Geek Activism

After blogging, tweeting and generally keeping us amused, the Phoenix Mars Lander is dead. Read its final words:

So long Earth. I’ll be here to greet the next explorers to arrive, be they robot or human.

Read through its first-person guest-blog at Engadget and tweets at Twitter.

Everybody has a wish list for the new President, including the Government Accountability Office. It’s strange how one arm of the legislative branch has a ready list of things they need from the next President. Do they know they have a President in office right now?

In any case, there are two points in their list that are of our interest:

• Retirement of the Space Shuttle: To get this done, they want the administration to fill key leadership positions in NASA, which should be interesting. Leadership in NASA has recently had a contentious relationship with the scientific community over climate research.
• Digital TV Transition: Not sure what they want the next President to do here, but basically they want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to be more proactive.

Again- they already have an FCC, an NTIA and President Bush, and yet they are willing to wait until the end of January for “urgent” action.

Until inauguration day on the 20th of January, I will be covering some of the aspects of the transition to the Obama administration that affect technology and open government in a series called Change Watch.

Obama Gets a Thank You from NASA - [NYTimes.com]

It�s not every day that the head of a federal agency in a Republican administration during an election year writes a glowing thank-you note to the Democratic candidate for president. But Michael D. Griffin, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote a letter to Senator Barack Obama on Oct. 2 stating that that he was �deeply grateful to you, personally� for his work in getting Congress to approve a critically important measure for the space program.