“Give me a boy at seven and I’ll give you a man at thirteen”
Whomever you attribute this too, it suggests a lot about formative years and the stickiness of who we become.
As a kid growing up in the 1960s, like most I had an almost front row seat to the “go go” years of maned space flight. So many wonderful events and in hindsight so much of it left a lasting and positive mark within me.
Decades later and being a bit of an organized fella, I find myself more often than not trying to clear my “bucket list”.
We all have bucket lists, it’s just a matter of whether you consciously acknowledge them or let them drift, nagging and unattended.
Things get removed by simply doing them, things get removed because we face up to the fact it ain’t never going to happen and things get removed as we’ve changed and really don’t understand how it ever got on the bucket list in the first place
So lists can shrink but they can also grow. I try not to add capriciously to mine but things do drift in.
I haven’t been invited to ISS, nor Artemis, nor Blue Horizon and accept my terra forma lot but things space “niggle” at me.
Sometimes soon after dusk and looking skyward, you can see Sun lit satellites drifting across the sky. The population of opportunities climbs monthly as many are SpaceX satellites but hidden amongst this population are ham radio satellites. Deployed by Russians, deployed by Japanese, by Americans, by Chinese and even the UK, these “relay” stations in the sky are accessible to hams for minutes at a time.
AI developed “recreational” software….sit back and marvel
Twelve short months ago, I almost laboriously walked Gemini through what I wanted. Trial and error suggested this was the best way to get something usable. In the world of software engineering twelve months is almost an eternity and we were expected to get lots done. In the world of AI, twelve days is almost an eternity. Gemini has pretty much created what I want with the absolute minimum of guidance. Remarkable is an understatement.
Google’s Gemini is remarkable but so is OpenAI’s offerings. I do some “blue skying” with OpenAI and after a short journey around using my Arrow handheld and the challenges therein, I asked for a suggested software interface to help me understand my handwaving relative to a satellites arc. It cam up with the following image all on its own with very little push and pull refinement from me.
Almost, recycled “junk”
In the spirit of clearing the bucket list, I feel somewhat the same about my “toy” collection. Use them, loose them but add no more!!
The decades old Gitzo tripod, a marvel in its heyday but a boat anchor today, seems the perfect “aid” for my human guided antenna. For real aficionados motors would whir and the directional antenna would faithfully track the satellites arc across the evening sky.
The voices pop out of the ether and I realize I’m hearing my first amateur radio satellite chit chat between US operators. Cool.
The non PC “Killing two birds with one stone….”
That was fun.
I heard my first voices in the sky, I felt one step closer to those childhood NASA memories and this dyed in the wool software guy gets to do this while riding the AI train without the pressures of being in Silicon Valley.
One stone, many bucket list items; love it.
Bring it on.