Skip to main content

25 Years, A Moment in Time

"Daddy, what happened?"
"It blew up, honey."

My sister was five and she was the first to speak. I was seven and knew I was going to be an astronaut. We were in Florida on vacation and the shuttle was supposed to launch while we were there. My awesome parents drove us from our condo in North Palm Beach to the Cape, not once, not twice but three days in a row as the launch continued to get scrubbed due to cold weather.

I remember the instant the shuttle blew up, watching it from the side of a nearby roadway, and I knew exactly what happened. I remember the crowd gasp. And I remember my sister pulling at my father's arm and being the first in the crowd to say anything. I remember being annoyed, as most typical seven-year old brothers tend to get, when she asked a question I knew the answer to. I remember the look on my parents' face. I remember feeling sad. But most importantly, I remember how proud I felt and how much more I wanted to be an astronaut that day.

Today, I reflected on how did being there affect my life. Most obviously it kept my passion for space alive and two years later, in July of 1988, I went to SpaceCamp. Later, as I neared the time to begin planning what I would do after high school, my parents spent countless hours researching the path to NASA including how to become an Air Force pilot and how they could get me the most prestigious recommendation they could to earn me entry into the Air Force Academy. In the end I didn't choose that path and instead chose a path into computer science, thanks mainly to the effect of Jurassic Park.

Reflecting on the "what-if" of becoming an astronaut, as a now parent of two, I'm blown away by what my parents tried to accomplish for me. What an amazing thing, to have someone on this Earth who would go to any lengths possible to get you the right foundation to make your dreams come true instead of to laugh and scoff and say "sure Brian, an astronaut". And I'm blessed to have two, and now for the past decade I've had a third person too.

The other thing I've realized is the coincidence that this year is the 25th anniversary of that day, and also the year the space shuttle program will end. As my wife and parents know, for the past few months I've made it clear that I will be taking Penelope down to Florida to see the next and penultimate space shuttle launch. If Wally was older and able to appreciate it I'd bring him too because I want my kids to experience, at least once, the wonder of watching a manned spacecraft launch to the heavens and the imagination it sparks with that tangible discovery that anything really is possible. The symmetry that mine and Penelope's first launch will be 25 years apart had escaped me until today and the thought is bittersweet because who knows when, or if, she and Wally might see another launch of a manned mission to space.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

3D Photo Viewer for Looking Glass

The Looking Glass I created my first Chrome extension, which is now live on the Chrome Web Store ! It's built for the Looking Glass , a holographic display that let's you view three-dimensional objects without glasses. I've also opened the source to the extension on GitHub. The Chrome extension allows you to view Facebook's "3D Photos", a feature they added in 2018 for displaying photos that include a depth map like those from phones with dual cameras, such as Apple's "Portrait Mode". Getting Started To use the extension, connect your Looking Glass to your computer, navigate to Facebook and open the viewer from the extension's popup menu. This will open a browser window on the Looking Glass display's screen in fullscreen mode. Opening the Viewer Once the viewer is open, the extension watches for any 3D Photo files being downloaded, so browse around Facebook looking for 3D Photos.  I recommend some of the Facebook groups de...

Simplifying logging with Maven and SLF4J (Part 2)

So in my  previous post  I explained how to simplify your logging with Maven and SLF4J. If you haven't read it yet, please do before reading more.  Since then I've discovered an easier and cleaner way to remove the secondary frameworks from your Maven dependency tree. Here's a revised overview of the steps: Decided which logging framework will be your primary, aka who will actually write to your log file. Define the dependency scope of all the secondary frameworks to be ' provided '. Configure your project to depend on drop-in replacements of each secondary framework from SLF4J. Define secondary frameworks as provided Use the dependencyManagement section for this. Its used when you might have a dependency transitively. Add dependency on SLF4J Add the following to your pom.xml Conclusion So now in only 3 steps you can redirect all your logging to your primary logging framework without changing a line of code!

First Impressions from NoSQL Live

Today I drove up to Boston for the day to attend NoSQL Live . My experience so far within the NoSQL community has been limited to what we've built in-house at Disney and ESPN over the past decade to solve our scaling issues, more recently has been ESPN's use of Websphere eXtreme Scale , and the very latest has been my own experimentation with HBase which hasn't gotten much further than setting up a four node cluster. I've read a little about Cassandra, memcached, Tokyo Cabinet and that's about it. So before the sandman wipes away most of my first impressions of the technologies discussed today, I wanted to record my thoughts for posterity or, at the very least, tomorrow. Cassandra Cassandra seems to be the hottest NoSQL solution this month with press about both Twitter and Digg running implementations. My impression, I'm wary of "eventual consistency". I don't feel I understand the risk and ramifications well enough to design a system properly...