I’m working from home today.  Since on these days I set my own hours, I started really early.  By 10am, I needed a break, so I decided to run over to the grocery store to grab some milk.

There was an unusually large number of people in line for 10am on a Tuesday and the checkout ladies were struggling to keep up. By the time I was in line, I was 7 people back.  A couple people in front of me were pretty frustrated with the length of the line and were being pretty vocal about it.

A very old man sort of waddled up behind me with his own gallon of milk.  It was pretty obvious that it was about one gallon of milk too heavy for him.  I turned around and offered to carry it for him, and he very gratefully agreed.

I noticed that his hat said “WWII Veteran” which had me intreged.  Any WWII vet is at least 90 in 2012.

Me: “Wow, you fought World War II?”

Him: “Yup.  Seems like a lifetime ago. I was a Marine in Guadalcanal.”

Me: “Wow. Thank you so much for your service, it was long before I was born but I’m very grateful for your sacrifice for our freedom. Please, go ahead of me. Anyone who fraught WWII gets front of the line privileges in my book”.

Him: “Thank you son. Let me guess, you were Navy right?”

Me: “Yes sir. How did you know?”

As this conversation continued, every single person in front of us stepped aside for this old man. He and I walked to the checkout counter and I put down his milk. He paid with some crumpled up bills, and then the most vocal line complainer carried his milk out to the car for him.

Sometimes extraordinary things happen when you’re doing the most ordinary things. Meeting him made me stand a little taller and the change in heart of a group of people with first world problems made my day.

I’ve been a Netflix customer for 12 years, and I STILL have the DVD service in addition to the streaming.  Streaming is a great idea, but the movies people want to watch still aren’t available.

Netflix runs a top 100 list of their most popular titles.  On that list today, 5 of the movies are available to watch online.

FIVE

You don’t get to one until number 39

It’s not really the fault of Netflix.  The owners of the content want to keep making money from you by getting you to buy DVDs.

I still have the DVD service because the movies I want to watch, and from the top 100 list, the movies pretty much everyone else want to watch are only available on DVD.

Just logged into Klout for the first time in a long time and got: “Klout believes you are influential about Bacon”. Heh.

Also Astronomy, Podcasting, and Github.

I think I like the bacon one the best.

We use a Keurig at the office. I’ve resisted getting one at home because I have a hard time with the massive amount of waste for a single cup of hot beverage.

Cameron at our office volunteered to collect, take home, separate the tops from the cups, remove the coffee and put it in her garden, and recycle the tops and cups separately.  Just how much of a difference does it make in a 10 person office?

She had this to report from the first few weeks of doing this:

 In one month’s time, we’ve kept close to 300 K cups and 50 cream cups out of the landfill–in a year, that will be enough plastic to fill 2 large rolling trash cans.  Not to mention composting close to 30 gallons of coffee/tea waste.

The lesson here is simple but powerful…. if you see something that needs to be done, do it.

Cameron is my hero today.

I was just going through some of my recent pictures on my phone.  I had shared a number of them on Facebook via Instagram, but realized that I hadn’t shared them on Flickr.  When I went to Flickr to upload them, I was prompted to renew my pro account.

I love the idea of “cloud services” for their convienience, but I’m becoming pretty wary of not owning my own content.

Last Christmas, we sat on my parents living room floor and looked though boxes of 40 year old photos.  It was wonderful.

In 40 years, where will my posts, comments, photos and memories be?  On some Yahoo server?  I don’t think so.

Time to bring my content back onto system that I own.  I’ve got memories I want to share with grandkids that don’t even exist yet.

Just took my new BeagleBone out of the box. It’s even smaller than I was thinking. Would fit nicely into a 1U cubesat…

I want to change my “what do you do” dinner party answer to “I build spaceships” and actually mean it.

I hate that question, but I might not if I had that answer.

Announcement coming soon

I’m going to figure out a way so that this becomes what wakes me up in the morning.

This is what makes want to be more.

This is what I dream of.

Today SXSW announced the panels chosen to be a part of the 2012 conference.

Ours was officially chosen!

Come and see us present “How to win friends and influence space exploration“.

Woo hoo!