Get the following things laid out before you start:

• Turkey fryer (26 or 30 quart pot, depending on how big your bird is)
• A full tank of propane
• Enough peanut oil to almost fill the pot
• Marinade and injector
• Seasoned salt or other rub for the outside of the turkey
• A fire extinguisher near where you will be frying
• A length of 2×4, or a sturdy broomstick

The first step to prepping the turkey is to get it. You can spend the extra money on a Butterball if you like, but we have pretty good luck with a decent grade A turkey. Whatever you get, make sure that it will fit in the fryer pot that you have, with room to spare at the top. For these notes, I’m going to inject the turkey. You could also brine it, if you choose, though I’ve never done that.

Four hours, or so, before you want to eat, unwrap the turkey and remove the “surprise package”. The giblets, neck, etc. Remove the popup timer, if it has one. Trim any excess skin around the neck. If you don’t do this, it will flap and splatter oil, or sear shut. Don’t worry about washing the turkey just yet.

Take the fryer pot and put the turkey in it, on the rack provided. Fill the pot with clean tap water, until the entire turkey is submerged. If the very tips of the legs are still sticking out (the bone), that’s OK. Take the turkey out and let it drain. Use a tape measure to measure the distance between the top of the pot and the water level. Add 1.5″, and remember the number (so your number should now put the tape measure end below the surface of the water).

Take the turkey off the rack and pat it dry. You should have something flavorful to inject the turkey with. We use Cajun Injectors, usually half the turkey with Creole Butter, and the other half with Roasted Garlic. Follow the instructions on the jar to inject the marinade into the breast and legs. Try to poke as few holes in the turkey as possible, but spread it around. Put the turkey somewhere cold (on a tray in the fridge, for example). This will give the marinade a little time to soak in. You could start earlier if you want, but I usually don’t bother.

Empty and thoroughly dry out the fryer pot. About 2 hours or so (depending on the size of your turkey) before you want to eat, Set up your fryer outside, not inside, not in a garage, and not near anything flammable. I can’t stress this enough. It may be cold outside, but just wear a jacket. And whereever you put the fryer, plan on spilling a little oil, or having it splatter. You might want to put some damp newspaper under and around it to soak up the oil (and not create a fire hazard). Put the fryer pot on the burner, but don’t light the burner yet.

Make sure you’ve got peanut oil. Peanut oil has a very high temperature at which it will break down, and it will not adversely flavor the turkey. Trust me on this. Don’t try to use another oil or shortening. It might work, it might not, but peanut definitely works. Fill the pot with peanut oil to the mark from earlier (1.5″ below the water level after the turkey was removed from the pot). Your fryer should have come with a thermometer and a clip, so clip it to the side of the pot so the end of the thermometer is in the oil.

Now you can start the burner. Follow the directions for the particular fryer that you have. Once you have the burner lit, the flame should be almost completely blue. If it’s not, adjust the air shutter. Crank it up as high as you feel comfortable with. It’s probably going to take longer to heat the oil than it will to actually cook the turkey. With 6 gallons of peanut oil, it took me about an hour to heat the oil.

You want to get it up to 400 degrees. We’re not going to cook the turkey at 400, but the temperature will drop when you put the turkey in, so getting it up to 400 is good. I wouldn’t go higher, though. More importantly, now that the oil is on, keep an eye on it. I would suggest always having someone with the fryer. You don’t want the burner to go out, the temperature to go too high, or anything to catch fire.

Once the temperature is close to 400, get the turkey out of the fridge. Pat it as dry as possible with paper towels. The more water is on the turkey, the more the oil is going to boil and splatter when you put it in, so dry is good. Get your seasoned salt and sprinkle it over the entire surface of the turkey, inside and out. This is going to give the skin some flavor when it crisps, so be liberal, and rub it in pretty good. Put the turkey on the fryer rack, and take it out to the fryer.

For this part, it’s good to have two people, so you can both stand back from the fryer. The fryer rack should have a hook that goes with it (kinda like a coat hanger) that hooks onto the top of the rack for lowering it into the oil. Hook this onto the rack, and run the 2×4 or broomstick through it, so you can each hold one end of the 2×4 and stand back from the fryer. You might want to have gloves on as well, just in case it splatters. Hopefully, your oil is up to 400 now. Otherwise, wait until it is.

