The New Road

NASA Ames

The NASA Ames talk went well this morning. Though that is just my take. I'll actually be getting feedback forms from the woman who set it up. How cool is that? It's like a report card... for adults. If it's bad I'll just bury it in the back yard like I did with my middle school interim report that said I was flunking math (bright kid.) Hopefully the fact that I steered clear of any rocket scientist jokes will get me a few points.

One thing that I was surprised by was the interest in Ruby on Rails. I'm a big supporter, even though I was there to talk PHP. Rails has a huge buzz factor. I think I'll have to start writing some articles on it. 

Anywho, back to Ames. It's an interesting facility. Some of the buildings are straight out of the 50s. And other enormous buildings, like the wind tunnel and the massive hanger, going mostly unused. I'd have taken more pictures if there was stuff to take pictures of. Generally it's just a mass of oddly shaped buildings with big tubes emerging from one building and then drilling into others. Inside it felt a lot like the University buildings I used to work in early on in my career.

I did get a chance to interview the director of nanotechnology about what they are trying to do at NASA with this exciting new science. He had some very cool things to say, and he was able to make it accessible to me, which means it should be accessible to almost anyone. ;-)