The State of the Union and Federal Budget

Well, I thought that President Obama's State of the Union address was not too bad. He had lots of good things to say about job creation, clean energy, and reducing nuclear weapons. I ended up catching most of it between working as the representative for the executive board for SEDS at the meeting of SEDS chapters at the same time. I was very disappointed that he didn't sit down and declare a new route for NASA (JFK-style), but I guess there are other issues at the moment.

What got me feeling the need to post my thoughts here was my annoyance at the republican response to the president's speech by Robert F. McDonnell, the governor of Virgina. While I'm fine with a republican responding to the President's speech (I encourage it), it felt disrespectful to have the response immediately following the President's speech and to have it also televised on CNN and I'll explain why. First off, when you follow on the heels of the speech you are "responding" to, there is no way you could possibly be responding to the President's plans. You're making a political statement, not a response. The second reason this is disrespectful is that by following the President's speech on the same news networks, you are put in an equal footing with the President in the eyes of many people, which is very wrong and misleading. Even CNN seemed to allude to this in their remarks following both speeches where they would refer to the President "AND" the Governor.

It would make this feel better if the Republicans would wait an hour or a day to formulate a proper response. I have no problem with respectful responses, but a "response" that is just blaring the party line is not necessary. I thought that these continual Obama speaks - token Republican speaks back and forth contests would pull to an end once Obama became the commander-in-chief. Apparently not. (And I do hope that Palin runs for President, as it would be so fun to blast her for that in 2012)

Ok enough politics! There are some very exciting things going on with SEDS at the moment. We have started our own Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/sedsusa and we are building a new SEDS website at http://seds.org/drupal.php . Both of these projects are coming along nicely. Also, we will likely have 26 chapters of SEDS-USA very soon (started my reign as expansion chair with 20 groups). There are also about 5 more chapters in the works right now, so I'm very happy. Hopefully some of our initiatives will help grow SEDS into a student group super-power in the near future (back in the days, SEDS had 100+ chapters around the world).

A Happy New Year ... To SEDS

Well, I've generally felt like a sleepy bum since being home in Minnesota. It's that tendency of mine to store up sleep during break and sleep a lot less during school. That and the fact that I was up some late nights wanting to throw m computer out the window thanks to Microsoft. The reason for that was that I was redoing my desktop computer's OS updating from Windows 7 Pre-Release to Windows 7 (and had a lot of issues with Win7 64-bit, finally settling on 32-bit).

But, to take up some time in recent days, I've been trying to work on this and that for SEDS. I wanted to quickly share my work from today. I have chatted back and forth with SEDS webmaster Josh Sosa about the future of the SEDS website and while the method of our update is still up to debate, I've been working up a wordpress version of the vision in my head. Here's the sneak peak picture, though note that this design is not near complete and so far I've just been fixing up a design I found online.


Feel free to comment on the design if you like. The top you can see will show 5 recent stories that rotate using javascript (only on the home page). I plan to implement drop down menus and will also add another bar at the top of the page that will show some items like the SEDS partners.

Letter to NASA

Well, I just got home from finishing up work yesterday in Cedar Rapids. It's nice to be back in Minnesota (fun to see the dog at least) and was fun to stop through Ames, IA and see some friends. I just wanted to share a letter I recently wrote to the NASA public affairs heads at NASA Kennedy and NASA Johnson. If you feel like me about their rejection of SpaceVidcast (in SVC's bid to get media credentials), I encourage you to write a letter or give them a call too. Their contact info is here.

End of Work

Well, it had to end sometime. I'm talking about my current co-op experience that I've been doing since May '09. I'm starting to prepare to leave after this next week but for some reason I of course feel as busy as ever. I've had lots of questions of "are you busy?" from engineers I've worked with before during the week this week and I've had to tell most that "Yes" I am busy working on this:

Yeah, see the huge bunch of pages in the binder? That's the last few months of my life also known as 500+ pages of what amounts to a kind of how-to guide of every little function of the Flight2 system that my group at Rockwell is selling to our current (and future) customers. I have been tediously rewriting and revising the whole thing because a huge amount of the control functionality for the system got switched a bit. I did make some nice accomplishments with it (finished or not) like slimming the document from 100+ MB to only 30+ MB and making it look really nice.

I went to the bar (3rd Base [url might not work]) tonight for a bit of a going-away party for myself and Mark Zerr, my one-time mentor and boss (for a program). It was pretty fun to talk about both work and other topics with a bunch of Rockwell people I know well and some I don't as well as both my current and hiring managers (one on each side of me) and my manager's manager who has been around Rockwell since the dawn of time I would guess. Very interesting discussion that lasted for around 4 hours, ending in tons of praise for me by a no-longer-sober Mark (which I was very thankful for). I found out that unbeknownst to me, Mark has just moved from being a lowly (though very smart) engineer to being a manager and he's working under my old manager, Cale, who is now a higher level manager. I guess now I just have to become a full systems engineer and that will finish off the move-up cycle.

