Pour absinthe into tumbler (I used 300 ml beaker).
Add orgeat to shaker w/ice, shake to chill and pour into absinthe via stirring rod.
Add rum and Cointreau to shaker, shake to chill and add to tumbler.
Add seltzer and ice to tumbler & stir.
I've seen enough bull being slung about Obama's proposed plans for NASA - I need to say a few things here. From the first time I saw the Orion/Ares plans, I thought they were a very poor choice. Nothing in it (barring the use of new materials & avionics in Orion) advanced the art of getting humans into space. It was a repurposing of existing hardware & designs that could keep current contractors employed, and couldn't be criticized for endangering astronauts. But the Ares 1 design wasn't safer - there are good reasons why no one uses solid rockets as the main stage for man-rated launch system. Chiefly, they just aren't safe. The Air Force studied the Ares 1 and chose not to adopt it for their own manned launch programs, because they found that the escape system couldn't get the capsule clear of the explosion should it fail. Ares 1/Orion is a big fat payload stuck on the end of a very long stick of controlled explosive, but none of the people promoting Constellation wanted to talk about that.
Second - go look at the post Elon Musk put up yesterday. Yes, his company is one of those private sector space developers Barack Obama mentioned. But he quotes the Augustine Commission, chiefly to the point that Constellation was never going to work. Even if you discounted all the development costs, launches would be more expensive than the shuttle, and carry smaller payloads. Constellation simply made no sense, either economically or in terms of advancing the state of the art of American space vehicles. I for one am glad to see it gone.
There's no guarantee that the Obama plan will be successful, but it certainly won't run off into a swamp & sink, which was exactly where Constellation was going to wind up, taking NASA with it. Ever since Congress got its claws into the shuttle program, NASA has been at the mercy of bureaucrats & bean-counters who don't give a rat's ass about engineering or the benefits of exploring & exploiting space. In my opinion, many space advocates have been exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, willing to do or say almost anything to appease Washington to keep NASA and manned space flight alive. The Bush plan was just the latest episode - there was no way the Bush administration or a Republican-dominated Congress was going to fund the proposed programs at a useful level. It was just a sop to keep the aerospace industry and influential space advocates content and supportive of the administration. I understand why those people are throwing bricks at the Obama plan now, but I prefer painful but clear-minded planning to comfortable lies that will never produce real progress.
I know there are a lot of people out there who won't agree with this, but I felt it was finally time to oppose the stream of bull that's coming from the main stream media. It's time the folks reporting on this subject actually went and did some actual research, instead of just regurgitating the PR packets they're getting.
So the iPad continues to be the internet' Rorschach test - everyone is seeing what they want to in it. And because the continuing drama is making my fingers itch, here I am committing blog for the very first time. The iPad is the next step in what Apple has been doing since it rolled out the aluminum iMac, the iPhone, the Touch, the MacBook Air, and then the unibody MacBook Pros. Elements from all these products are in the iPad, or pointed toward its overall UX. Aluminum unibody, glass multi-touch screen, LED-lit LCD display,WiFi/3G, and iTunes/app store to supply content. I'm seeing some disappointment from people who were expecting something much more whiz-bang. You don't get whiz-bang starting at a $499 price point. What you get is a functional appliance, a tool meant to become a part of everyday life. No, it's not a multi-tool. It has limitations - it's what developers and users make of it within those limitations that's going to be interesting. I think most of the people who are unhappy with the iPad had some preconceived notion of what category it would slot into. That's the thing, it's specifically not designed to fall into any one slot. No, it won't have every bell & whistle that a dedicated ereader, or gaming device, or media player might have. It will, however, do all those tasks well enough that most people will opt for one iPad rather than three specialized devices. That said, I really wish they'd included GPS, and I really hope that someone builds an app to pull in images from the Eye-Fi cards. I can understand leaving out the GPS and SD slot in the interest of saving battery life, weight, and cost, but I still want them. I think a GPS-enable iPad almost be a must-have item for emergency response vehicles, long-range truckers, and researchers out in the field. But then, there's always iPad 2G. I'm hoping that the iPad 1G is successful enough that we get to see the 2G and the 3G and whatever comes after. I know I'm putting my money down the instant the first generation goes on sale. I do believe I have a purpose for this blog now - come back in three months if you want to see what I'm up to. (I don't think it was chance that Adobe posted to pages full of EPUB/ebook info the night before the intro. I can't wait to see the specs & the development requirements for iBooks.) 