Do not just drop the turkey into the oil! That’s how accidents happen. Instead you want to lower the turkey into the oil very slowly so that it does not boil over or splatter excessively. Just take your time, and lower the turkey in evenly a couple inches at a time. But don’t go slower than you have to to keep the oil from splattering or overflowing. Once the turkey is completely in the oil, unhook the handle from the rack. The oil should have expanded a little when it heated up, and it should be covering the turkey completely (except possibly for the tips of the leg bones). If it’s not, add a little more oil so that it is.

Start your timer. You’re going to fry the turkey for 3.5 minutes per pound. So a 16 pound bird would cook for 56 minutes. Continue to watch it to make sure there are no problems. You also want to keep an eye on the temperature. Once the bird is in, the temp will drop. It might go down as much as 100 degrees. Keep the burner on high, and bring the temperature back up to 350. Once it hits 350, level it off.

When the time is up, shut the burner off first. Use the hook and the 2×4 to lift the turkey out of the oil. Hold it over the pot for a minute to let it drain, then take it inside and let it cool down for 10 or 15 minutes. Carve it like you would any other turkey, and enjoy. The wings will be a little crispy, but the breast and legs should be perfect. Leave the oil to cool.

After dinner, and after the oil is cold, you have a choice to make. If you’re going to fry another turkey soon, save the oil. It’s good for at least 2 turkeys, provided you filter it a little. Otherwise you can just toss it. Either way, put it back into the containers you got it out of. If you’re going to save it, filter it through a strainer to get all the turkey bits out of it. Clean everything else up and store it properly.

These are my notes, as updated from this Thanksgiving’s turkey. If you’ve got more notes or questions, please post them here. Always looking for more tips.

I’m very fortunate to work in a job where it is not tied to my physical location. I’m a manager, and I need to spend most of my time in the office so that I can interact both with my team and with other teams. This does not preclude working from home a day a week, which is a perk that my department has maintained for everyone for many years now, or working from other places when appropriate. Originally, I took advantage of this to escape on Friday afternoons to perform my GTD weekly reviews so that I would not be distracted. Now I’ll often spend an afternoon a week working from a coffee shop just so I can focus on some of the more creative tasks that I don’t tend to attack when I’m at my desk. I was doing this before I even knew there was a name for it.

A third place is usually defined as a social space separate from the two traditional environments (home and work) where people can go either to interact or just to be around other people while they work. Coffee shops are a very common version of this, as most provide the traits of a third place: free or inexpensive, close by, food and drink, regulars, and an environment that is comfortable to spend time in. They are also my third place of choice, as I can generally count on wireless access for free or with purchase, and there’s always another one around if my chosen location begins to get too crowded. I get a coffee, put my headphones on, and get down to the business of writing posts, or crafting policies or plans, or researching topics that I just need a little time for.

I’ve also been developing some interest in the idea of coworking, but not just the basic shared environment where you can be around others while you work. I look at it more for the ability for like-minded folks to collaborate on an idea. Some of this is what we’ve been working on in the space tweep community: someone comes up with an idea and a few of us “gather around” to discuss and create it. There’s a problem with it, in that we don’t have a decent place to collaborate except for 140 characters at a time on Twitter (hence my previous post about a Spacepoints collaboration space). I look at places like NASA’s sp.ace and I wonder what an environment like that could accomplish at my company.

Of course, what did they do? The new office in Reston will have an open floor plan. The cubes, if you can even call them that, are 6 foot square, with very low glass walls (only about 3′ high). Everyone has a cube except for directors and above, who will have some of the very few offices. This is going to be a huge change for a company where most people are in offices right now, and those who are not are in full-height cubes. I look at this design and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make phone calls, how I’m going to concentrate when other people are making phone calls, how I’m going to have private conversations with my team, and who’s going to be looking over my shoulder while I’m working. It allows for almost no personalization of our workspace, and I really don’t think it’s going to be conducive as a primary workspace for most people.

So it comes down to the fact that I want to spend time in a coworking space, but I want it to be a limited amount of time and I want to actually have a second place (work) to come back to. As much as I am trying to approach the new office with an open mind (I like the huge gym, and the cafeteria, and the collaborative spaces), I just can’t see how the actual desk space is going to work. I think it will actually force me to a third place more.

