I’ve been watching the NASA-TV coverage of Deep Impact, while also reading Susan Kitchens’s on-the-scene blog. Having both sources of information is very nice, because NASA-TV is very hard to follow at times (it was really frustrating when they were showing people celebrating and talking about the great images but not showing them). TiVo has, as always, been very handy so I could take a longer look at some of the images.

I do wish NASA-TV had a direct feed from the systems at JPL — instead, they have a camera taking a picture of images on a screen, which means that at times, the image is blocked by people wandering past (or just staying in place).

On Saturday, we joined The Rallye Club and ran our second rallye, Car Wars III: Revenge of the SI. It nearly was our last one — we found it rather frustrating and irritating (unlike our first rallye, which was frustrating and amusing). As we were leaving the finish point restaurant, we happened to stop and talk with another team, who told us about some of their previous experiences, gave us some suggestions, and said that they were writing some of the upcoming rallyes, which would make better use of the themes and might be a bit less easy to screw up completely than this one was.

This rallye made use of an old gimmick, the “Delete Gimmick” gimmick, which requires you to figure out what instruction got you to a particular spot and then delete it from the instructions for the rest of the rallye. We blew it and deleted the wrong gimmick — this put us way off course, and since we weren’t keeping a good run sheet, we had no way of recovering. We knew we were in trouble when we finished the entire set of instructions in 90 minutes, over an hour before the finish was to open — so we retraced part of our route and eventually found the checkpoint, but we were still the second car to finish, indicating that we’d missed a lot of the route (and our score confirmed this).

Maybe the next rallye we run will be more fun — I hope so!

I don’t even play video games, but I couldn’t resist following the trail in Ed’s post. I, too, have now spent ten minutes of my life that I’ll never get back watching All Your Base Rhapsody.

Good thing I’m taking the day off — I would have felt guilty using IBM’s time for something so silly.