Houston, we have a puppy!

Last night I picked up a girl. Dark brown eyes, white hair, very cute, about 10" tall, four legs, one tail...

Yes, I now have a puppy. Her full legal name is Nordic Whisper Kaylee Emma Raskob. The first two are the fault of the breeder, not me. Her call name is Kaylee.

All she's got is a mouth, so the whole world looks like a chew toy, but we're making a lot of progress already. She's extremely hyper, and did NOT want to go to sleep last night, but I can get her to settle down when necessary. I also got her to sit three times this morning. :-)

While this blog isn't going to be all puppy, all the time, Kaylee will have a starring role for the foreseeable future.

Awesomeness

Nathon Fillion rocks. Castle rocks.

Monday was the 'Halloween episode' of Castle (the TV show) for this season. It opens with Richard Castle (Nathon Fillion) accessorizing himself in a Halloween costume that is strongly reminiscent of Mal Reynolds, complete with sidearm, suspenders, and brown overcoat. He then walks into another room and asks his daughter's opinion. In answer to her question "what are you" he replies "a space cowboy!" She counters, "didn't you wear that like five years ago?"

I swear, I don't know how they kept straight faces for that exchange.

For those who don't keep track, the movie "Serenity" opened September 30th, 2005. Firefly aired in the 2002/2003 TV season.

Oh, Castle is a pretty good TV show in general. It just happens that this particular opening is awesome.

Puppy, sleep, and Grey's

So, I think Grey's Anatomy has finally, clearly, and permanently jumped the shark. I think last season was a general downhill slide, though with a few excellent moments, but killing George and then this season... well, I'm considering stopping watching it. It seems highly unlikely that the season will recover to the point where I'll want to buy the DVD set.

I've been having some insomnia lately - had two nights late last week where I just couldn't get more than four hours of sleep. No idea why, or if it will continue.

And to finish on a positive note, last night I visited the Prospective Puppy! For those not in the loop, an American Eskimo breed puppy is in my very near future. Katie (tentative name) is an overly enthusiastic and energetic critter (so... she's a puppy). She also has needle sharp teeth, which she over uses slightly. We took to each other right away, however, and the future includes plans for quite a bit of formal and home training which should correct the "everything is interesting and everything is a chew toy" problem.

Optimism

It is rare for me to think that I'm an optimist. However, when something that looks like it is going well at first turns out to be bad for the Nth time, I have to wonder.

Yes, I'm talking about work.

Every time I think the 787 is going to fly, it gets delayed again. Dissapointments happen at a lower level even more often.

So am I an optimist who's pessimistic about being an optimist? Does that even make sense?

I'm a Redshirt!

Many years ago, I played FASA's Star Trek RPG. I played the security chief on an original-series era Larson class destroyer (USS Leyte). One of the stats you roll for is a straight percentile dice roll for luck. I rolled a 99 - the highest score possible. This perhaps explains how I managed to survive going down on landing parties with the captain, XO, communications officer... I eventually did a halloween costume for my character, red shirt and all.

But this post isn't about that. Well, not any more than what's already been posted.

I am, once again, a redshirt.

See, there's an author called John Ringo who seems to like racking up high body counts in his books. He also tends to give little paragraph/page length blips about some of the people he then immediately kills. Fans understandably dubbed these redshirts, and quickly found that the author was willing to use fan's names to avoid having to come up with names on his own. A year or so ago I emailed Mr. Ringo with a question about a plot point in one of his books that had been bugging me (he generally writes internally-consistant and fairly realistic fiction, so aparent plot holes bug me more than they do in some other author's works). He responded, clearing up the point and quite successfully explaining how it wasn't a plot hole. I thanked him and offered my name for redshirting should he choose to use it.

Looks like he has!

http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/Collections/LiveFreeorDieChapters/LiveFreeorDie_05.php

This is a (authorized) snippet from a book that is not yet published. It includes a brief conversation between the principle character and, drumroll please: "James Raskob, President, CEO and Chief Engineer of AMTAC".

I've been planning on getting the book since I saw the synopsis (I've bought digital or print copies of most of Ringo's books), now I'm wondering if I should try to get an autographed copy. :-)

For the record, I have no idea if I die, turn out to be a villain, turn into a recurring character, or have more than the one scene in the snippet. Regardless, I'm kind of pysched to see my name in print.

Winery Wedding

This weekend I attended a wedding at a winery in Ohio. I've been to many weddings, and I'm no stranger to Ohio, but this was the first time I was ever at a winery.

The wedding (and socializing with other friends in town for the wedding) was fun. I danced, drank, and swapped stories with a number of good people. As weddings go, this one was very short - just 15 minutes from beginning to end.

I was swept up into the group that pranked the newlyweds car - putting over 100 baloons in it, attaching a pair of handcuffs to the steering wheel, and scattering various other items throughout, in addition to the inevitable window markings and beer cans tied to the trailer hitch. I tried to be the voice of moderation. In any case the bride seemed rather amused at the pranking (it has been something of a tradition in this group of people), so all's well that ends well.

The dinner after the wedding was also at the winery. There were about 70-80 guests invited (quick guesstimate is that about 90% showed up), about 65 bottles of wine of about a dozen different varieties (no, I am NOT kidding), and about 150 freshly-made cupcakes (in place of wedding cake). I drank quite a bit of wine and not enough water, which may have contributed to some of the more energetic dancing I did. :-)

Should anyone ever be near Cleveland and interested in wine, I recommend the Buccia Winery, http://www.bucciavineyard.com/ . Try their Candlelight wine if you get the chance.

Flying Southwest Airlines to and from continues to make me appreciate them. Free-form boarding may not be for everyone, but I really like the way some of the attendants spice up the announcements. "We never anticipate a loss of cabin pressure. If we did, we wouldn't have showed up to work today... if you are seated with a child or someone acting like a child..." I still don't take the safety briefing seriously, but they do make me pay attention.

Well, it has potential

Those who've known me only during/since college might be a little surprised to find that growning up I was, and so some extent still am, a hard-core railfan. Yup, railroads, especially the 'glory days' of steam engines, are something I find fascinating, beautiful, and (important to my engineer's brain) practical and replete with fine mechanical engineering.

I'll admit my membership in NARRP has long since expired, and I couldn't even find my mileage log for the last train trip I took, but I still love the rails.

So I feel compelled to give overdue credit for pushing an upgrade to the sad state of long-distance passenger travel in the US to PBHO's administration. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-Rail/
I discovered this initiative just today.

What I'm not sure of is just how much horsepower is behind this. On the one hand, PBHO has his hands full trying to ruin healthcare in this country, declare one of the principle gasses I exhale a harmful polutant to be taxed, and generally mucking up our economy by printing money. On the other hand, even Amtrak has managed to squeeze budget dollars for the Acela service in the Northeast Corridor. If Amtrak can find the money for new equipment, you know the time for it has come.

In fact, I've been half-expecting a push for high-speed medium and long-distance passenger service in this country ever since 9/11. The technology was there even before that (I have a t-shirt bought about the X-2000 when it did demo trips in the Northeast Corridor back in 1993), and it seemed like the jumpstart it needed might have arrived in finding something that made air travel even LESS customer friendly. (See my various rants about the utter uselessness and in some cases INcreased risk of air travel under the TSA.)

Of course, $13 billion, while hardly spare change even in these days of trillion dollar deficit spending packages, is still only a tiny fraction of what the Federal Government puts annually into the interstate highway network, while remaining an order of magnitude more than Amtrak's current budget.

So is this a sop to common sense that will be abandoned in the compromises over health miscare, or a massive boost to the passenger rail industry? Neither? Both?