More so than previously, I have come to know a number of people working for NASA in the last year through the Tweetup program. I’ve been watching as they announce that they’ve gotten the call, and that their last day is coming. These are the people who have made this program work. The astronauts take the final risk, and a big one it is. But it’s the people who work at Kennedy Space Center, at Johnson Space Center, at Michoud, Dryden, and other sites who have made that possible. They are the ones who know that their names will never be known, that they will not be going on media tours, and that they have truly uncertain futures. My friend CraftLass wrote a beautiful post about these heroes. And while nobody would argue that the astronauts are not heroes, I think even they would agree that the true heroes are the people who solve the hard problems in obscurity.

I’ve been to the Space Coast a couple times recently, and after being in Titusville for several days, I have seen what a depressed economy truly looks like. With the combination of the real estate market being where it is, and the economy in that area being even worse, nobody can afford to pick up and move to where a job might be. But despite this, the technicians, engineers, managers, and other NASA employees are doing their jobs, and responding in a dignified manner. They are true professionals. They know that tomorrow morning, Shuttle Mission Control at JSC shuts down, the last shuttle is handed over to the Transition and Retirement team, and they will be there right up until they are told they are no longer needed.

I think what bothers me most about this entire situation is the loss of so many talented people. While there are some commercial space players who have set up shop in Florida, such as SpaceX, they can only employ a fraction of the people who are losing jobs at NASA. This doesn’t even take into account people working at JSC and at other facilities. These people have years of experience with space flight; some have been at NASA for 30 years or more! It saddens me that this incredible pool of talent is dispersing. The lucky ones will be able to put their skills to use in a new job. Many others will take whatever work they can find. What is even worse is that when the commercial space business picks up in a year or two and has some real momentum, these same people will likely be tossed aside because they have a gap in their resume.

This is not how we, as a nation, should treat our heroes. I have always been of the opinion that industries will grow and change, and that we should not eschew that change because someone will lose their job as a result. Automation, improved processes, the failure of individual businesses to adapt: these are all natural changes, and we can’t avoid it just to make sure that an assembly line worker keeps his job. We cannot save the jobs, but we must save the people. It is our responsibility to help them retrain, to develop new skills that will enable them to move forwards.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I wish I did. I wish I could tell my friends at NASA, and the myriad others who have made the dream of a little boy or girl to grow up to be a spaceman a reality, that there is a way through. I can only hope that they will keep their positive outlook, and find a path themselves.

What I need is something along the lines of a virtual thirdplace, an incubator, and coworking, all mashed up. It’s no secret that most of what has been inspiring me lately is space related. And as I said in my previous post about Spacepoints, there’s a need to coordinate the resources available to the community so that you don’t need to know people to be able to get something done. Additionally, I’m a practicioner of Getting Things Done, which says that you should only have a thought once (in an ideal world), at which point you capture it and decide what to do with it. Roll all this together and it’s a pretty interesting concept for enabling people interested in STEM outreach to do, without worrying as much about the “how”. Not to mention the multiplicative effect of putting lots of ideas out there.

We’ll start with users signing up. As part of connecting to the system, they will fill out a profile that lets them specify what their skills are. This can be hobbies (like an amateur photographer, or a woodworker), professional (e.g. a lawyer), or anything in between (someone who used to do graphic design professionally but is now writing books). They can also add in resources they can reach within 1 degree (someone they know directly). This would be along the lines of they have a relative who is a publisher, for example. By doing this we build up a resource database that can be used when working on a project later.

Now we add in the ability for users to quickly capture ideas. Whenever someone has an idea about something to do, no matter how small the idea is, how impossible they think it is, how ill-defined it is at the moment of conception, the person should be able to quickly save it in the system. They can send it by logging into the site and writing it down, by emailing it in, by sending an SMS or a tweet, or any other way we can think of. Reliable capture is an important GTD concept, and here it will let all the possible ideas be captured. Additionally, as soon as an idea is captured, it should be open to the rest of the community for comment. This lets everyone start fleshing out the idea, expanding on it, spinning off of it, and most importantly, turning it into a reality. It will be important to treat this as brainstorming, and keep it positive and constructive.

Once we have an idea and comments on it, we’re ready to start executing. This is where things start to get tricky, because there’s a big difference between talking and doing. For any project, leadership could be collaborative, or it could be coordinated by a single person. If it’s a single person, it could be the person who originally came up with the idea, or it could be someone else who wants to run with it. Regardless, this is where the database of resources comes in. Users should be able to search what’s available, contact folks to find out if they can help, and attach people to the project. Much like an incubator, there should probably be some amount of common resources available to use, such as web hosting or database servers, for those projects that will exist online.

