Good Morning Internet

(Photo credit: NASA/Paul E. Alers)

I started writ­ing about the NASA Tweetup nearly a dozen times now. I’m hav­ing trou­ble encap­su­lat­ing exactly how pro­found of an expe­ri­ence it was, maybe because I’m still wrap­ping my head around it.

In the weeks lead­ing up, a group of very orga­nized peo­ple coor­di­nated the rental of a vaca­tion house, which we dubbed the Big House. The enthu­si­asm peo­ple had in the Google group and on Twit­ter was infec­tious. I didn’t know any­one, but I was excited to dive in and meet them. Within a mat­ter of hours of arriv­ing, we were fam­ily. These are new friends I will keep for the rest of my life.

At Kennedy Space Cen­ter, we saw things that aren’t nor­mally avail­able to the pub­lic. The launch was delayed mul­ti­ple times, and then even­tu­ally scrubbed, but Stephanie Schier­holz, the tweetup orga­nizer and our per­sonal superhero/rockstar, coor­di­nated extra activ­i­ties and more unfor­get­table moments than we could have dreamed. What was orig­i­nally a three-day trip was extended into a week-long expe­ri­ence that, for lack of a bet­ter term, changed my life. We saw the inside of the Vehi­cle Assem­bly Build­ing. We vis­ited the launch­pad at sun­set. We explored the Kennedy Space Cen­ter vis­i­tor cen­ter at leisure and rode the Shut­tle Launch Expe­ri­ence mul­ti­ple times. At the Big House, we stayed up late, forged new rela­tion­ships, played music, laughed harder than any of us had laughed in a long time, ate, drank, and basked in the pres­ence of some of the most cre­ative, smart, fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple I had ever met.

I am work­ing on a much longer post about the whole week, but in the mean­time, my friends Raam and Tal­lu­lah both wrote incred­i­bly stir­ring pieces that express the spirit of the expe­ri­ence much bet­ter than I can right now. It’s absolutely required read­ing. We also had no short­age of pho­tog­ra­phers on hand, so be sure to check out my Flickr set as well as the tweetup group.

As of right now, NASA plans to launch Dis­cov­ery no ear­lier than 2:52 a.m. on Decem­ber 3. Stephanie informed us that our badges will allow us into the press area dur­ing this new launch win­dow. (See? She’s still our super­hero.) So, pre­sented with this aston­ish­ing oppor­tu­nity, I will head back down to the Space Coast next week. There’s no way I could miss this.

Related Posts:

• Thanks, Mom and Dad, for intro­duc­ing me to space
• 13 days until the NASA tweetup
• The year of adven­ture continues
• Video of this morning’s win­ter sol­stice lunar eclipse
• Per­seid Fail

I owe a lot of my inter­est in sci­ence and space explo­ration to my par­ents. Grow­ing up, my Dad took me on field trips to explore plan­ets and stars through tele­scopes in the dead of win­ter. My first up-close look at the Moon knocked my socks off. We put down blan­kets in the back­yard and counted mete­ors dur­ing show­ers. My par­ents bought sub­scrip­tions for me to kids’ sci­ence and space mag­a­zines, and I once got to spend a sum­mer at the the Mary­land Sci­ence Center’s plan­e­tar­ium in Baltimore.

A few years ago, when Mars and the Earth were closer to each other than they’d ever be in our life­times, my dad and I gazed at the Mar­t­ian polar ice caps through his tele­scope. It was stunning.

Just this past May, I was lucky enough to road trip down to Florida with my sis­ter and father to watch my first-ever space shut­tle launch, the launch of Space Shut­tle Atlantis, STS-132. Right now, I’m beside myself with excite­ment for the NASA Tweetup this weekend.

I’m so thank­ful that my par­ents intro­duced me to space at a young age. Just a few min­utes ago, I got this email from my dad:

The date for the next launch draws near and I’m excited even tho I’m not going! So I thought you might like to see this pic of your space shut­tle toy that I found clean­ing up today. Still in great work­ing con­di­tion!
0:-)

I totally remem­ber this toy. It was one of my favorites. Right now, I kind of want to go home and play with it.

Related Posts:

• STS-133 NASA Tweetup
• 13 days until the NASA tweetup
• Video of this morning’s win­ter sol­stice lunar eclipse
• Seag­ull Cen­tury 2010
• The year of adven­ture continues

2009 was kind of a rough year for every­one. The econ­omy did a swan-dive into an empty pool and a lot of us lost our jobs.

