Olivier Forget

There is a situation developing on the World-Wide-Web that runs completely against its ethos. I am talking about the growing number of news websites that require that you are signed-in, and possibly a paying member to read their articles. From the web peruser’s point of view, it’s a terrible experience. You might be reading your feed on social media and decide to click on a link to read the actual article (instead of just piling on in the replies) but then, bam:

I checked Twitter briefly last night before going to sleep. Bit of a mistake. I saw something I did not like and it caused me to spend some time feeling uncomfortable as I was trying to sleep. I’m talking about Elon Musk suddenly aligning fully with the “Freedom” protesters. Let’s backtrack a bit in case this gets read at some future date. We Are In A Pandemic It’s 2020, we’re in the middle of a pandemic courtesy of the COVID19 virus.

I came across a post on Mastodon with the hashtag “#100daysToOffload”. Having seen a lot of #100DaysOfCode posts on Twitter, I was wondering what this “offloading” was all about. The Challenge 100 Days To Offload is a challenge to post in your personal blog every day for 100 days. Hahahaha like that’s going to happen. I set up this Hugo thing over a year ago because I wanted a place to recall my experience seeing a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch.

I love taking notes. It might be the only effective way for my brain to work. Regardless of the technology involved I always gravitate towards a blank slate of some kind and spill thoughts onto the medium. I used to buy paper notebooks and filled them with barely readable words and other scratches. There were arrows, diagrams, and strike-throughs on every page, and exclamation points inside triangles for when I really meant it.

I flew to Florida to witness in person the awesome power of the Falcon Heavy. My viewing location for the launch of Arabsat 6a was Banana Creek within the Kennedy Space Center, also known as “Feel The Heat” in KSC’s launch viewing nomenclature. It is 3.9 miles due West of the launch pad, as close as one can be for such a launch. I do not want my recollection of this experience to become clouded with time, so here are my notes.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while now. I suppose I took so long to start because I much prefer building things than talking about building things. When I was an aerospace engineer I worked in small experimental shops that routinely produced hardware. We lived by the classic saying “Hardware talks and bullsh– walks” and we had little respect for office-dwelling engineers who only produced theoretical papers.