Konnichiwa, bitches!

(Especially me. See below.)

Well blog, long time no write.

Just to get it out of the way, the relationship I referenced in a few posts last year has come to it's conclusion. That is all I'm going to say about that until I can come up with something funny about getting dumped and being terribly depressed. Boo hoo!

Moving on. I'm sorely out of practice at trying to be funny at any length larger than a paragraph, so getting back into this is going to be like swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in New England -- I'll need to ease myself in or I'll freeze my balls (literally). So here's something quick that I read today:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Five months after it was launched on a mission to find earth-like planets, the Kepler space telescope has sent back to Earth high-precision images of a planet some 1,000 light years away, NASA said Thursday.

But the real excitement at NASA was over how well Kepler was working, and the promise it holds for the future.

With Kepler only in the calibration phase, the telescope, which was launched in March on a mission to find earth-like planets in the galaxy, sent back to Earth highly precise images of a planet with the unromantic name of HAT-P-7-B.

The images of the so-called "hot Jupiter" planet located about 1,000 light years (around 5.9 quadrillion miles, 9.5 quadrillion kilometers) from Earth were "the first time anyone has seen light from this planet," said William Borucki, the principal science investigator for the Kepler mission and lead author of a report that will be published Friday in Science.

But while the scientists were enthusiastic about Kepler's discovery of optical light from HAT-P-7-B -- Carnegie Institution astrophysicist Alan Boss called it "stunning indeed" -- they were even more excited by the fact that Kepler was working, and working well.

"The real headline is Kepler works," said Boss.

Amazing! High precision images of a planet light years away! But that's not what gives these scientists a space-boner; oh no, it's that the piece of equipment that they spent years engineering and billions of dollars building is doing the job that they designed it to do. And this isn't an isolated incident. I'm too lazy to dig up any actual articles to back this up, but every time a piece of space equipment does it's job the scientists seem surprised.

"Holy shit! The Mars Rover landed on Mars and is now roving it. This is the exact opposite of what I expected to happen, despite spending 15 years of my life dedicated to this project."

Where can I get a job where failure is expected? Relationship counselor? Actually, that's not a good example at all.