Holographic Neural Interface Protocol (A Rampant Speculation)

WARNING: WHAT FOLLOWS IS COMPLETE AND TOTAL SPECULATION.

ANY RELATION TO ACTUAL NEROLOGY, COMPUTER SCIENCE, AND ECONOMICS IS HOPED FOR BUT UNEXPECTED.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

     I can hear it now: “Another post? Really?”

 

Available now!

   As I continue work on the Conjunction setting, RocketFans, I must continue to refine my future history to account for observable reality. For example, My A Class PatrolRockets are in the process of getting a weapons upgrade as information from the ultimate space combat sim, Childrenof a Dead Earth, becomes available. Apparently, railguns will be the weapon of choice in space, and even old-fashioned gun powder cannon will have a place. That’s something that’s been discounted since Malcolm Jameson’s article “SpaceWar Tactics” appeared in Astounding in November 1939. This proved Heinlein’s axiom that all the theory in the universe doesn’t compare to one instance of getting in there and finding out.

     Or something.

 

Well, rock me to sleep tonight...

   Anyway, one of the major things I’m going to have to account for in my future history is the growing inevitability of what is coming to be known as the Economic Singularity. Basically, with the advent of reliable, easy to build and above all cheap AI, the Luddite Fallacy is becoming less fallacy and more “oh crap, there are going to be no jobs no matter your education level in a few decades”. Idealists site this as the perfect opportunity for us to switch to Universal Basic Income economies so we can all relax and let the machines run things, and every person can be part of the aristocracy of the independently well-off. I’d like to think that would happen. I really would. But since AI security is going to be just as cheap as AI everything else, it will be more likely that the 1% who now literally own everything will invest in private armies to protect them and theirs from the starving masses that no longer have any use to them.

     Cynical? Moi?

     Joking aside, the future doesn’t look very sweetness-and-light when your future livelihood depends on the altruism of your average billionaire. I imagine many will either insulate themselves in ivory towers that soar behind thick walls, or...leave. Elon Musk, James Cameron etal. And who knows how many others that can afford it may pack up and go to Mars, mine asteroids, or something else. In fact, I’m depending on it, as one of these billionaires, the ficticious Walter Hopkins, will set up the Destiny Foundation by-and-by. I used to think that asteroid mining would be another development bubble, but if automation and AI really will run everything in a decade or so, then the demand for resources will increase exponentially. This includes metals, of course, but even moreso hydrocarbons...which is what Conjunction is all about.

     But what of us? The 99% who will be left behind, with no available employment, no government dole, and no value to the 1%?

 

Pictured: Maroua, Cameroon, 2016 or
Detroit, Former United States, 2036

   Realistically, a secondary economy will spout up in the cracks, turning out products by hand for people with no money to by robot-built stuff. This could be as low tech as turning spring steel from scrapped cars into tools, to running a 3D printer out of melted down shopping bags and stolen electricity. Money, now electronic and used to monitor everything you purchase, will be replace by poker chips and other makeshift tokens. I see this kind of scenario as one of the only possibilities: if the mainstream economy excludes practically everybody, then everybody will have to make a new economy that exists outside the mainsteam.

And then there’s the hackers.

We already see lots of fun and games in the news from hackers doing everything from violating the sanctity of crypto-currency to potentially influencing rival nations’ elections. If this becomes the only way for non-billionaires to have any way to get manufactured products or legal tender, you can bet everyone with a computer is going to try their hand at hacking if they think they can get away with it. And everyone will have a computer.

     What are the powers-that-be going to do about it? Sure, sure, they have all those AI programs that do everything and many will be anti-virus-sooper-dooper-security-programs, but let us not forget, so will everyone else. With AI kernals being release open source and lots of tech sector professionals made redundant by said AI, the hackers will have AI of their own, and what with the open source movements of today and the very real need to do something in the future to put food on the table, there will be a run-away arms race between corporate AI and the disenfranchised. It may very well end up that there will be some form of Basic Income implemented to curb the desire to hack the system, at least among the folks who would be hacking just to survive, as a “cost of doing business” expense. But the desire to make a truly “hack-proof” system will be strong, and much, much more money will be spend on preventing security breeches than on bribing the masses to with Basic and Social Media.

This is were the real wild speculation starts.

