Author: Wil

If you’re not reading bOINGbOING every day, you should start right now.
WAIT!
I mean, as soon as you’re done enjoying the majestic WWdN.
For those of you who are still here, I present a terriffic article I read at bb this morning: Confessions of a Car Salesman from the wonderboys at Edmunds.com.
It’s filled with useful and sometimes shocking information, that anyone who buys or leases a car should know. That’s not surprising, since providing consumers with just that type of information is what Edmunds is all about. The unexpected thing is, it’s wonderfully written literature, too. Are you listening, This American Life?
You are?! Well, why won’t you put me on your damn show then?! !?!111
Oh. Sorry about that. I mean, uhm . . .
Yeah. It’s a really great article, and worth your time.
Okay, now you may be dismissed. 🙂

Over the weekend, Ryan and Nolan and I played several hours of Talisman. Friday night, we played for close to four hours. On Saturday, it was almost five before my Warrior of Chaos defeated Ryan’s Thief on the Crown of Command. Last night, in an effort to play the game in a reasonable amount of time, we decided to play the game with just the original rules, and the first two expansions, but while setting up the game, I realized that my Talisman Adventure components seemed to be missing, so I set out on a quest to find it.
My quest took me into one of my closets, where I thought the box may be hiding behind some blankets. While I was deep in the closet (har. har. har.), I failed my search attempt, and a roll of eight forgotten Teen Idol™posters fell off a shelf and hit me on the head. I took 1d4 damage from this clever trap.
I never found the Talisman Adventure box, and we ended up playing “Classic Talisman,” with just the original rules, characters, items, and stuff. As punishment for our insolent attempt to complete a game in less time than it takes to fly coast-to-coast, the gods prevented us from completing our game. It’s still set up on our dining room table, to be completed later today, after homework and chores are finished.
This morning, while I quaffed coffee and waited for OpenOffice.org to load so I can work on Just A Geek rewrites, I thought to myself, “Maybe it’s a sign, those posters falling on my head . . . maybe I should . . . auction one of those Teen Idol™ things, and purchase a replacement Talisman Adventure Set!”
I smacked my right fist into my open left hand, Burt Ward style.
“Oh, good idea,” my Mr. T. Bobble-head said, “I pity the fool who doesn’t auction off one of those posters!”
“Don’t look at me,” said Mr. Plow, “I only talk when I’m in the right World of Springfield Interactive Environment, which is sold separately.”
“Well then, I guess it’s two against one, Mr. Plow,” I said, and hit submit.

I swear to freaking Anhur, if I die of freaking starvation on level five of the Dungeons of Doom one more time, I will scream.

On Tuesday, TechTV sent me to JPL to interview some of the people responsible for the Mars Exploration Rover mission for a Screen Savers segment that will air next week.
I was lucky enough to land interviews with Dr. Joy Crisp, who is one of the project scientists, one of the guys who drives the rovers (who I can’t find any web data on, so I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten his name wrong, like an idiot) and Julie Townsend, who is the Tactical Uplink Lead (how cool does that sound?)
I thought I may be a little silly (“So, tell me, if you had to reverse the polarity on the rover’s main deflector shield . . . “) but mostly serious (“What’s the data transfer rate from the Rover to the DSN, and what protocol do you use to talk to it?”).
When I was there, though, I found it very difficult to joke around, because I am so in awe of these people. I mean, I pretended to do shit in space. These people really do, and their work will have a far greater impact on history than mine. Oh, and they’re all super nice and patiently answered each question I asked like they hadn’t heard it a thousand times already. When faced with an intelligent scientist who is passionate about her work, who is taking time out of her day to talk to me, it just seems wrong to ask some flip question about how many Martians they’ve had to photoshop out of the images.
We talked a lot about what they expected to learn from this mission, and how relieved they were that it’s working so well, especially considering all the losses they’ve had from recent Mars missions. Their optimism and excitement was infectious, and electric, and I was very grateful to be there to share some of it with them.
So I was *incredibly* sad this afternoon when I read that Spirit hasn’t talked to JPL for 24 hours, and they’re afraid that they may have lost contact with the rover.
There’s still some hope that they can recover from what is being called a “very serious anomaly,” but that hope is fading fast.
So if anyone reading this could, you know, maybe look up toward Mars tonight, and send a little Mojo to Spirit, that’d be cool.
UPDATED @ 1800 PST: Spirit Beeps It’s Alive And “Commandable”: NASA Official

NASA officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have confirmed that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has responded to an emergency command this morning by sending back a radio beep — an event which had been stated as a possibility, but not a certainty, at the end of this morning’s JPL press conference. “This means it’s commandable,” a JPL spokeswoman told SpaceDaily.

(Link found via trackback. Thanks, Grant!)