There are a lot of gaps in this idea right now. For example, how do you handle projects that you want to keep somewhat closed? And how do you track credit for a project? That’s less important than a lot of technical details, but it’s critical for continued engagement that people have their contributions recognized. And when an idea really takes off, the people who made it happen should be identified and celebrated. We’ll figure out the details along the way.

Spacepoints is just such a grand idea. It’s not a game. It’s not an app. It’s a dozen apps, and a hundred different games, and so much more. The problem is that even trying to describe it is difficult, because there’s no way to do it without talking in concrete terms. So we talk about a system where people can tell other people about the space outreach things that they do and earn points. But what about a check-in app? OK, so we add that in. And what about the next idea for how to increase outreach and awareness? Why does it have to be space? What about particle physics? I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. This is why we talk about “Spacepoints: The Flame Thrower”. By injecting what seems ludicrous, we’re trying to remind people to think outside the box.

Even more than that, we really have to just do something. This is why whenisthenextrocketlaunch.com is a great example of what Spacepoints is after. Sean Herron, sitting at SpaceUp Houston wanted to do something, and in less than an hour he registered a domain, created a website, and had a finished project to provide people with information about when and where the next rocket launch is. It’s about ISS Notify, where Nathan Bergey created a device to show when the ISS is going overhead, shared the design, and then got other people excited about the project on KIckstarter! He didn’t need the incentive of Spacepoints for that, just a desire to share his excitement for space with everyone else.

So how do we not fall into a trap where a single implementation becomes the definition for what Spacepoints is? The people who get it, the ones who couldn’t care less about the idea of Spacepoints if it gets in the way of the outreach, need to own the idea. As much it is about the community and getting people to go out and do, there still needs to be some kind of organization that are watching out against corporate entities coopting the idea (among other problems). This could be a non-profit organization, a “board of directors”, or something less formal. It is a place to provide guidance, to organize resources, and to make sure that the grand idea stays intact. If someone is working on a project and they need web design help, or graphics, or coding help, or anything at all, there should be a place they can go to find some help.

This is what I see Spacepoints as. It’s a way to enable people to do STEM outreach. Not just by incenting them to do so through points and prizes, but by making it easy for them to take something from an idea to a reality at ludicrous speeds. The more we can come up with to get people excited, the easier it is to find the next big idea that will be the breakout hit. So why are you still sitting here reading this? What idea have you thought of that you haven’t started creating yet? What’s stopping you?

Yet another achievement for our last space shuttle, Atlantis, she was responsible for launching the Galileo probe to Jupiter on STS-34. The was only the second time a probe leaving our local neighborhood was launched from the space shuttle, the first having been the Magellan probe to Venus that was launched by Atlantis during STS-30 earlier in 1989. Galileo’s path would take her around Venus in 1990 and then around Earth twice, in 1990 and 1992, in order to use the gravitational assist to build up enough velocity to get to Jupiter. Even along the way, she had plenty of work to do, examining asteroids and determining if it was possible to detect life on Earth from space. This was accomplished through a series of experiments devised by Carl Sagan during Galileo’s first flyby of Earth. And it was not a trip without problems, either, as her high-gain antenna failed to open. This forced us to rely on her low-gain antenna, which was only intended to transmit at 8 to 16 bits per second (whereas the high-gain antenna would have transmitted at 134 kilobits per second, over 8000 times faster). The NASA engineers, resourceful as always, were able to boost this to 160 bits per second by utilizing compression and receiver upgrades. Just before arriving in Jupiter orbit, Galileo launched an atmospheric probe that made a death dive into Jupiter, collecting 58 minutes worth of data about the weather and composition of the atmosphere. In total, Galileo returned about 30 GB of data and around 14,000 images before performing her own dive into Jupiter (to prevent any possibility of introducing Earth bacteria to Europa).

Juno, with the benefit of 20 years of additional engineering advances, will perform almost as many orbits (32) as Galileo (35) in just a single Earth year, and will perform much more sophisticated science. Once she arrives at Jupiter, in 2016, she will provide a better estimate of Jupiter’s core mass and precisely explore the planet’s magnetic and gravitational fields. She will also fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge of the atmospheric composition. You may ask why we really care. Why would we bother using our resources to send another probe to Jupiter, rather than exploring our closer neighbors? But Jupiter was probably one of the first planets to form in our solar system, and its giant mass has a huge effect on the rest of the planets, including Earth. By understanding Jupiter, we will learn more about how our solar system, and our planet, formed.

