I started writing this at around 1 o’clock, then some friends came over and I stopped. It’s now almost 3pm and not much has changed. The protests should be winding down and here, less than a mile south, there’s almost no indication they’re happening at all. The sidewalks appear normal, there isn’t an excess of sirens and things seem basically quiet. The same goes for TV:

• CBS: NCAA Basketball
• NBC: Speed Skating
• FOX: Nascar
• ABC: Speed Skating
• UPN: FX2
• WPIX: Beastmaster
• PBS: Something boring
• CSPAN 1: Senate Intelligence Committee meeting from Tuesday
• CSPAN 2: BookTV from February 5, 1999
• CNN: In The Money
• CNN Headline News: Nothing important
• CNN World: “Al Qaeda – The New threat”
• CNBC: Infomercial
• MSNBC: ‘Showdown with Saddam”
• FOX News: News

I finally got around to announcing Joe’s Filters on VersionTracker and MacUpdate. So far there’ve been more clickthroughs from VersionTracker and more downloads through MacUpdate.

I bought Ken Burns’ The Civil War on DVD recently (found it cheaper than on Amazon). Tonight I decided I’d listen to that instead of music while working. Then I was reminded why I hate DVDs so much. I don’t even know how much crap there is we’re supposed to be forced to sit through at the beginning of those disks. After having a small fit of button pushing to no avail, I quit Apple’s DVD player and opened VLC and the movie popped right to the beginning, no crap, no waiting.

I haven’t seen the film in years, it really is a masterpiece.

Update: VLC is good, but it’s a little buggy and a huge processor hog. It was using more than 65% of the processor by itself, making the laptop very hot, other applications sluggish, causing all the fans to turn on and making my hands sweaty. A quick Google search turned up this patch for Apple’s DVD player which overrides all those asinine ‘action prohibited’ messages on DVDs. I installed it and it seems to work perfectly. Now I just need something like that for the DVD player connected to the TV.

Cool! I just wish I could read it…

Buzz Aldrin reflecting on fear, bravery and valor in the New York Times:

“I don’t think anybody astronauts or otherwise is born with some kind of right stuff. It’s something you work into.”

To learn about bravery, ask a man who walked on the moon.

That article also got me thinking about Michael Collins. Talk about your unsung hero. He went all the way to the moon and stayed in the Command Module (incidentally named Columbia) orbiting the moon alone, to make sure they’d be coming back to Earth. Imagine what must have been going through his head while Neil and Buzz were hopping around Mare Tranquillitatis — The Sea of Tranquility. On the far side of the Moon no communications were possible. One man in a tin eggshell whose orbit defined the furthest frontier of humanity’s reach. With all the Moon and space behind him, no one has ever been so far from home. The loneliness and awe of those 26 and half hours must be unprecedented in all of human history.

Five months later Michael Collins resigned from NASA and the Air Force.

“The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.“

darkened in memorium