This year, I declared, would be dif­fer­ent. While watch­ing Olympic hockey and a space shut­tle land­ing (I’m a mul­ti­tasker), I could tell this year would be filled with adven­tures. And wow, yes, it sure has. It’s been bet­ter than I had imag­ined, and I feel so lucky to have had so many expe­ri­ences this year. A quick ver­bal montage:

• Sur­vived the snowpocalypse
• Played a reunion show with Three Track Mind
• Turned 30
• Went to South by Southwest
• Saw the final (sched­uled) launch of Space Shut­tle Atlantis
• Went to MaxFunCon
• Quit an unful­fill­ing job
• Watched the World Cup
• Watched fire­works from my roof
• Met Tom Green
• Found an amaz­ing new job
• Started my sec­ond year of grad school

And now it’s Octo­ber. It’s autumn, my favorite sea­son, and I still have a few adven­tures before the year wraps up. Next week­end, I’m bik­ing 100 kilo­me­ters in the Seag­ull Cen­tury. In Novem­ber, I’m one of the lucky ones going to the NASA Tweetup for Space Shut­tle Discovery’s last trip to space. (That’s right: Two shut­tle launches in one year!) A week later I get to see my all-time favorite band, The Posies, play in DC. And then it’s the holidays.

I feel so incred­i­bly lucky. As I write this, I’m sit­ting at the same table where I was back in Feb­ru­ary, day­dream­ing about all these adven­tures. I couldn’t be hap­pier with how every­thing turned out. 2010 has been filled with expe­ri­ences, friends, and fam­ily I wouldn’t trade for anything.

What was your favorite adven­ture of 2010? How do you plan on top­ping it in 2011?

Related Posts:

• STS-133 NASA Tweetup
• I’m lead­ing a panel at SXSW Interactive!
• The Posies at the 9:30 Club
• Thanks, Mom and Dad, for intro­duc­ing me to space
• 13 days until the NASA tweetup

Update: It appears Apple has resolved the issue. A few hours after writ­ing this post, my mom tried the codes again and they worked. She’s the proud owner of “Broth­ers” by The Black Lips and “Sea of Cow­ards” by The Dead Weather. Still, it would have been nice for her to have them a week ago, as planned.

Last week, I pur­chased two gift codes for albums from the iTunes Store. I slipped them into a card and gave them to my mother as part of her birth­day present. I thought it would be fun for her to type in the codes, down­load the albums instantly, and sync them to her devices.

So you can imag­ine how upset I was when she politely men­tioned to me over the week­end that she had trou­ble redeem­ing the codes. Switch­ing into Mac Geek Son Mode, I hopped onto her com­puter and tried it out. I got the same generic error she did: “The iTunes Store could not process your request. Please try again later.”

My mom had been try­ing “again later” for days, and got the same unhelp­ful error each time. I double-checked my receipt and check card. The trans­ac­tion was processed and Apple took my money, so why wouldn’t the codes work?

On Fri­day, I sent an email to iTunes tech­ni­cal sup­port. Two days later, I got a response from a rep­re­sen­ta­tive who apol­o­gized for the delay (they nor­mally claim a 24-hour turn­around on sup­port requests) and issued me a two-song credit to my account to make up for it. Okay, that’s nice, but it doesn’t address the prob­lem of get­ting music to my mom.

The tech sup­port rep went on:

After research­ing fur­ther, I tried to open it from my end and I received an error as well. I was then informed by my senior super­vi­sor that there is an issue with redeem­ing gift codes and the Apple is cur­rently work­ing toward a res­o­lu­tion for the issue you have reported.

If you do not pre­fer to wait for the issue to be resolved, which I can’t pre­dict when will that be. Please reply to this email and I will cer­tainly refund the gifts back to your credit card. Thank you for your time and I look for­ward to your reply, Gavin.

Gift codes don’t work, sup­port can’t pre­dict when the prob­lem will be resolved, and the best solu­tion Apple can offer is a refund? Isn’t “Gift This Album” sup­posed to be a major fea­ture of the store? It’s unac­cept­able that the top music retailer in the US can’t han­dle a request this simple.

I wrote back, ask­ing if I could get replace­ment codes, or if there was any pos­si­ble way I could get these two albums out of the store and into my mom’s iTunes col­lec­tion. While I await a reply, my lovely mom is waits patiently for these two birth­day presents.

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SXSW was amaz­ing. I had more incred­i­ble expe­ri­ences packed into one week than I can remem­ber. Inter­ac­tive sparked new ideas and helped me develop new ones. Film encour­aged me to approach my writ­ing from dif­fer­ent angles. Music con­vinced me that I need to start writ­ing songs again. All three com­po­nents of SXSW were sources of seem­ingly end­less inspi­ra­tion, and that made the trip com­pletely worth it, air­line delays and all.

