New Kickstarter: short stories in Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series!

Kowal's Lady Astronaut series is, simply put, awesome. IMHO. The first book is The Calculating Stars, and it begins with a literal bang: a meteorite smacks into the ocean off the eastern seaboard of the USA. The resulting tidal wave and flooding completely destroys Washington, DC and tons of other areas.

The heroine of the story is a calculator, a woman who calculates (she later gets her hand on the first computers!). And she starts doing math, and realizes that this impact is going to invoke climate change on the scale of a nuclear winter. Her calculations are verified (gotta check, even if she is a genius) and thus the American Space Program begins - in 1952!

Excellent read, I found it difficult to put down and burned through all three books in very little time. And it found serious appreciation: "The Lady Astronaut Universe is Apollo-era science fiction that sprang to life with Mary Robinette Kowal's Hugo-award winning novelette "The Lady Astronaut of Mars." The first novel in the series, The Calculating Stars, is one of only 18 books to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards."

The series is currently a trilogy of novels plus some short stories. This book, expected July '25, is an additional nine stories (or more, depending on how far the Kickstarter goes!) and is also sort of a 'get excitement going' for the next novel, due March or May next year.

The initial goal of $30,000 was exceeded in hours, they've almost doubled it with over a thousand backers.

$10 will get you the PDF of the book, more will get you more (how profound!) up to an including a weekend in Space Camp!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mary-robinette/silent-spaces

EDIT: fixed URL

Boeing blames paperwork for door plug blowout, NTSB slaps Boeing upside the head bigly

One complaint that investigators into Boeing's systems after the plug blow-out was that there didn't seem to be any paperwork regarding repairing the door. Suspicions were raised that Boeing or people on the shop floor deleted said records, but 'we the people' never really heard the resolution of this.

Now a Boeing executive is saying there was no paperwork because the door plug repair was not assigned to a repair team! Now, obviously that demonstrates a problem. Why was no ticket issued? Inquiring minds want to know!

We may have an explanation: " Boeing said during the Tuesday briefing that the reason the Alaska Air door plug was not probably secured in the first place was because two different groups of employees at the plant were charged with doing the work, with one removing and the other reinstalling the door plug as the plane was passing along the assembly line.

The first group of employees removed the door plug to address problems with some rivets that were made by a supplier, Spirit AeroSystems. But they didn’t generate the paperwork indicating they had removed the door plug, along with the four bolts necessary to hold it in place, in order to do that work.

When a different group of employees put the plug back in place, Boeing says the employees didn’t think the plane would actually fly in that condition.

Instead, they were just blocking the hole with the plug to protect the inside of the fuselage from weather as the plane moved outside to a different area of the factory compound. That group of employees often makes those kind of temporary fixes.

“The doors team closes up the aircraft before it is moved outside, but it’s not their responsibility to install the pins,” said Elizabeth Lund, senior vice president of quality for Boeing’s commercial airplane unit. "

But there's a bigger problem. :-)

This is a Federal investigation by the NTSB. Boing isn't supposed to say 'boo' unless it is cleared with the NTSB for release. They don't want any information being released until it's reviewed and approved, they want anything released to be as truthful as possible.

Care to guess what the Boing exec who released this information didn't do?

And the consequences are pretty grave for Boeing. "The NTSB said that given its recent actions, Boeing won’t have access to investigative information the agency produces about the Alaska Airlines incident, but it will keep its party status to the investigation.

The NTSB is unable to fine Boeing, as it doesn’t have enforcement authority. While the agency could have stripped away Boeing’s party status, the NTSB may have considered it more important to keep Boeing as a party to the investigation because of its employees’ expertise.

The NTSB said that it may subpoena any relevant records it requires during the course of the investigation. It also will subpoena Boeing to appear at an investigative hearing in Washington D.C. on Aug. 6 and 7. The agency said that, unlike other parties, Boeing won’t be able to ask questions of other participants."

Boeing knew the rules of an NTSB investigation as they've been party to quite a few of them. There's really no excuse for this kind of stupidity. This might be an executive resume-generating event.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/boeing-cause-alaska-air-door-plug

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boeing-sanctioned-sharing-737-max-9-investigation-info_n_667d5231e4b07cb66c6d070b

Microsoft Paint and Jpegs

I've been using Paint a lot recently, doing screen captures and snips for some documentation writing. One thing that's infuriating about it is that by default, it wants to save docs as PNGs, and you can't default it over to Jpeg!

But there's a trick....

Click on File, Save As, then you'll see a list of formats it can save in. Right-click on Jpeg and there's an option to creating a shortcut on the toolbar. Of course, you have to make the toolbar visible.

I prefer keyboard shortcuts, but I'll take this as a bit of a labor saver.