     Cognitive improvements are considered an almost taboo subject among people. Of course, many people didn’t want to sell the farm and move to the city when the work dried up. Just like then, people are afraid of losing their familiar way of life. The Economic Singularity will eliminate the familiar way of life quite thoroughly, which will probably make many people cling to the familiar all the more. In the end, that won’t matter for many people. Just like working on Sundays (or Fridays or Saturdays, if you’re Muslim or Jewish respectively), people desperate for income will submit to things they normally would rather not.

     

...only in your head.

Now imagine a set of cognitive upgrades that make it easier to direct-interface with computers. They let you actually “see” your social media feeds and YouTube videos without having to use an actual computer! Computers are now owned centrally; you just get the signal, but you have instant access to your favorite computer stuff! The best part is, the upgrades are free! Anyone receiving any kind of Basic Income will find that keeping their benefits will actually depend on getting said upgrades. Conspiracy buffs will moan that were are now monitored 24/7 – not only by camera and monitoring our computer usage, but now your very thoughts as well!

     The fact that this is to a certain degree true will make such conspiracy buffs even less well received than normal conspiracy buffs.

     Just what is the purpose of boosting the brainpower of the average citizen? Holographic Neural-Interface Protocol.

 

HNIP is a new programming language that allows data to be stored directly in the memories of humans with cognitive upgrades. What makes such an elaborate systems worth the time and effort is that the data is stored holographically – as in “brain holographically”, not “computer holographically”.  The entirety of a given network’s data is stored across the memories of all of the people in the network. While each individual brain theoretically has all of the data, the data lacks the resolution to be accessed – the a holographic image of a rose that’s cut in to tiny pieces each have the full image of the rose but it’s really fuzzy. It takes at least five people with the same data stored in their heads logged in at the same time to allow access to the data.

     What’s the point, you probably didn’t ask? Brains being what they are, it’s impossible to access the data by someone outside the network. Basically, unless you have the data stored in your head already, "remember” it. So any hackers would already have to be part of the HNIP network they’re hacking, and because the computers are accessed by direct neural interface, it will difficult if not impossible to hide the fact that a certain individual is the hacker.

     Now for the fun part: For most people, they can’t function as part node in a HNIP network unless they are unconscious. It just takes too much brainpower. But that’s okay, right? In exchange for Basic Income and an unlimited data plan, the average citizen rents out their brain while they sleep. Each night they take a pill, konk out, get a lenghthy update of all the new data in their network, and for the next eight to ten hours they are a node in a system that lets AI and automation run the world without bothersome hackers planting malware and trying to steal bitcoins and emails. There will still be hackers, of course.  Some will work hard to penetrate systems anonymously, while others will try to beat the resolution problem and get data out of their own heads.

     So I said “most” people have to be unconscious in order for their memory to be used by the HNIP system. Some people function as a node while awake. It can seriously degrade their waking performance of tasks -any thing from full-on zombie impersonator to narcolepsy to only moderately distracted. A very rare few can function more or less normally, while an ultra-rare minority have full cognitive functioning and full node functioning at the same time.

     Naturally, the folks that can crunch data while awake have an advantage. They can stay interfaced to the network for longer, which means more income. Some can qualify for special jobs as systems administrators – or become super-hackers. The rarest, the ones that can be interfaced 24/7 without significant loss of functioning, are highly sought out in situations where you need the most computer power for the least amount of dependent human brains in the network.

     For example, as spacers.

* * *

     Okay, whimsical and somewhat flimsy storytelling aside, I’m trying to make a science fiction setting that takes into account the current trends but still have humans be relevant and act more or less like people now. The rest is working out the consequences so that when I make plots, my characters don’t have to act stupid and their technology doesn’t have to be ignored.

     I’m looking at you, StarTrek.

So to recap for clarity, what I’m proposing is:

• Humans have cognitive upgrades that allow them to directly access information stored in the Holographic Neural-Interface Protocol language. They do not need personal computers (or tablets, or smartphones) to access this information, but a central computer must be available to translate unconscious data stored across multiple minds into conscious data that can be accessed by people.
• Holographic Neural-Interface Protocol (HNIP) is a programming language that allows data to be stored directly in the brains of augmented humans In a way similar to normal memories.
• The memories stored in an individual brain are complete, but of a resolution too low to be directly accessed without the most sophisticated of systems, and even then, the amount of errors creeping into the data make it highly suspect.
• It takes at least five people with the same data stored in their heads to increase resolution enough to allow reliable access to that data.
• The more people in a network, the higher the data resolution, the easier it is to access and the more efficient the network is.
• The data stored on such a network is only accessible by people within that network. You can’t remember something that not stored in your own head.
• You can be part of multiple networks, but that doesn’t mean that the people from one network (like a public one) can access data from a network they themselves are not a part of (like a classified military one) just because they're in a network with someone that has classified data in their head. Sorry...
• People in a HNIP network function in two ways: as users, when they access the data, and as nodes, when they act as data storage. Typically, people must be unconscious in order to function as nodes.
• About 20% of the population can function as nodes while conscious (for a given value of conscious).
• About 5% of the population can function as nodes and users simultaneously. They are rated on a special scale that measures how well they can function as users while operating as a node.
• Those who have at least a 70% rating are considered good enough to be spacers, and many are then drafted as spacers (colonists) or offered special incentives to become spacers (Terrans).