The science is exciting, but even more exciting and immediate for me is that NASA has invited me down to Kennedy Space Center to learn more about Juno, and Jupiter, from the experts and to witness her launch on August 5th. As part of NASA’s Tweetup program, where they open up events to some of their social media followers in an effort to increase awareness of NASA’s work, 150 people have been invited down to KSC for a two day event around Juno’s launch. My first NASA Tweetup experience was for Sun-Earth Day at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, earlier this year, and I am honored to have been selected again to go down for this launch. At GSFC, we were able to participate in NASA Edge, their unscripted webcast, as well as take a tour of the GSFC facilities and go down to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to observe the sun and meet with other experts. I can only speculate on what we will be involved in at KSC, based on previous (shuttle) launch Tweetups, and I am so excited to find out!

There are many who are upset over the end of the Space Transportation System (STS) program. We can debate the politics, lament what is past, or get angry over the decisions that have been made, or we can channel that energy into moving forward. Yes, many people are losing their jobs right now, and this is sad because there is so much still to do. The Space Launch System (SLS) program continues to be stuck in limbo, and as a result there are a lot of people who have the skills needed for SLS but are being laid off. The commercial players in the future of space are hiring, but definitely not everyone being laid off, and in many cases not in the same physical locations. This transition period is going to be very hard, but we need to look forwards, and not back.

One of the many things that NASA is good at is solving the difficult problems. We all know their resume: they’ve put men and women in space, on the moon, and they’ve built a home and laboratory 240 miles above us. They have gone from the Cold War mentality of beating the Russians at all costs to working together with them to launch and assemble the pieces of the International Space Station. But the STS only went as far as low earth orbit (LEO): NASA has sent vehicles to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. Voyager 1 is now over 17 billion kilometers from Earth (or more than 116 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun) and still receiving and transmitting data! And they keep sending them out: the Juno mission to Jupiter will launch August 5th, and the Curiosity rover (the Mars Science Laboratory) will launch later this fall. NASA continues to look to the future, including landing humans on asteroids and getting them back to the Moon and to Mars.

These are the hard problems that NASA should be working on, and we must continue to fund this exploration work. But LEO is no longer a hard problem. The STS is complex and expensive, in part because it was so novel when it started, but also because the orbiter is a compromise vehicle: it is designed to carry both 7 people and up to 26 tons of cargo to LEO. These are two completely different types of cargo, and very difficult to launch together. But if we launch them separately, it is much easier, and much less expensive. We know we can get cargo to LEO much less expensive on expendable vehicles like Atlas, and soon on commercial vehicles like SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 and Boeing‘s CST-100 as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program. And SLS will take what we have learned from STS and become a launch vehicle capable of taking a payload up to 130 tons to low earth orbit! Getting people to LEO is simpler too using a capsule, rather than an orbiter. The Russians do it with Soyuz, we’re developing the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and companies such as SpaceX are developing Dragon and other vehicles. Where once we had only NASA and Roscomos, we now have competition both for the launch vehicles and crew vehicles. Should we not celebrate these developments?

So where does that leave us? Space exploration is important. We have to keep sending vehicles out and figuring out how the universe works. We need to explore the other planets, both within our solar system and beyond, because we cannot understand our own without doing that. We need to continue to launch observatories, such as Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, SDO, and JWST, because our own atmosphere hampers our ability to see all that there is to see. And above all, the results of these endeavors must be shared with the world in an open and collaborative manner. It is up to all of us to make sure that our representatives in government support this work. If nothing else, this is what each of us can do to further space exploration. However, there is a reason I have provided so many links in this post. Read about what we are doing, and look at the results. What we have accomplished so far is amazing, and the best is still coming.

At the same time, we must continue to expand our nearby capabilities outside Earth’s atmosphere. The future craft that will carry people to our nearest neighbors and beyond will need to be launched from there by necessity, because the first 200 miles from Earth requires the most power. But now that there is competition, the work has to be shared by both the governmental and commercial entities. The STS has laid the groundwork for this, and shown what can be done. It has given us a staging area in LEO. It has fostered international collaboration in space exploration. Celebrate this, and celebrate its end, but we must not allow ourselves to wallow in sadness for the end of the program. It is but one small step beyond this little rock we call Earth. Let’s take the next step.

