Shaun, Leila, Clint and I drove to the Johnson Space Center south of Houston today-- after a sidetrip for pastries, we got there a bit too late for the actual tour of the rocket park and other facitilites, but we wandered around the inside of the place for a while.  They've got a good shuttle mockup (much better than the one at Kennedy, methinks) but not a whole lot else.  We bought the requisite freeze-dried ice cream and I got a shirt and a poster for my (newly painted) office-- assuming the poster survives the trip back to Seattle in my luggage. 

On the way to the Austin airport, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a bad sign that the song "It's the end of the world as we know it" came on the radio not once, but twice.  Well, I suppose we'll know soon enough, since this little post won't make it to the web if something goes wrong. :-)  In case you didn't know already, I'm really a lot more superstitious than I ought to be.

One of the multi-state lotteries (Mega-Millions) is up to 256 million bucks, so I bought a few tickets to bring back for coworkers (under the mistaken impression that they're not for sale in Washington... oops). It occurs to me that the inevitable "what if" that comes from playing the lottery is a lot like software testing-- you try to figure out what would happen in the extreme edge cases.  From that, perhaps you can intuit other properties of the system (person)... or not-- sometimes edge cases are just that. 

This was a really great trip-- the best vacation-vacation I've had in a while... It was great to see Austin and meet Conan (Clint and Leila's dog) and spend time with Clint and Leila.  We had lots of interesting conversations and the experience was a lot more memorable than some of the utterly forgettable trips I've taken (San Jose, for instance). 

Texas in February: Thumbs up.