Well, time to get some sleep before another fun LEGO League tournament here in Cedar Rapids tomorrow. Soon I'll be moving back to Ames and MN, so I may make more posts then. Happy Holidays to all!

Bad Drivers, Obama, and Google Wave

Well, I've been lacking in posting lately mostly because I have been super-busy basically rewriting the documentation for the Flight2 System. It's pretty fun, but a lot of work. If you'll notice (looking closely) in the picture there, they have the new CDU in that picture (the 2 boxes with green text just above the engine throttles) but they don't show that it has a color screen and they also don't mention that the documentation for it isn't quite yet written! Anyhow, it keeps me busy with lots of work.

First point of the day is one that I make often: I am unimpressed with Iowan drivers. As I was driving to and from home last weekend, I was driving up in the rain with a fairly dark sky and saw a ton of cars that didn't even have their headlights on on the freeway! Come on people! Just about had someone run me off the road yesterday because they decided to pull out of the center turn lane and back into traffic as I was finishing moving into that lane (don't want to scratch my pretty car!). It just seems like constant problems not to mention the fact that they don't even have to do parallel parking to get a license (T-parking I'm not sure about). Anyhow, please get better at driving Iowans!

I was very impressed with Obama's speech tonight about Afghanistan. He said a lot of good things and while I thought that the 18 month deadline for getting troops into Afghanistan and out is a bit short, deadlines are good and hopefully it will make the army work harder to get the job done. Gotta love those little jabs at the Bush administration that he lays into speeches, though you usually have to read between the lines a bit. If you missed the speech, listen to a bit here:



I also recently have been toying with Google Wave. It's pretty neat and the ability to make edits to conversations and add images and documents is cool, but even cooler are the extensions and bots. I got one recently that records and transcribes a phone call into the wave for you (from a MIT guy), very cool. Hopefully we can put it to work for Kaleidoquiz. Hope everyone reading had a good Thanksgiving and was able to visit with family and friends, now I'm off to eat some post-Thanksgiving pie. Cheers!

Lots of Uploading

Well, there hasn't been a whole lot going on in Cedar Rapids, IA for a while. Just work, work, work. Soccer is pretty fun, but I was out of the game for a week because of a sprained knee (very painful, barely walk-able) and was playing through still a bit crippled last week. Our team is doing very badly, but the games are a lot of fun and we put up a good fight.

I've been trying to get old videos uploaded to the web today. One of the things I did a couple weeks ago was go to Ames for a day to see the Freshman Aerospace class launch their rockets. The class this year is huge (bigger than my year) and when they're each trying to launch their team's rocket 3-4 times, that adds up fast (200+ students/4-5 team * 3-4 launches = a lot). Most of it was a success and I shot some video of the launches, but the quality suffered a little because I got enlisted to help time the rockets' time-to-deploy [their parachutes], so I was trying to film with my left hand and time with my right.



I've also been trying to set stuff up for SpaceVision 2009 next month. Hopefully (fingers crossed) SpaceVidcast will help me out with the live streaming etc and kind of count it as a remote conference broadcast to save me the trouble of setting up SEDS accounts on UStream etc. Should be a fun time though. Check out the latest episode of SpaceVidcast if you're any kind of Apollo space fan because they got Cy Liebergot on and like many people of that awesome era, he has more to say than youtube can hold (thus the lower quality).



Edit: Oh, and by the way, I figured out finally how to do some cool stuff with my domain so now http://rickhanton.com comes to this site and http://twitter.rickhanton.com, http://facebook.rickhanton.com, http://flickr.rickhanton.com, and http://youtube.rickhanton.com send you to the proper places.

Working, Working ...

Well, these days I'm just working away. I've been spending time working with some engineers who are designing systems for Polish airplanes, which is kind of cool because I was in Poland just last year. When I'm not doing that, I spend time playing soccer, working with SEDS-USA, or helping out the Rockoon group at ISU or SpaceVidcast.

Keeps me busy at least. I'm pretty proud of where SEDS is at these days, with much credit going to the current chairs, Joshua and Ryan. We're beginning to get a stable source of funding (should be working in the next 2-3 years) and we're slowly getting more chapters interested and more projects off the ground. I just with Obama would finish a bit with health care and the banks and give NASA a second of his time so he can dictate their path for the next 20 or so years.

Anyways, another thing I have been doing with SEDS is playing with a website called "Spreadshirt" that let me setup a T-shirt store for SEDS that sells reasonably-priced shirts with the SEDS logo etc. I bought a few to try them out and have made some adjustments to the store, but my favorite item I bought was a T-shirt with this old 1989 SEDS conference design on it.



Pretty sweet!