Globes apart. My wife is sitting in the living room watching the Golden Globes;
I've retired to my office to watch NASA-TV on my computer (I can tell
who's won the Globes in near-real time by watching my RSS feeds).
Opportunity just responded to the first command set correctly; somehow
I find more drama in that than in Michael Douglas' lifetime
achievement award presentation.
Listening to the uber-geeks at JPL as they wait 8 minutes for each
response back from Opportunity, and speculate about the cause of every
delay in response (“Maybe the HNA is taking precendence over the
AVR….or not.”), fluctuation in voltage, and recorded faults is
oddly entertaining and…comforting. I am awash in the soft
whisperings of speeds, temps, and feeds, and the dull hum of circuit
noise,
Now they're sending a command to clear Opportunity's memory of
yesterday's pictures. Meanwhile, Paula is ignoring Danny DeVito's
testimonial speech. I wish we could send a command to delete some of
his pictures.

As I was clearing out my office of debris, I came across my old NEC
MobilePro, a Windows CE “handheld” sublaptop. It still works, sort
of; the backup battery is deceased, however, so it won't keep any
settings when it's turned off.

But it is the perfect size for my 3 year old daughter to use for
pretend play. Since everyone else in the house practically has a
computer, it only seemed fair to give her one.

This morning, as I checked my e-mail from a desk in New York (I'm
here for LinuxWorld), I found this picture from my loving wife: