God DAMN is that early.
Eating breakfast, prepping for the launch this morning. Don’t forget the webcast people!
Looks like Mike Melville is the pilot this time again. Probably wanted him in the seat since hes got the most live stick time with the flight characteristics of SpaceShipOne.
Well here I am, once again in wonderful Mojave, CA at the XCOR hangar enjoying a nice party with the press and VIPs and various friends of XCOR and Scaled Composites. For those who are just tuning in and wondering what the hell Dan is talking about it is this:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1894&e=1&u=/ap/20040928/ap_on_sc/private_spaceship
A live webcast of the lanuch will be found here:
http://www.xprize.org/webcast/webcast.php
Liftoff is at 6AM PST. This means I get up at before 4AM to mingle with my fellow members of the press and brainstorm ideas and questions for the article(s) I’ll be working on for TechRevu and BYTE.
There isn’t as many press people here at this launch so far then the last one but I expect it to get really ridiculous next week when Scaled attempts their second launch to win the X-Prize. This is all tenative of course but keep your eyes glued here to find out when the next launch is!
I now have a job interview with these guys tomorrow morning.
http://www.amagaccess.com/
Mei is NOT an 8,000 pound panda, but is instead a lovely gal who playtests games in Irvine, CA. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Google!
The first good news in the search for a new job came in today before lunch with Mei. I got a phone call from a headhunter who is interested in me for some company involved a sales engineer support type of spot for something that would require me to have a security clearance, which the company would sponsor. I should hear back in the next few days if they want to interview me. No, I don’t know who the company is yet. It could be any number of defense contractors.
For those who don’t know, getting a security clearance takes quite a long time and a fair amount of money. Last time I heard someone give figures they said the average Secret clearance takes 18 months and $50,000 for the required background checks and whatnot. You can’t just get a security clearance if you want, there really isnt anyone you can ask as a private citizen its something that happens through your company and the government. Typically positions that require a security clearance also want you to already have your clearance (they last from 3-5 years I beleive?) as many companies don’t wish to take on the burden of sponoring a persons clearance. So if this lead develops then this will be huge for me as I’ll have something that I can parlay later on into more interesting career developments.
My mom just back home from her class and mentioned that its a good thing I parked in the driveway today. Normally I park my car on the opposite side of the street from the house you see. So I go outside to look and damn if someone elses car parked across the street just got totally RAMMED in the rear. Check this out!
Things I’ve been doing/up to lately.
Working on C++ code for CIS 41 (late, ugh). It is amazing what a single stupid default constructor argument can do to make your code SIGABRT. So stupid. Must remember not to fall into that trap again.
Went to the cast & crew screening for the Surge of Power movie. Turned out even funnier then I thought it would end up being. One or two scenes had a soft focus issue but considering the budget we were working in and the limitations we had I think we did really amazing.
Unfortunately I got my days mixed up in my schedule and totally missed the damn wrap party for the film on Saturday! ARRRRGH! Bloody Hell. There were people there I wanted to hang out with.
Apparently I’m the only person in SoCal who didn’t go to stinkin Inland Invasion. Perhaps next time I’ll have to money to be able to do it. It sounds like it was fun for those who went.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete is my comedy relief for the weekends disapponitments at least:
Spent the week tweaking my resume and sending it out to various job openings. No word back from anyone so far which is disappointing. Going to try Blizzard, they have some openings that look like good fits for my skills which is a shock. Would be nice if that happened. Applied to Google Labs, not sure if I am a fit for them here in LA but I hope to hear something back.
No news to report on the dating front because I’m basically broke and going out hasn’t been in the budget, not to mention I haven’t really met any new women or anything like that so no new potentials to check out.
Did manage to go see Sky Capatain and the World of Tomorrow on Friday night (sorry folks but Garden State just sounded weak to me since no one could remember what the movie was supposed to be about) with CHS, Angie, and Jim.
Made some new friends in LA over the week, that might turn out nicely. Met up in LA on Friday with Chip and CHS and had philly cheesesteaks at South Station…oh god so goood!
Decided to help out the poor guy who got Slashdotted earlier this weekend who wrote a book on how to save energy. Basically the guy who submitted the story to Slashdot decided it would be a smart idea to directly link to a 5MB PDF file. What a freaking idiot! Anyways I talked to the guy who wrote the book and made a BitTorrent file for him to use to distribute the PDF to people who wanted it. You can get it here if you’re interested (this means you sheer) :
http://demonoid.com/download/21737/Saving_Energy.torrent
Still trying to deal with creditors and work out this debt issue and see if I can reduce the load I have/owe somehow.
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People no longer seem to give me a call for informal gatherings it seems. I don’t know if this is because stuff just isn’t happening or people are just plain forgetting to give me a call or if its just something else entirely that I have forgotten about.
Anyone out there got some ideas?
Here is the deal.
I have nothing to do tomorrow except screw with my info on monster.com and send out resumes.
This in of itself wont take more then a few hours of my time, so I’d like to do SOMETHING with someone tomorrow after noon or whatever. I can’t say I’m horribly inclined to do much driving as gas is tight as is money. Just would be nice if someone would come over here tomorrow and hang with my stupid ass or whatever.
I dunno.
This entry is lame or something.
Daniel Spisak was born from the fiery depths of fusion and now roams the pale blue dot known as Earth. I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science from UC Irvine at the end of 2007.
I am also involved in technology & security consulting firms as well as being a freelance technology writer. I also contribute to Jerry Pournelle's website and Chaos Manor Reviews. Additionally I am also a freelance photographer as well and you can find my photos either on my own personal gallery or up at my Flickr account or on Zivity.
This blog is one of the main locations where I do my writing, which is then automatically sent to my LiveJournal, VOX, and MySpace accounts. I can also be found on a variety of social networking and microblogging sites like Pownce, Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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