Professional Pride

[selenite0]

patgund shared another story of an amateur rocketeer blowing up his garage.

patgund: What is it with rockets and lack of self-preservation instincts?

selenite: I have quite good instincts, thank you. So do Gary Hudson and a lot of other people I know. That's why we're not in the paper.

Comments

[patgund.livejournal.com]

And as I said, point taken.

Did not mean to offend

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Not offended. But I thought it was worth posting.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

At least this guy didn't attach the engine to his bicycle......

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

And this is why Mr. Stine's original handbook included plans for launch bunkers. :)

It's a wonder the Shuttle SRB factory hasn't blown to hell by now.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Wait until they start tooling up to make additional SRB's for Apollo 2.0 or whatever they plan to call it.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

I'm glad my hobbies are less volatile. No one ever reads headlines like, "Costumer Stabs Self to Death With Pins."

[selenite.livejournal.com]

No, you just dye without any publicity.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

*rolls eyes*

Very funny. I'm in stitches.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

He's such a cut up. Seriously warped. He rarely deviates from the pattern.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, but we shouldn't needle him about it. He's probably not as bad as he seams.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Sew you say.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

All right, this thread is getting out of hand.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

I think I'd cotton to that idea

[dartpoly.livejournal.com]

waitaminnit! you know patgund?!
aieee.

"what's that sound?"
"oh, just my world shrinking again..."

[selenite.livejournal.com]

IIRC, at our first SCA event in San Diego he gave us brownies. This would've been, um, 1999? celticdragonfly can probably correct me.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

It was 1999, but it wasn't in San Diego. I think it was Angels.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Angels or Gyldenholt. But yeah, my "how much chocolate can I fit into this and still have it be a brownie" brownies

[dartpoly.livejournal.com]

had we already determined, maybe in discussion at DFWPoly dinner, some existing Callahanian link between myself and you&celticdragonfly?

(considering alt.callahans, et al, is how i know patgund.)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Nope, I think we're a totally coincidental connection. Or it's Fate. Hard to tell until much later.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

(chuckle) Would help to point out I'm old friends with silkensteel too??

[dartpoly.livejournal.com]

ah, but that's to be expected -- Callahans is the common link there.
i bet you know jnork, gdmusumeci, koyote and therealocelot, too.
:>

[patgund.livejournal.com]

(Laugh) Actually know silkensteel and jnork from before Callahans. Scary thought that.

[(Anonymous)]

I've known Patrick since... 1985 or thereabouts. He was friends with the girlfriend of one of our roomies. That household was a fascinating mix of dysfunctional people into explosives, power tools, large amounts of electrical discharge and poor social skills.

[silkensteel.livejournal.com]

I've known Patrick since... 1985 or thereabouts. He was friends with the girlfriend of one of our roomies. That household was a fascinating mix of dysfunctional people into explosives, power tools, large amounts of electrical discharge and poor social skills.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Some of those people got better. The rest, well.......

Some of those people got better.

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

I don't know patgund that I know of, but I've seen him via I don't know how many places.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

You've met him, tygerr, he was at your party.
http://www.rejoycing.com/cons/condfw/friday/condfw2004-Fri.htm

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Oops. I *have* met him. Can't argue with the photographic evidence. (In my defense, I met a LOT of people f2f for the first time that day, and I was a bit distracted by co-hosting the party. And my brain function had been handicapped by the forcible extraction of one of my neural implants.)

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Well, overlap on the Bujold and the Arrogant Worms for starters

[tmc4242.livejournal.com]

I read "Edward Reiner singed his hair and cut his hands in the explosion, which occurred as he held a rocket motor jacket in his hands, while tamping the powder into the engine with a brass hammer" and I see in my head the gremlin from the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

"You have to hit these blockbuster bombs _Juuuuust_Right_..."

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

I recall watching John Carmack's blog about his work on Armadillo Aerospace and how it seemed to me that vital engineering steps were being overlooked like "testing components before putting them together in the final product and having it crash".

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Carmack was the one person I was excluding by name from the "a lot of people" above. I stopped reading his blog a while back. The last bits I remember were:

1. Spending a long, long time getting the engine to ignite while spraying peroxide out the nozzle. Followed by the craft running out of fuel on the way up and crashing because it couldn't do a powered landing.

2. Machining new combustion chambers. Noting that one of them was screwed up and thinner than the spec. Saying "we'll fire it anyway."

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I think the news is top-heavy with people who have below-par survival instincts. Which, when one thinks about it, is exactly as expected.

(I am reminded of the Arrogant Worms song, "History is Made by Stupid People".)

[patgund.livejournal.com]

"Before you fill it up with explosive gas, be sure to fix the no-smoking light....."

The one I had shown selenite earier was:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/01/24/rocket.bike/index.html