Photography has been a hobby that I have enjoyed even in college, though I haven’t done much since then. That was before the prevalence of digital cameras, so it was a darkroom class that focused more on the technical aspects of developing film, and techniques for working with exposure in the darkroom. There was less work done on the composition of our pictures, though that probably would have been in a later class if I was able to take it. Time passed, and I shifted back to snapshots and horribly busy pictures where I try to show everything all at once. Once the kids were born, it was more important to get lots of pictures of them, and there are a few good ones in there as a result of the law of averages.

Last year I got a very nice Canon 7D body, and started picking up some really good gear to go along with it. So much, that I often get asked if I’m a professional, to which I respond “No, just an amateur who spends far too much.” Despite the new glass, like a Lensbaby and a sweet Tokina wide angle, I was still leaning on my 70-300mm zoom lens as a crutch, and occasionally dipping down to the kit lens that came with our older EOS Rebel. When the kit lens broke on a trip to Walt Disney World last year, I saw it as an opportunity to move to a Sigma 50mm prime lens to cover that gap I had on the low end. It’s certainly not perfect, as I have no way to cover the range from 18-50 or 50-70, but working primarily with the prime has been very helpful for me.

1. It has a f1.4 aperture, which is very fast and gives some beautiful bokeh. I had never played with depth of field before this.
2. It forces me to think about what is in the shot and what is not, rather than just yanking the zoom around.
3. When you try to fill the frame with a subject using a 50mm lens, you have to get close to them. When you get close to a subject, they look at you.

For the Digital Days class, I opted to take the beginner class on Saturday as well as the intermediate class the following day. I figured a refresher on the basics would be good, and I don’t regret doing that even if it was a little slow for me. The second day was where were really got into composition and lighting. I think the biggest takeaway I had from the whole weekend was “fill the frame.” That is, make all the space in your picture count and be aware of what is at the edges of your picture. Does it tell the story, or detract? Don’t take a picture expecting to crop it down, get in closer and take the picture you really want. I can see the difference in my photos of my kids even, where I have gotten in close and filled the frame as opposed to where I have shot them from too far away.

The other big thing was white balance. I’ve never touched that setting, whether on the camera (where I’m shooting in RAW anyways), or in post-processing. Suddenly I’m checking the setting in Lightroom when I process the photos and realizing what a difference it makes in getting the skin tones to look right. Such a little thing, but it’s a big deal. And it’s got me looking at some WhiBal cards to use as part of my kit.

The second day of class also had a model shoot. I won’t lie, I was somewhat dreading this. I’ve never worked with models before! When I take pictures of people, it’s people I know and most of the time they’re doing something. They’re not there specifically for me to take pictures of them. I had no idea how I was going to approach the model shoot, or what I would get out of it. Using it as an opportunity to work with some of the techniques like depth of field, motion blur, and lighting, I didn’t expect to come away with anything I was going to want to keep. Boy was I wrong! Not only did I take some pictures I really liked, I was able to take some shots that even the instructors didn’t really think would be possible, like this one (they didn’t think the strings on the racket would wash out enough):

Of course, the instructors weren’t as thrilled that I listened when they said “shoot 1000, share 8.” After the model shoot I handed them a full 16 GB memory card (700 images) for their review session. What was nice, however, was that they selected at least a half-dozen of my shots to put on the big screen during the critique.

I immediately turned around last weekend and took some pictures at our neighbor’s daughter’s birthday party this past weekend. Sure, I wouldn’t call anything there award winning, but it’s a far cry from even the pictures I took at Disney World last fall. It certainly gives me a lot more to think about when it comes to composing my pictures.

Space Points came out of a discussion at SpaceUp Houston in February. The idea is that it’s a kind of game where you get points for sharing your excitement of space exploration in many ways. It’s going to be a big topic of discussion at the upcoming SpaceUp this month, and I’m hoping to get there so I can take part. Of course, I’m already starting some work in the arena through another project I was brought in on.

When I was at the tweetup for Sun Earth Day 2011 at Goddard Space Flight Center, I met a ton of really great folks, both NASA tweeps and enthusiasts like me. Some were just getting into the community, others ran podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, and anything else you can think of. Earlier this week, I hooked up with @jonverve to talk about how to create a crowdsource website for space mission data. In the space of just a few days, with the help of several other tweeps, we have outlined a system that will let anyone enter in details about missions and mission events, while using a reputation and moderation system to assure that good data makes it through and bad data is weeded out.