I learned a few things about the SXSW expe­ri­ence itself, too. In the pre­ced­ing weeks, I made a sched­ule of every ses­sion and show I wanted to attend. In the­ory, I thought I’d be able to string one after another seam­lessly, bounc­ing from talk to party to band. In prac­tice, some­times events would over­lap, it took more time to get from one event to another than I thought, and some­times there were lines to deal with.

I also learned that blog­ging and pod­cast­ing dur­ing SXSW are near-impossible feats.

Back here in the “real world”, I’ve never been more moti­vated to take on ambi­tious projects, trans­form my pro­fes­sional life into some­thing I enjoy and am proud of, and ded­i­cate more time and effort to my cre­ative writ­ing. I feel so for­tu­nate to have so many smart, tal­ented, and encour­ag­ing friends off of whom I can bounce ideas and get feedback.

Tonight I plan to go through my note­book and recap my favorite moments from SXSW 2010. I have over a thou­sand pho­tos to sort out. I can’t wait to share the high­lights with you.

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I am so lucky to have such a fan­tas­tic fam­ily and group of friends. My 30th birth­day couldn’t have been more fun.

The party started with din­ner at Rocket to Venus. Food, drinks, and com­pany were all top-notch.

We moved on to Frazier’s where we met up with some Twit­ter friends. Together, every­body made sure I always had a drink in my hand. We moved to the Hon Bar next. The details get a lit­tle blurry from that point on, which means my friends excelled at their mis­sion to make sure I cel­e­brated properly.

My birth­day week­end con­tin­ued Sun­day, which was equally amaz­ing. Down at my par­ents’ house, the weather was warm enough to spend some time sit­ting out­side in the sun. My dad slow-cooked ribs on the grill all day and my mom made salmon that could win awards.

I can’t imag­ine a bet­ter way to ring in a new decade. I’m so thank­ful to have friends and fam­ily that made my 30th birth­day so special.

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In this episode I intro­duce you to my friend Mike Camillo. He’s decided to eat bet­ter, exer­cise more, and lose weight.

In order to track his progress and keep him­self moti­vated, he takes a shirt­less pho­tos of him­self each Fri­day and posts it to Face­book for every­one to see, along with the lat­est scale read­ing. Bold stuff.

Sub­scribe with iTunes.

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I met Matt Kraft (known in some cir­cles as Krafty, K-Box, K-Rock, Kraft-o-mattic, Kraft­mat­tic, and some­times Matt) at Sal­is­bury University’s vari­ety show in the fall of 1998. He, along with our good buddy Josh, played in a band called Release, and I had some­how been con­vinced to act as one of the shows emcees.

A cou­ple weeks later I replaced the gui­tar player in Release. By the spring, Krafty, Josh and I had re-formed as local leg­ends of late-nineties rock, Three Track Mind. We released one full-length album called Throws Like a Girl (which you can still find on iTunes).

I’ve known this guy for just a shade over a decade. We’ve been through a lot, and he’s one of my best friends. So I was thrilled that he recently started a photo blog called, fit­tingly, Kraft­mat­tic.

His daily pho­tos are really fun, and his accom­pa­ny­ing posts just crack me right the hell up. Recently, he had a photo of portable toi­lets dan­gling above a con­struc­tion site, and in another entry he turned a well-known piece of art into a Kids in the Hall ref­er­ence. I love him, so go sub­scribe to his feed!

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We took my grand­mother out to din­ner for her 85th birth­day yes­ter­day. I men­tioned ear­lier that she told me repeat­edly through­out the day she wasn’t a fan of my win­ter beard, but I think it’s bet­ter when you get it firsthand.

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My dad’s pho­tog­ra­phy open­ing was a huge suc­cess last night! I saw a lot of fam­ily and fam­ily friends I haven’t seen in years. None of them have ever seen me with a beard before, and I got a wide vari­ety of reactions.

• Every­body (after doing a double-take): “Oh my god! I almost didn’t rec­og­nize Gavin!”
• Male rel­a­tives and friends: “It looks good! You should keep grow­ing it.”
• Males my father’s age: “I remem­ber when I could grow a dark beard. Now it would be all white!”
• Female rel­a­tives and friends: “Inter­est­ing! So, are you going to keep it?”
• My mom (to a friend): “I’m going to buy him a gift cer­tifi­cate to a bar­ber shop.”

Today, we’re tak­ing my grand­mother out to din­ner for her 85th birth­day. She’s had my favorite reac­tion by far.

• My grand­mother (repeat­edly today): “Wow!” and “That beard!” and “I will never get used to that beard!” and “I don’t like that beard!”

I started the beard on New Year’s Day, and the plan was to keep it through Feb­ru­ary and then go back to my clean-shaven look at the begin­ning of March, just in time for my birth­day. But now part of me wants to keep it, just to col­lect more reactions.

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