops are all getting loaded with the entire Adobe creative suite and the entire Linotype font collection.

I’ve been drooling all over myself all week.

Want want want want shiny happy G5 system want want want.

This particular client is also putting a lot of pressure on me to come to work for them, overseeing their new in-house advertising and design group in Atlanta. Problem is, they don’t want to make me an offer; they want me to research the median salary in Atlanta for that job, and put together a proposal for them.

If we’re doing our research right, it looks like the median salary for something reasonably close to what they want is somewhere between $102K and $153K a year. Which is significantly more than I made from my business last year, and is even more than I was kinda sorta but not really offered to move to Boston earlier this year. If they go for it. If it all pans out.

Trouble is, I have another thing cooking with another of my clients down here that might end up worth a great deal more, if it pans out. Which is a big “if”–that client nominally has funding, but it’s tied up in an overseas bank right now for reasons far too complicated to go into.

And, of course, it’s possible that both of these opportunities will go exactly nowhere, though with the scond client that seems unlikely–they’re getting their funding, it’s just taking a while.

And when it comes right down to it, I odn’t really want to live in Atlanta. I’d much rather live in…oh, I dunno, Boston or summin like that, but we won’t go there.

Grr. So frustrating. I have absolutely no idea what to do right now.

Still want a G5.

The official numbers aren’t in yet, but from the preliminary it looks like…

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…SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize!!!!!!

As I type this, it’s on its way back from a maximum altitude of 368,000 feet on its second flight to claim the Ansari X Prize. The era of civilian commercial space flight has officially begun.

It’s almost impossible to express how exciting this is. Manned private space flight is one of those things, like nanotechnology and molecular materials science, that changes everything. Now everything is possible. Private space stations. Space tourism. But none of that is nearly as exciting, or as important, as the idea that we are, haltingly, leaving our ancestral home.

This is vital, to our future as a species and to our survival as a species. We cannot stay here. If we do, we’re doomed. The next species-ending catastrophe may not happen tomorrow, or two years from now, or two hundred years from now, but it will. It’s just a question of time.

And we should not stay here. We alone among all the animals have the ability to understand ourselves and the universe. Sapience is how the universe knows itself. If we are to become what we are capable of becoming, we must leave the cradle. That won’t happen until spaceflight is accessible and cheap.

What has been done today is more significant than the invention of the first crude dugout canoe. This is the next step in the same imperative that made us migrate out of Africa millennia ago. We now live in a time where we can see our way away from our homeworld. Very exciting times, these, and I am delighted to be living in them.

From the live Webcast:




And the person who made the X Prize possible:

Civilian Space Exploration meme

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Ganked from happypete:

In honor of the launch of SpaceShipOne for all the marbles on Monday, I’ve got a meme.

Add “civilian space program” to your Interests, and post about it. Let’s see how far it goes. See if we can generate some interest in Boldly Going….

To add “civilian space program” to your interests automagically, click here.

Quote for the Day, courtesy Deke Slayton, the late NASA astronaut, from the book Moon Shot; he’s quoting Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first human to envision rockets for space travel:

“Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

Amen.

For those of you who are Windows XP admins…

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…I’ve hust put up a complete FAQ on Windows XP security. I hope Microsoft doesn’t get too offended…

Fun Link o’ the Day

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With a tip of the hat to gadget_girl:

The Museum of Bad Art

Not just your typical bad art. This is art that is almost transcendent in its stunning, sublime awfulness. This is art that does for painting what Jonestown did for Kool-Aid. This is art that challenges the traditional conception of “art” as “expression which reveals the deeper mysteries of the human condition.” Many of the pieces in the Museum display a carefree–some would say “reckless”–disregard for the most basic elements of composition, form, and technical competence; the viewer is often left reeling. And the hard-hitting commentary that accompanies these works dares to ask the difficult questions, like “Are those mountains or ice cream cones in the background?”

My own personal favorite in the collection is here.

Baby lizards!

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On the way to the office this morning, we spotted this little guy running around…he’s so ky00t! He’s a Florida anole; the whole place is overrun with them, but I’ve never seen one this small before. (This pic is very close to actual size.)

He was a bugger to catch the first time, but after I caught him, he had a great time running all over me. He finally jumped off (onto the sidewalk, not a good place for a lizard to be), so I had to catch him again to get him into the bushes. By the time I got him there, he’d just about lost all fear of humans, and was letting me handle him with no problem.

From another forum: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN

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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN

Joe gets up at 6 am and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance — now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry. In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body an d how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It’s noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.

Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

What dreams may come…

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So yesterday, I was dreaming about nanotech.

Specifically, I was dreaming about Shelly, datan0de, and nanotech. In a weird kind of way.

In the dream, the three of us were in a huge industrial factory of the kind that was built at the start of the industrial revolution–an enormous brick building, with spinning metal shafts along the ceiling that drive great pulleys connected by long belts to machines that did the actual work (and sometimes lopped off people’s fingers). For some reason I’m not quite clear on, it was desperately, vitally important that we come up with a way to construct generic, programmable nanoscopic assemblers, soon (like in six months), or we would all die.

During the dream, the three of us were arguing about the best way to go about constructing prototype assemblers. datan0de, who was wearing his DragonCon gear, was arguing for a “bottom-up” approach: design a molecule that would do what we wanted, then figure out a way to make that molecule spontaneously self-assemble when the correct ingredients were brought together in the correct way.

I was arguing for a “top down” approach, where we first design the assembler, then construct it on a molecule-by-molecule basis by using devices such as atomic force microscopes to place every molecule in position. Once the first assembler had been hand-built in this way, we could then program it to build more assemblers.

Shelly was arguing for a third approach–namely, designing the assembler, then constructing protein-based machinery to build the assembler by using custom strands of DNA to create the protein-based machinery. She argued that datan0de and I were trying to reinvent the wheel; the mechanism to create proteins from a strand of DNA already exist, so if we could figure out how to build a machine out of proteins that would construct the assembler, then we could use the machinery inside a living cell to cause the cell to churn out assemblers just by cooking up the appropriate DNA and introducing it into the cell.

More FetishCon ’04 fun stuff!

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Yep, still more yummy goodness from FetishCon ’04. Friday night, datan0de went with Shelly and I, our roommate, and his girlfriend to the Fetish Factory party, which was a lot of fun. We ran into a bunch of friends there, including someone I haven’t seen in quite a while, who I ran into later at the convention proper.

The Fetish Factory parties are strict-dress-code affairs (fetishwear only), which actually helps to create a very immersive atmosphere–it was a lot more fun than I’d predicted. Pics of Shelly and I and our roommate’s girlfriend, as usual not work-safe