Now this plays into the Space Points idea, because if you’re helping out by entering in good mission data, you should get points for that! But for the mission data system itself, you need to keep track of who is entering good data and who is not, as well as giving out rewards. When you combine both, I think about reputation economies, like Whuffie in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Of course, he had the benefit of a science-fictional brain implant that facilitates reputation tracking. That makes it a difficult problem, but not an impossible one, and one that I have thought on and off about for years since I read the book. I’d like to think that Space Points could be the start of a social economy like that, but I’m definitely not the only one who has thoughts on what it should be, and my idea may be a little too big, or too uninteresting. I don’t have a problem with that at all, though.

In order to make the mission data project a little more modular, and a little easier to connect with a Space Points system later, I decided that I should make the reputation system (which I am, predictably, calling Whuffie) a separate application from the mission data application. I was thinking that Whuffie could actually be the backend database for Space Points, if desired. All it really needs to be is a database and API for posting transactions for users and accessing balances. To start with, the only trusted application is the mission data application, but it could talk to any number of applications down the road. Going in the other direction, Whuffie could be trashed later, and the mission data project could be connected to a different backend for tracking reputation. Modular systems are just easier to work with.

The problem here is that I feel a little bit like I am stepping on toes, mostly through misunderstanding. Space Points is someone else’s idea, and while it’s supposed to be a group effort, the initial work that we’re doing on crowdsourcing mission data doesn’t fit squarely into that group and we’re racing ahead a bit to get an implementation in place, which is going to happen before the real discussions (at June’s SpaceUp) on Space Points start to take place. So I’m working on systems that might interface with Space Points before that concept really exists. Or the systems I’m creating might become the backbone of Space Points if others want, but that still means that the choices I make now could influence Space Points later.

In part, it’s my fault for using the #spacepoints hashtag, but I do that because I want to make sure that we stay engaged with the larger group. But as much as we’re pushing for a site for crowdsourced data, I don’t have any illusions that what I am doing is going to be some kind of canonical implementation of Space Points. Yeah, I’ve registered a couple domains and a Twitter handle, but I’ve done it because nobody else had yet and there was a squatter moving in. And, regardless of how Space Points happens, I want to keep the crowdsource project close to it so I was going to stick it in a subdomain, at least for now. But the domains and the Twitter handle go with the Space Points project, wherever that goes and whoever is leading it. It’s like when I registered domains hours after a company merger was announced many years ago because the company hadn’t thought to do it before announcing!

I don’t do it to take control, or materially benefit. I don’t necessarily want to run the project, and I hope anyone who feels like I’m pushing my way in understands that. I want to contribute in any way I can, and I like developing software platforms to do interesting things. I tend to move along quickly when I’m working on a fun project, but I’m also willing to throw out any of the work that I’m doing if it doesn’t fit later. I enjoy doing the work for its own sake. Yeah, I certainly like running cool stuff if I can, but I’m more interested in seeing it done than being the one who does it.

This is, of course, a well known phenomenon. It has something to do with creating multiple pathways in your brain to the same information. It’s the core of the GTD system: get it out of your head and into your system. It still amazes me that it works, and that your brain will relax when you do actually put things down on paper.

Something has been eating at me for the last week or so. I’ve had a hard time focusing on most of my information-based tasks (i.e. not things like “Go get milk”, but rather things that require actual thought). I know that something has taken up residence in my head, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. Even after completing my weekly review, it was still hanging around.

Yesterday, finally, I decided to take a stab at what could be cluttering up my brain. I started a mind map for an as yet undisclosed project (Sorry, I just can’t talk about it yet – hopefully soon I can) that has a wide impact and that I have little control over at present. While definitely helpful for that project, it did not release the tension. This morning, while in my favorite thinking room (guess), a few small tasks came to me that needed to be taken care of. As the iPhone does not play nice with the shower, I did not write them down immediately.

I went through my morning routine, realizing at one point that we needed to pick up more diapers from Costco very soon. Out comes the iPhone, and in goes the note “Costco – diapers”. I also remembered to write down the other thing, and suddenly it was as if the clouds cleared and the sun came out.

“Review horizons of focus”

Yes, that’s right. My upper horizons are out of whack after the mess that has been the past year, and while I had an action to review and update them a while ago, it got sidetracked shortly after I started by an interruption. Especially given the projects I am working on presently, I cannot think clearly about the longer term because I don’t have it down on paper. But just writing it down, putting it in my inbox, and knowing that I will address it on Friday at the latest now is sufficient for me to stop worrying about it.