March 2008 Archives

A huge unmanned European transport ship capable of delivering several tons of cargo to the ISS has been cleared to launch on Sunday. The Automated Transfer Vehicle has been named Jules Verne and will be blasted into space from a modified European Ariane 5 rocket which is going to launch from Kourou, French Guinea.

The various space agencies are hoping that the ATV will be able to take over many of the supply runs that bring water, food, fuel and spare parts, particularly after NASA scraps the space shuttle program in five years.

Depending on the life span of the vehicle, the European Space Agency plans to build a total of five of them

You may have noticed on a couple of posts at my other site that I have added something called Buzzfuse to the bottom of those posts. What Buzzfuse does is to give me a place to market my posts and drive traffic to each of my sites. It's easy to sign up at Buzzfuse.com and it's nice to find another way besides trackbacks to bring new traffic to some of my work.

Go check it out, sign up and submit your own work to see how it goes!

Any good geek should know who Gary Gygax was. Along with Co-Creator Dave Arneson he helped launch the fantasy gaming genre by creating a fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

My dad picked up the game in 1976 and introduced it to us. I was immediately hooked and was heavily involved in gaming until the early eighties and then still played off and on until the last decade. Now I just don't have the time. I must have 300 books, Dragon magazines and modules packed away in my basement dating from the seventies until the early nineties.

Gary Gygax had been suffering from health problems for several years including an abdominal aneurysm according to his wife. His death was caused by those same problems.

Funeral arrangements for the man who died today are still pending. Along with his wife he is survived by six children.