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I had a previous regular engagement to be in Fort Lauderdale the later part of this week so I decided to take the opportunity to also view the shuttle launch on Tuesday 1:31am. I changed my flight to be in Florida Monday and drove up to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) area. I checked out on the web for the various alternatives to view shuttle launches. The shuttles are launched from pad 39A or 39B at the northern part of KSC. Other space flights are launches from pads in the southern part of the KSC. There are these five ways to view a shuttle launches. The first three are available to the general publics. The last one is only for VIP and/or families of the shuttle crew members:

1) view it for free in the spaceview park near the junction of US 1 and State Route 406. There are room to accommodate about 300 viewers along the water front which has an unobstructed view of launch pads 39A and 39B about 12 miles away, separated only by water. This location has ample parking. I got there on Monday night about six hours before the launch. 90% or about 40 people worth of the “front row” seats, were already taken. But the rest of the crowd started to show up starting about three hours before the launch. It was full house about an hour before launch. There are volunteers setting up two small color TVs to provide what NASA is showing for the launch event including the real life proceedings of the launch. The audio of this was piped to several large outdoor speakers. It was really fun carnival like atmosphere. Good thing it did not rain that night but bringing a rain gear and insect repellant would have been a smart thing.

In Titusville and surround area there are various other locations with slightly less ideal viewing angles and accesses - maybe a bit obstructed, maybe a bit farther away, maybe someone might charge a fee for parking…

2) Paid $38 to visit KSC on launch day. This will entitle the ticket bearer to also watch the launch in KSC’s viewing area equiped with large screen tv and high quality sound. This viewing location is about 7.4 miles from the launch pad. But you can’t see the pad due to trees. Therefore you can only see the shuttle once it clears the tree line. Of course there are plenty things to see inside KSC and the ticket is good for two admissions within 7 days. For an extra $12 you will be made a “commander”, get a Commander Pass that will allow you to enter KSC on any non launch day for a year. This pass will entitle you with a 10% discount for purchases in KSC gift shops, 20% discount on KSC food, and over $5 discount per admission ticket for your friends and families. The KSC admission ticket or the Command Pass is also good for admission to the Astronaut Hall of Fame 4 miles west of the KSC.

3) Paid an additional $21 on top of the above mentioned $38 to take a KSC run bus to go to the restrcited part of the NASA Causeway to view the launch. This location is about 6.5 miles from pad 39A.  It has an un-obstructed view of launch pad 39a and 39b where the shuttles launch. The shuttle is in full view from the causeway. There is audio of the launch proceedings but not video. Since only water separate the pads and the causeway a night launch will be so spectacular since the water will be lighted up for all these miles. It is awesome. I went this route on Friday and had a grand time. Due to causeway parking capacity NASA only sells about 2000 such bus passes per launch and they are usually gone within minutes. You can subscript to a mailing list to know when these passes go on sale on line.

4) NASA apparently allowed cars to park on the causeway for viewing the launch. Prior to 2002 limited number of passes were issued to the general public for this. Now it is only available to families of NASA workers.

5) If you are a VIP or a family member of the shuttle crews you can view the launch on a bleacher stand right outside the Saturn V site in KSC. There are seats for about 100 people. This is the closest site to launch pads 39a and 39b. It is about 5 miles away still. To me this is not as good as (3) since most of the view of the shuttle itself would be blocked by the supporting structure of the launch pad.

To me the several hours that led to the launch were filled with very impressive launch proceeding information over the audio stream from NASA. The lift off was so spectacular at night. The cheering leading to or at the lift off was so heart warming. Surprising ly the often spoken of accompanying thundering roars were no where to be heard on Friday. The first couple seconds when the sky was lite up it looked almost like a atomic blast were often depicted less the mushroom cloud. When the shuttle pierced through and then shine from above the cloud it was so awesome. It was many time brighter than a full moon and in orange of course. I highly recommend seeing one of the remaining six launches before the shuttle program is wrapped up. Be sure to bring a tripod and insect repellent. The rain coat I conclude is not as important since if it rained where you are viewing the launch chances are that NASA would have cancel the launch. It turned out that there could be no rain within 6 miles radius of the launch pad for the shuttle to be launched. Plus a long list of weather conditions have to be met for the launch to be on.

http://www.launchphotography.com/Shuttle_Launch_Viewing.html is a great article on choices of viewing shuttle launches.

I will post some video and photos I took on Friday.

http://www.templestudy.com/2008/09/08/the-seal-of-melchizedek-part-1/

The above URL gives details about this interesting fact mentioned in the high priest group priesthood lesson today. A couple high priests that had visited this temple were very impressed with the extensive usage of this pattern within this temple. The design was allegedly confirmed by Hugh Nibley to be the Seal of Melchezedek. The pattern is consist of two concentric squares offset by a 45 degree angle from each other in order to provide a shape with eight points. This is similar to the Star of David which is two concentric triangles offset by a 60 degree angle to provide 6 points.

