Soccer and NASA? Huh?

Well the world is now going to have a bit of withdrawl with the end of World Cup Soccer. I watched the final between Italy and France yesterday and must say it was a rather un-inspiring game. The Italians sat back on their heels and let the French dance around them with the ball and if it wasn't for Bufon, one of the greatest gatekeepers in the world, or so I'm told, then Italy would have been beaten, strictly speaking France I believe had the better team, their spirit was there and so was their game play. Yes Italy came on strong in the first half, but their energy and spirit peetered out by part 2. When the two overtime periods came and went it looked as though Italy had run out of steam and were playing just to get into the kick-off, which is strange as the Red, White and Green never do well in kick-offs. In any case, then Zidane goes and gives one of the Italian players a head bunt in the sternum for some verbal exchange or something, which really caused a break in play and probably could have given the Italians a slight edge had they seized the opportunity and played offensively. But again they sat back and played it cool. Thankfully because of a mistake by one of the French soccer snipers who hit the goalpost, Italy was able to win the kick-off 5-3, not a very convincing win, but one I'll gladly take myself and see the end of the World cup.

Now I dont' have anything against soccer or any sport, it's just that while a good majority of the planet was sitting in their living rooms watching Italy and Franch, many didn't realize that floating some 320Km above them the astronauts of the space shutle Discovery were bathing in the successes reaped from a very productive space walk performed the day before. Saturday saw two space walkers venture out of the safe confines of the shuttle/space station complex and perform some tests of the 15 metre extension boom that is affixed to the end of the Canada-arm that will enable astronauts to reach the bottom of the orbiter should an emergency arise that requires them to perform repair work to the tiles covering the bottom of the shuttle. In fact yesterday they performed another spacewalk in which they simulated repairs to the heat tiles and that too went off without a hitch. Those of you who know me personally know about my fondness for anything related to Space. For those of you perhaps more fortunate not to have to listen to me go on and on about NASA should know that I'm a big space nut, case perhaps my wife would say, but then she thinks i'm a super-geek! Anyhow, NASA and the space program have always held a wonderful fascination for me and being able to watch NASA TV over the Internet has been one of my greatest past times over the last few years. Lately I found out that I might actually be able to watch NASA on a satellite dish. Now until lately the only way I thought I could do this was to buy a big old ugly 10+ foot dish and somehow convince my neighbour that I had a life-threatening disease whose only cure was to watch at least 4-5 hours of NASA TV a day. Hmmm.. Yeah I agree, it's highly unlikely that my neighbour or any other sane person on the planet would fall for that one, but hey can't blame a guy for trying. With this said, I wasn't about to put my neighbour or my house evaluation at risk by basically having an overgrown wok in the back yard. So I made the concession of watching NASA TV over the Internet and got my high-speed DSL connection. However, lately I found out that there is a method by which people can watch sat. TV for free. It's called Free to air and there are many website devoted to this subject so I won't go to deep into it. The only thing I'll say is in searching for information I found out that one can receive digital feeds from NASA TV on some of the satellites available on the Free to air system. My only thing now is to find a very inexpensive FTA receiver and a small dish to place unobtrusively on the roof and be able to enjoy a NASA TV in glorious and full 27" diagonal on my TV. I'll post more if I'm ever actually successful. For now I'm going to hit the hay as they say and leave some tidbits for some other blogging day.