KenMankoff

Missing NYC

This Is SpaceBit

This is SpaceBit, formerly residing at http://SpaceBit.org

As I realize my online avatar involves more than just space and computers, I’ve gone with a more generic name of me a.k.a Ken Mankoff, so the site http://spacebit.org/ has been moved to http://kenmankoff.com/

In particular, the old domain name did not capture my now multi-year and PhD. level obsession with ice, Antarctica, and Pine Island Glacier.

Road Trip Photos

We have uploaded photos from our cross-country road trip.

Home v8.0

View from Home v.80, Santa Cruz, CA

K: NY > MA > VT > CO > AK > CH > NYC > Santa Cruz
H: London > NYC > London > Bangkok > London > Edinburgh > NYC > Santa Cruz

> next?

The Road Trip is Over

Our ~5000 mile road-trip (NYC to Santa Cruz, CA) is over. Some thoughts accumulated on the way:

18 wheelers really do have 18 wheels, but the quad-segmented Fedex trucks (cab + 3 trailers) have 26 wheels.

We managed to pass about 15 vehicles. That is what happens when you drive an old RV that gets wobbly over 60 mph.

A/C is over-rated. Roll your windows down. Feel the heat.

Utah is once again and still the most amazing state to visit if you want to live on Mars

The mid-west may be flat and full of fields, but it is beautiful. Especially Iowa.

AT&T has terrible signal west of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Verizon has excellent 3G coverage coast to coast except in some Utah canyons.

And of course photos… I’ll upload them soon to a new album.

Meta Sunset

Road Trip

We’re driving from New York City to Santa Cruz, CA. We’ve kitted out our camper with mobile wireless. The SSID is “GoGoCamperGo”. My wife has set up a live-stream of the drive and I’m broadcasting GPS stats. The camera and GPS will be on whenever we’re driving, and sometimes when we are parked. Updates may appear here and here.

You can access the road trip page here: http://kenmankoff.com/nyc2ca

Go Go Camper Go

Astronaut Rejection Part II of II

Yesterday I received my second astronaut rejection letter. The first was a few months ago from ESA and this one was from NASA. I am not surprised but still sad. The nine new astronauts (called AsCans as they are Astronaut Candidates until their first flight) selected by NASA are introduced here.

In related news, as of July 1st I am officially a PhD. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Post Twitter Experiment

I recently mentioned I’d perform a small Twitter Experiment. It was certainly an interesting week to dive into Twitter. The Iran elections had just occurred. Searching for Iran was worthless due to non-Iranians tweeting support, but a friend mentioned an interesting person to follow (they were on the ground in Tehran) and I felt like I had front-row seats to a revolution.

Somehow @bodc followed me on Twitter after I wrote my first post, before I even tweeted. This was the one benefit of my experiment, as I am now aware of yet another oceanographic data center. Other than @bodc, I did not gain anything by tweeting my occasional work progress throughout the week, and nobody following me replied to anything so I don’t know if anybody else gained anything either. What I did learn is that the web interface is worthless, and if you want to use Twitter it helps to have the right software interface.

I hear TweetDeck and TWhirl are excellent interfaces but they are based on Adobe Air and I am morally opposed to using Adobe products when possible… which doesn’t leave much. If you know of a non-Air alternative to TweetDeck please let me know. It turns out TweetDeck does have a non-Air-based iPhone client which is the best Twitter interface I’ve found to date. TweetDeck allows me to follow just my friends in one pane, a search for the word “Antarctica” in another pane, two Tehran-based Iranians in a 3rd pane, etc. It turns the non-stop stream-of-consciousness that is Twitter into a manageable stream of data.

In conclusion, I’m still not sure what or why, but I can tell I’ll continue to follow it and contribute via it on occasion. And due to the wide software and access support it is still the easiest way I know of to send small bits of information onto the web where they can be consumed by others devices or humans.

Road Trip

We are going to drive across the U.S.A from New York, New York to Santa Cruz, California. Trip duration is 25 days. We are currently in the planning stages. If you have any suggestions of interesting places to visit, please let us know. Either comment below on this post, or edit our map and add a placemark.

View NYC -> UCSC in a larger map