One high priest said on a side notes that he saw this same design pattern all over a bridge in Iraq that showed up on some tv footage…

Interesting to read in this article that according to this research group, to construct this MD5 attack would take 32 years worth of CPU cycles of a typical single core desktop PC. But they completed it (the rogue CA cert) in 3 days using 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles in parallel. Basically the special hardware the PS3 used to provide super fast graphic makes each PS3 equal to 40 PC’s in complex number crunching.

This research group plans to publish in first half of 2009 the details of the latest improved algorithm they have used. However they estimate that other experienced research groups should be able to construct the same attack in a month by info in this article and public research results already published in 2007 by other research groups.

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/?ap1=rcb

Microsoft had sent out this response when this latest finding about MD5 was announced in a security conference in Berlin end of 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961509.mspx

In priesthood lesson Br. Court Hilton the teacher today pointed out that this fee has remained at $10 from Kirtland time to the present. $10 back then is equivalent to $140 today.

http://www.crn.com/security/212700354

security researchers from the U.S., the Netherlands and Switzerland presented findings for an exploitable vulnerability in the MD5 cryptographic hash function during the Dec 27-30 2008 Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

Last year around this time when I was in Paris my friend introduced me to this French new year tradition. Saturday I was able to visit the French Bakery in north Provo before we left Provo. I bought a $28 King Cake for Buffie to share this tradition with her friends.  The one from Paris was from supermarket and cost lots less. The Provo one should be much tastier.  Check out this article on the tradition to see which way you would like to treat the person whose piece of cake contains the trinket (a small ring for the Provo one), just search King Cake or Galette de Rois in google e.g.:

http://www.askoxford.com/languages/culturevulture/france/galette/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_cake

Cheryl who worked with me till I moved to my current job. She grew up in France. She said that the trinket used to be something edible. But since often the treatment of the finder of it was to sing or to buy a round of drinks for the crowd, the finder often preferred to eat the bean and not tell anyone. That is why now it is made of something not edible so the finder has to “spill the bean”.

Buffie let us know how things turn out.

We made it back to Denver in good time 1-9:15pm yesterday. Based on noaa.org info the first half of the trip through Rawlin would be better than the second half. As we got latest updates road condition info from Josie it still sounded so. Given that that first half turned out to be only-one-lane dry at best we were bracing for needing to stay overnight at Rawlin or at best Laramie. The updates were punctuated with phrases like blowing snow and slick. There were plenty flashing signs on the roads that said the same thing. When it got dark around 45 miles west of Rawlin it became difficult to see by eyes alone how the road condition is.  We had to also gauge the real road condition by how fast other cars could travel.  We soon found that the road was quite dry. There was just a 3-mile section west of the wind farm at Arlington that had some want-to-be blowing snow. We were thus able to make very good time on the second half of the journey,  average speed of 75mph, much better than 65mph for the first half.

We of course were very glad to arrive Denver a little after 9pm. But it surfaced the sad state of affairs with things nowadays. Apparently government agencies that were supposed to monitor and report road conditions must have left their posts and allowed flashing digital road signs become totally outdated, same for the similar info on their web sites. We believed weather conditions on this section of I-80 must have been quite bad half a day ago: when there was still day light, along the first 200 miles stretch we saw at least four tow trucks retrieving cars that were upside down by the road sides, some on the west-bound and some east-bound sides.

This morning concern the work ethics of the general populace a thought came to me about a writing named “A message to Garcia” by Elbert Hubbard in 1899. He wrote this stirring short article after dinner one day allegedly to shame his son into taking better care of the family publisher business. Elbert has been a successful publisher and the article became such a hot item in the format of a book (or actually a pamphlet) in the ensuing years. It was made into a silent film first and then a talkie film in 1936. To date it is the 5th most circulated publication in the world. Funny that other than the most which is the Bibles, the other 3 are of dubious distinction. - one was Mao’s Little Red Book, one was by the Jehovah Witnesses… In today’s work environment it would be hard to introduce such a fiery comments on work ethics. But at one times it was widely used as inpirational reading in companies, and it was issued to every USA military officers in both world wars.

Take a reading (for the first time or again) of it. There are lots of people no longer believe it has a place in modern day life. But there are still people who view it inspirational. I was introduced to it over 15 years ago in a Dale Carnegie training class Bell Labs sent me to. The class actually was the thing that changed my mind to go for a management job instead of staying as a practicing engineer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Message_to_Garcia

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/hubbard1899.pdf

Let me know your thoughts on what was said in it.