Pretty happy with the blog now, got the colors and everything working, added a fading effect so the background image transitions better... only thing left to do is make it so the image doesn't title horizontially so on larger resolultions it looks bad. I tried for an hour or two today but I couldn't do anything. My idea was to make a table, 1024 pixels wide, the contained the whole blog (no border or anyting obviously). I could set the background image of the table to the mars picture and then the body of the document to a darker orange that blends with the picture well. That way, on bigger resolutions, it wouldn't start to tile. Anyways, hopefully Kevin can help me try and implement that... after that... I think that's all.

Well, yesterday was pretty interesting because the Huygens probe deployed from the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn. The Cassini/Huygens mission, for those of you who don't know, was a joint project by the European Space Agency and NASA and launched just over seven years ago. It flew by Jupiter on the way, taking the first high-resolution photos of that planet since Voyager 2 visited in the 1980's.

Anywho it reached Saturn and took some really cool photos, and just yesterday deployed the probe onto Titan, a moon. Why would they pick a moon at Saturn? Well, its the only place in the solar system (other than Earth) to have liquid flowing on it. Scientists have long wondered what lay in the haze of Titan, after Voyager 2 discovered some shocking things about it. They predicted, from this information, that it had flowing seas of methane and varied terrian much like our home planet.

So far, it appears they were spot on. During the descent the probe captured pictures of the surface, revealing a hilly and very Earth-like terrian as well as dark seas with many veins and triubtaries running into them. As of right now they don't know too much, the information is just starting to come in. They did release one color picture the probe took yesterday.

First Color Photo of Titan's Service

It looks a lot like Mars and appears to have landed in a valley. It was ready to land in liquid as well. Apparently they didn't have great digital cameras back in 1997, but maybe they'll have some high resulution photos. The probe now will conduct various experiments so we can know exactly what's on the planet.

Also, it was equipped with a microphone (would have loved to see this on the Mars Rovers) so the ESA has released audio of the surface descent. Hopefully they'll release an audio clip of the probe on the surface as well, might be kind of interesting, especially if there's wind or something.

Audio of Huygens Descent

Anywho, I'm a space dork. :)

I've updated my blog style. I took a pretty basic template and added a bunch of stuff, including the background image. Took a while to figure out how to do some stuff, but overall I thought it went over pretty well. I'm still not completely satisfied with it, so you might see minor changes in the coming weeks.

" The impactor will vaporize instantly when it hits, along with its small payload, a compact disc containing more than 500,000 names of people who wanted to tag along vicariously. "

Including me. Ohhhh yeah... B)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6817717/

http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=Science&cat=Stem_Cell_Research

Good, at least one major political figures realizes the benefits. *cough*

Had a fun time in Vegas. I'll go day by day and try to be brief because I'm really tired.

We left Wednesday morning and arrived in Vegas late afternoon. After getting to our hotel room and settling down we ate at a nearby restuarant called Bahama Breeze. It was okay, I got a kindy pukey seafood pasta dish.

After that we went back to the hotel (it was about five blocks off the strip... rooms on the strip during New Years are $300 minimum) and drove along the strip. After taking it in and my dad getting frustrated with traffic we parked at Treasure Island and looked around. My first time in a Casino, and well... it wasn't anything special. They all looked alike, but I guess maybe if I could actually gamble I'd be more interested (heh, I'm so cheap I probably wouldn't anyways). We picked up our tickets for the show we were going to the next night, Mystère, a Cirque du Soleil production.

Mystère Website

The next day we woke up and headed towards Hoover Dam. Little did we know, thanks to 9/11, it took more than three hours to even get to the damn dam because they search every car that tries to go nearby it. Anyways, we didn't go down the dam road because the dam line was too long. We decided to cancel the dam sightseeing and ate at a nearby town. We wandered around the town before heading back.

We then went to the show, it was really neat and we all enjoyed it. Afterwards we walked the strip a bit, looked at a few more casinos, then called it a night.

The next day was New Years! I slept into one and we didn't head out until about four from the hotel room. Actually my parents went and did crap while I laid in bed and watched TV. Muhahahaha. We then took a shuttle to the strip and had to kill EIGHT HOURS. It was bad... we were sick of casinos and had NOTHING TO DO. Reminded me of the Civil War, we left a little too early for that one as well.

Anywho, we ended up having two meals during that time and finally it was time for the celebration. We headed towards the street and joined the 300,000 on the street to countdown the New Year. The crowd roared as the fireworks went off to signal 2005. It was fun to be part of, second largest celebration short of New York itself.

After that we waded through the throng of drunk people to get back to our hotel. Everyone was pushing and shoving, it was pretty intense. Too many people, too little space. At one point a fight broke out right next to us, police with riot gear came in, pretty soon police on horses, and everyone panicked. Was pretty scary getting shoved around in the commotion, little kids were getting crushed and people spilling their cocktails all over everyone. We all lived and walked back to the hotel room and slept.

The next day, today actually; we woke up, went to the airport, and came home. The Las Vegas airport has slot machines in the terminals (see picture) which is pretty sad. Anyways, great to be in the Nortwest again and see actual trees.

Rant about the Insight bowl tomorrow probably.

Pictures:

http://www.zolknetwork.com/misc/thomas/Vegas