Friends, This week finds me spaced-out. SpaceX’s first manned commercial flight to the ISS was conveniently pushed to Saturday at 1:22 PM. A perfect time to grab a beer while we blame the weird hour on planetary alignment. You know, that precision exercise that is hurling a highly explosive device from a rotating sphere towards a small moving object. Then if you’re in the mood for a little detective work, Sherloc and Watson are going to Mars in July. Sound like the plot for a bad B-movie exploiting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters? Actually, it’s just two instruments aboard the Perseverance rover. Christened in the space agency’s geeky tradition of reverse-engineering acronyms to fit clever names, SHERLOC (Scanning for Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) will be accompanied by WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering). As an aside, who capitalizes the second letter of a word in an acronym? (NASA, that’s who)....
Donuts are part of the magic that makes life so sweet. I founded the Level 3 Friday Donut Club in 2004 and ran it until my departure in 2015. It had a three year run at Windstream and is now virtual, but at its peak, we had a rotation of 50+ folks who brought donuts every Friday. We had three simple rules: (1) five dozen (2) boutique shop donuts (3) by 8:00 am. This blog memorializes these e-mails to share my thoughts (and, once upon a time, announce the donut arrival). Have a happy Friday!