JPL 1, Mars 0

Saturday, January 03, 2004, at 04:37PM

By Eric Richardson

Spirit has landed. I was at a movie tonight, so I wasn't around to watch the live feed during the tense moments. JPL looks to be a happy place right about now. It's pretty crazy to think that a couple months ago I was standing in the observation area of the assembly building looking down on two packages getting wrapped up for a flight to Florida. One of those is now sitting on the surface of Mars. Mars! Even as I'm saying that, I don't know if I can really grasp the scale of it.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2012
Making Sense of Numbers
After several partial-deployment tests, we launched StreamMachine at KPCC on Tuesday evening, putting online listeners in the hands of a Node.JS app that...
2006
Riding to the West Side
I rode my bike the 0.55 miles into work this morning. That always feels a bit odd to do. But the bike wasn't for that trip, it was for the one I...
2005
Quiet...
I've been quiet around here over the last few days for a reason. It's finals time. One tomorrow, one Wednesday, two Thursday, and then I'...
2004
starting fresh
I'm waiting right now for Fedora to install on my laptop. It had been a Redhat 9 box since I got it last fall, but a number of nagging annoyances...
The Palace
So at the new digs today I checked and it is the Palace Theatre, as I had guessed when I looked at the picture I took out my window. Some of the old Broadway...
it's the little things
Went down to the new apartment today to drop the first small load of stuff off and see if the power was turned on, etc. Each time I'm there it'...
2000
maglites
I carry a 5 D-cell Maglite in my car. The thing is massive. I figured it was the largest they made, but of course I was wrong. US Calvary has a 6 D...
1999
IRIX
You gotta love IRIX and journaled file systems. My Linux machine is still sitting there fsck'ing my little IDE drive (it's still got the 8gig...
the wonder of technology...
right now i'm sitting at school listening to mp3's streaming off of my computer at the office. Very cool. Who would ever have imagined?