9.7.06

Changed Around, the Robot Party

The floor may move under your feet...

I'm rearranging things in my sidebar at the moment, and trying to figure out what goes best where. I'll edit this post when I'm done to try and explain what the hell I'm doing.

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I just have to sit down and write this. I’m currently experiencing that mood where I want to crawl into bed and hide from the nasty mean world and all its difficulties.

Well, I’ve switched everything around, and added a new section. Demoting the political blogs was a hard decision, since this is how I got into the whole game, but I’m usually way too scared to comment on any of them and since this isn’t shaping up to be a political blog, it seemed odd to give them precedence. Harder still is going to be expanding the People Who Write In Blogs section. Now that I have an established blog, I’m all of a sudden very shy about adding to my blogroll. It was simple when I first made it - I just added all the blogs I read. But now I look at all the new blogs that I’m reading and think, “What if they see my blogroll? What will they think?” So I will be expanding this section very surreptitiously. If you should happen to see your blog appear there, please pay no attention.

The new section is providing links to my favourite robots. After some consideration, I decided to include links to all the current Martian ones. As you can see, the world’s space agencies are holding something of a robot party on Mars. Everyone is taking photos and someone’s wheel has got stuck. One usually calls a cab at that point, but the fare is considerable when the nearest taxis are millions of miles away and I can’t really blame NASA for thinking twice. It was tempting to just link to the JPL Mars Exploration pages, so there’d just be the one link, but the rovers deserve their own link, I feel, and Mars Express is an ESA mission, and in the end I just decided to throw everything in there.

These aren’t just one click links, by the way. When you go to each of the NASA sites, you’ll first want to click on the ‘multimedia’ or ’images’ button. And, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twenty first century, where images from distant planets are no longer reserved for exclusive press conferences - they’re regularly posted onto the internet. If this is something of an information overload for you, over time I hope to find some good sites that distil all that information into a more accessible form. The Planetary Society is a great stop for news, and the NASA photojournal for pretty pictures, like so:


Source, with explanation.

3 comments:

Diddums said...

"I just have to sit down and write this. I’m currently experiencing that mood where I want to crawl into bed and hide from the nasty mean world and all its difficulties."

I feel a bit like that today as well - but I also feel a little like fighting back, as it seems to me some people prefer to stop their ears with cotton wool. Being in a mildly fighting humour doesn't mean the scratches don't sting. :-(.

When it comes to looking at who people are linked to, I tend to look at the links in the comments section more than the blogroll links - but everybody's habits are different. Someone's posted a list of links I keep meaning to follow, so I better toddle :-). Hope to see the sidebar when I get a new browser (this browser is awful... and I can't see much of anything with it).

Pacian said...

You can't see my beautiful sidebar?! T_T

Well, I swear by the Opera browser, but I have no idea how well it'd work for you. The different versions are here.

Diddums said...

Ah ha! A side bar! Yes, it's very beautiful. I can see it using Firefox on my PC (which also downloads all the blogs faster as it's not as old as my Mac). It was the Mac browser I had problems with, it chews up everything - but.... but never mind, this is all intended for a future blog post.

Yes, nice side bar (feeling ludicrously happy all of a sudden).