Update: Discovery landed this morning right on time and everything went smoothly. The crew is now off the Orbiter and the long process of inspection has begun.
Just a couple of quick notes to start the morning:
- As I write this (Sunday night) the Space Shuttle is due to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:14 Pacific Time (13:14 Greenwich). They close the hatch (really, the payload bay doors) around 2:00 a.m. Pacific, fire the engines up 3 hours later, and in only and hour from then they’ll be home– if it doesn’t rain on the landing site, in which case they’ll scrub the attempt (actually, they won’t even deorbit if there’s a significant chance of rain). There were some troubles on the mission: one of their auxiliary power units which powers the hydraulics– needed to brake upon landing — gave them some grief. However, there are two backup units, so it shouldn’t be too big a worry. I suppose I’ll know when I wake in the morning, so I’ll post again when I have more info.
- You might have noticed the blog format changed again. I listened to the comments folks made when I moved the blog to the mainpage, the most common and important complaint being that the menu disappeared. Well, I tried to add one to the layout template (called a "theme") I was using and it was a nightmare. And the final straw, too: I had been having lots of trouble using the code in that theme. So I searched for three-column themes, found one that was close to what I liked, and spent all day hacking it. It was fun, actually! I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and write code in ages. What I came up with is pretty different than the template I used to base it on, but very similar to how the blog looked before. I hope everyone likes it. And remember: in a few days now I’ll be switching commenting systems entirely, so don’t worry about any issues there.
July 17th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Hey, I think what you’ve done is actually quite cool, doesn’t look too ’squished’
July 17th, 2006 at 3:23 am
You need to view it in Safari…. it’s one big, WIDE column. The menu is about all that shows up now – but hey, it’s on top! Below that is the posts. Something is wrong with the one of the DIVs maybe? Possibly a missing FLOAT?
July 17th, 2006 at 3:34 am
Dave is right about Safari. However, it looks pretty good! Just a little spread out.
July 17th, 2006 at 3:41 am
Yes…it is very “spread out”.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:16 am
For me, it is looking good (firefox 1.5.x). And definetly better than before.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:47 am
I, as an objective scientist, approve the look. (I’m using Firefox 1.5, by the bye.) I would like to see direct links to the “Astrology = Garbage” and the Moon Hoax debunking on that left-hand bar.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:35 am
Very good! I like that menu on the side! I think it’s the perfect middleground for the people that prefered the old page and those that prefered the blog.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:21 am
Phil,
Since you’re using WordPress, you might want to look into Sidebar Widgets. It’s a neat way to keep things organized and modular.
Also, the Shuttle is safely back on solid ground.
The landing was nearly perfect as I could tell.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:22 am
It also looks good in Opera 8.54
July 17th, 2006 at 7:08 am
It looks good to me.
Please do not assail me with produce; I am using IE 6.0 at a resolution of 1152 by 864.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:33 am
You need to view it in Safari….
Actually, I think you need to switch to Firefox.
In reality, I cannot test it on a Mac very easily, since I have a PC. I did check it on IE and Firefox, and had a million little problems. For example, I was trying to put a small border around the navbar under the banner. But when I did, it kept introducing a big space under the bar in Firefox… but not IE. OK, so I changed the code, and then the problem went away on Firefox but appeared in IE! It was maddening, so I simply removed the border. I want one there to separate it from the banner image, but oh well. I have another problem in the right hand sidebar at the bottom, with the extra little line there. But that is due to the way WP codes the blogroll links, and I cannot figure out how to fix it. It’s no big deal, but I hate stuff like that.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Shuttle landed, BTW.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Looks good to me – Netscape 8.1
Also checked IE 6.0. Looks fine there too.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:40 am
I’m getting the site via e-mail notice. I still get the old main page this way (so far). Using the link, I finally got the “new”
page with today’s posting. In Safari, the site is now shown over the entire page – no more blue borders and lots of white. I can adjust the size of the page to shrink the “stretch,” but I’d like to have a border on each side, not just the right side of the page. I’ll try Firefox next time and see what that looks like. Other than that, s’all hokay by me.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:47 am
Never mind; after closer looking I now see the left side border. I guess I’d like a space after the border – a margin within the enclosure. But what the hey, I can still read everything, so I’ll quit the nit-picking.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:53 am
I like this new style. Looks cool.
I watched the entire landing event of the Discovery on NASA TV, from the OMS burn to wheelstop.
I was surprised how fast it goes! Well, relatively fast.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:35 am
The RSS feed URLs in the link rel=alternate tags are still pointing to the old, now broken, feeds.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Nuts. The feeds have caused me lots of grief. I’ll look into that in a little bit.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:51 am
You are the master of symmetry. Now we just want the two sidebars to be equal in length for total balance.
July 17th, 2006 at 11:47 am
‘What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’
July 17th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
New format doesn’t use all available horizontal space — I have a lot of useless blue on the sides and a fairly narrow center column containing the information I most read. It is, however, perfectly legible which is all I really want from a web site.
July 17th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
I like the new links on the left. I like the category headings, too. I would consider putting the three big debunking headings into that link list as well – Astrology, Moon Hoax, and Hoagland.
July 17th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
BA, looking good!! (using Firefox 1.5.0.4)
July 17th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Safari is sensitive to comments in the CSS. On line 308 of your CSS file you have a comment that is not started properly:
color: #666; /color of >>> before links in sidebar */
I saved the main page and changed this to:
color: #666; /* color of >>> before links in sidebar */
After making the page looked the same in Safari as it did in Firefox.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
This is good!
I want to add a vote for astrology and moon hoax links in the menu. Hoagland’s Mars nonsense should probably be up there too.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Phil, just wondering, I didn’t know that an “engine” needed to be fired to de-orbit. Just release some of the gas propellant. Or am I wrong again?
Re the blog look on the screen (Safari), looks pretty good to me, as I commented before, it grows on you. (Miss the Preview button still). With a biggish screen (soso HP 21″ crt), I know I can narrow the line length, but at 1600 x1200 res. it leaves the print small, and subsequently the lines are longish. Not that that matters to me, I can easily punch up the size of the print, pressing keys a couple of times. This also solves the problem of reading lines that are too long, as I tend to re-read the start of some lines sometimes, and this detracts from my pleasure, in my time in the House,-sorry blog!
Ivan.
July 18th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Is there a “pilot’s eye view” video available from the landing?
July 18th, 2006 at 9:22 am
icemith, in order to deorbit, the Shuttle must slow down. This is accomplished by a thruster burn pointed into the direction of motion. The thrusters in question are the OMS. You are correct, they do not power on the Main Engines used for launch. I think Phil was speaking a bit metaphorically, using a common turn of phrase.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Hi!
I started subscribing to the RSS feed a few days ago (via Live Bookmars in Firefox), but the blog failed to load. I just noticed a few minutes ago that it works now.
Blog on!
July 18th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
It looks great on my Mac, on Firefox; and I agree with BMurray, as long as I can read it, that’s what matters. If the medium is pleasing to the eye, or at least not distracting, that’s gravy! Just keep enjoying what you do…
July 19th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I would like to see it fixed for Safari as I, notwithstanding the chauvinism regarding browsers, prefer that browser. It looks fine with IE and Firefox. With Safari I don’t think I have all the links that were usually on the right side, either.