Launch of Indian PSLV Rocket

Rocket Launch - ISRO PSLV-C20 (25 Feb 2013)     An Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket successfully launched on February 25th 2013 at 12:31 UTC carrying Saral and 6 commercial secondary payloads into orbit from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
    The 409kg Saral is a joint ISRO (Indian) and CNES (France) satellite to study the oceans of Earth.
    Two of the secondary payloads are from Canada, the 148kg 'SAPPHIRE' and the 74kg 'NEOSSat'. Austria is launching two satellites at 14kg each called 'NLS 8.1' and 'NLS 8.2'. Denmark is also launching 'NLS 8.3' weighing 3kg. The 6th secondary payload is a UK satellite called 'STRaND-1' and weighs 6.5kg.

    This happened on Monday, so it's almost like real news. Everytime I hear Indians speaking English I am reminded of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. Some of their accents are a little thick. Some of our accents in the USA are a little thick as well, but it seems like all those thick American accents are screened out before they become official voices. Will we ever overthrow the cloying suffication of Disney-fa-cation?
    I can understand the guy speaking the time at regular intervals. That can be handy if you are busy watching what is going on and want to know where you are in the schedule, but I don't understand the guy periodically repeating "PS1 (2, 3, 4) performance normal". Do people really need constant reassurance that everything is going according to plan? Does this serve a real function, or is it just some Indian bureaucrat-eze that has crept into their procedures?
    The English may have treated the Indians poorly, but they did install railroads and they did teach them to speak a common language. I wonder if there is a connection. I mean, if the English had been all nice and politically correct, would they these two things have happened? Idle speculation, I know. It all happened over a hundred years ago. And then there is Rudyard Kipling. I'm getting off track.
    Notice the fancy and uncomfortable looking chairs they brought in for the VIP's. Whatever prompted someone to move those chairs in is the same motive that prompted our over-the-top inaugural celebration. In comparison these chairs are a venial sin. Notice the way the big cheese is so slumped in his chair he looks like he is going to slide right out onto the floor.
    The best part is the graphs they show, range versus altitude, ground trace (latitude versus longitude) and time versus velocity. Evidently this was a four stage rocket. The stage separations are marked by yellow dots on the graphs. I was disappointed that the video didn't go all the way to orbit, but that may have been asking for too much. There is a period of coasting after the third stage burns out. I suspect this allows the payload to reach the prescribed altitude for its orbit. The final burn from the fourth stage is to give it enough velocity to maintain that orbit.

Update July 2015: Replaced vanished video. I am pretty sure it is the same video, though it does incorporate a small watermark. Interesting bit: Zaran, the video poster, uses an avatar from the Kerbal Space Program. Fixed a typo.

OREO Separator Machine #1

Dumb, but funny. Of course dumb and funny are blood brothers. Created by David Neevel. Via younger son.

Google+ Versus Picasa

I was having some trouble with Picasa earlier today. Perusing the help forums I discover that canceling your enrollment in Google+ will cause Picasa to forsake it's new social butterfly interface and revert to it's original, fairly straight forward interface, which I knew, understood and liked. Cool. So I do that and everything seems fine until I try and add a music video to a YouTube playlist this evening and then I get this.

which makes it sound like I would be going back to Google+. Gaaaaah! I wonder what's happened to my other playlists, not that it really matters, I hardly ever use them.

Expedia, Part 2

This song has just barest connection to this story, but hey, it's not a bad tune.
    You would think I should have learned my lesson last time, but no. I guess I'm just a sucker for the easy point-and-click buy-it-now and regret it later interface. Family emergency, need to fly to the middle of fly over country. Well, OK, it's not an emergency, but it's serious. So we plan on leaving in a week. Looks reasonable, so we buy tickets. Less than a day later things have gotten worse and we need to change at least one ticket. Anne puts in a call to Expedia and she gets a robo-cop that tells her they will call back in 26 to 39 hours. 26 to 39 hours!?!?! You're kidding, right? No, that was the message. Well, say good-bye to that $400 ticket.
    Then last night about midnight a string of miracles occurred:

1. Expedia called back. 
2. way down in my cave I heard the phone ring. 
3. I managed to answer it before it went to voice mail. 
4. I remembered my instructions and was able to communicate them to the woman on the other end.

    Being able to correctly remember my instructions was the most miraculous of all of these, being as I was about half in the bag. The upshot was that we now have a $250 credit for the next time we need to go somewhere, and being as someone in my family is always going somewhere, we will probably get to use it.

The Vogues - Five O'clock World

This song is very cool, but a little odd. The sound is, I don't know, heavy duty? Dramatic? But the topic is like totally mundane. Their voicings, the Hey! and the yodeling are what give this tune it's impact. The music is like a background addition. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys got started without any musical backup at all. Evidently this tune was used in the intro to the Drew Carey show, or else two people both decided to make the same mashup.

In the year 3131

Via Dustbury.

Git Along Little Doggie

Cattle walk alongside an Indian army tank during a military exercise at the Pokharan firing range in India state of Rajasthan March 19, 2008. REUTERS/B Mathur