achojoao

One day, I was struggling to remember the first book I read when I was a child. I had some images crossing my mind about a pair of adventurous shoes and also a boy building a space ship.

With those clues, I started to look for the book. I searched in my old box of books resting at the garret of my parent’s, even queried to my sister about it, but seems that we no longer have any book from the time. So I searched online for the traveller boots and quickly found the book title: Mundo Nuevo (New World) . You can notice one of the boots in the front cover. It tells the trip of Charolín and Mediasuela (Little-patent-leather and Half-sole), from the home of their kid owner to the countryside and back. Their adventures involves balloons, a gipsy, a circus, bandits… and even a football match in Zapatilandia (Shoeland). But nothing about an Elon Musk in his childhood. It turn out that I need to find another book. Anyway, good memories.

And now, how to find the second one? So many hits for “tale of boy building a space ship” and none of them were the correct one. So I began to look for the reading books that were published around these times and, after two or three days of reading fairy a non fairy tales, I found it: Senda 1 (Pathway 1). Quite a name for a space probe!

It tells the story about Toni and his love for building flying things, and also Moncho and Mina, his friends. Most of chapters narrate their childhood adventures and also those of their pets. They even had a martian girl friend that visits them in her OVNI.

While reading the book, I found the very same image that was crossing my mind these years. Doesn’t it look like the Starship from SpaceX? Hmmmm…

Lovely stories… Is there a link between this book and my love for space and technology? I don’t know you, but I’m starting to believe that books (and not only food) make us.

In Tales from the Lunar Guidance Computer, Don Eyles, a software engineer during the Apollo lunar missions and developer of several programs for the computer of the Lunar Module, does a very detailed description of that computer and its i/os, the real time system used and also the efforts made to solve some bugs and replicate errors. Truly interesting if you love computers and astronautics.

“I’ve written computer programs while I was stoned which have turned out to be pretty good programs.”, Don Eyles at Extra! Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14!

Bad news… but amazing job. Aren’t all things this machine has shown us wonderful?

I’m not a big fan of modern AAA or hype games, neither an owner of the last state-of-art console. But things are going to change.

Recently, I discovered No Man’s Sky, a survival game ambiented in space. There is a massive number of reviews over the Internet, mostly bad, so I’m not going to go deep on what the game darks or shines.

Maybe is a repetitive game, slightly stubborn or too centered in small details. But I think that it deserves being played, just for the sake of the exploration. Just for the sake that it transports you to the cover of an sci-fi book as no other thing has ever done.

I don’t know. Maybe in a couple of hours of gameplay I’ll throw the gamepad away or maybe I’ll be rushing for carbon for hours…

Let’s see…