     Like I said upfront, I have no idea of how possible this actually is; I’ve just been trying to make it as consistent as possible and to work out the consequences. I’d like some of you out there with actual computer programming experience to weigh in on the subject.

After a round of two of debate on the efficacy of this idea, we can move forward with the Intra-Fleet Tug’s internal design (like, its computers) and get back to work on Conjuction 2.0. So, I hope you enjoy,and I’ll see you next time!

Like what you see?

Intra-Fleet Tug WIP

     Got some work our the ole' GIMP last night, and the beginnings of our Intra-Fleet Tug can be seen.  Let me assure all of you who have practice designing spacecraft: This is not remotely an optimized design.  This is a Frankenstein rocket, built out of available components for a unique purpose that became a de facto design more or less by default.  The story behind this craft's inception is part of the story of the Conjunction War, and by exploring its design, we will learn more about the fateful last voyage of the Mekong and the Jovian Blockade.
     Interested?

Intra-Fleet Tugs and why Rocket Science is as hard as Rocket Science

     So four days agoor there abouts, I put a poll up on Google+ with a selection of spacecraft I was thinking about making isometric cutaways of. The frontrunner is the Intra-Fleet Space Tug. That means, RocketFans, that we’ve got ourselves a project!

This is not the tug.

     The context for this particular spacecraft, like the Cygnus capsule I also put in the poll, is the care and feeding of the distributed-network fortification that is a deployed UN Constellation in the Conjunctionsetting. In summary, the fleet’s configuration is a tetrahedron in space with a single control ship at the apex, patrol craft making up the other three vertices, and edges three hundred thousand kilometers long. Just how do you supply ships that are as far out as the Moon is from LEO?

 

Cygnus docking with a Class A Patrol Craft

   In the article about how fleets work, I stated that the crews on the patrol craft could be swapped out by ferrying fresh people out via the Cygnus. While this would certainly work for crew transfers, you’d also have to detail additional craft for cargo transfers, of consumables and (if armed with rail guns) ammunition. As versatile as the Cygnus is, it cannot not re-supply that most important consumable resource in terms of tactical movement, propellant.

     To put the problem into perspective, a Cygnus stack is a rough cylinder 4.5 meters in diameter and about ten meters long. The propellant tanks on a Type A Patrol Cutter are 8 meters in diameter and total thirty meters long. And there are two stacks. Clearly, to refuel a patrol ship, we need a real tanker.

I’ve said it before RocketFans, and I’ll surely say it again: AtomicRockets is an invaluable resource for the budding rocketeer. The “Realistic Designs” sections are a veritable clearinghouse of old NASA designs that were pretty good but never got a decent budget. These oldies make for a great library of inspiration when designing any spacecraft that is meant to work with real-world physics. For our Intra-Fleet Tug, I was inspired by the Johnson Space Center’sTug study, who’s image I used in the Poll. This beauty is a two-stage ferry to get from LEO to GEO where NASA was going to build a solar power station.

Yeah, we could have had that...

    Anyway, a light-second is good deal further than the LEO/ GEO distance, right? In kilometers, yes, but in Delta-V, not even close. It takes a whopping 4.33 km/s to go from LEO to GEO, but a paltry 2.74 km/s to get from LEO to Lunar orbit...a little over a light-second away.

     Gravity is funny like that.

     So our tug only needs about 75% the range of the JSC version. Since that design was staged and the first staged carried the spacecraft 85% of the way to GEO we could just lop of Stage I and call it a day. But where’s the fun in that?

     The problem with just ripping of the JSC design is that it isn’t a tanker. We need to be able to deliver a large amount of propellant, so we’re going to need a large spacecraft. Something that could haul at least a quarter or half of the Delta-V needed to completely refuel a Patrol craft. What follows is an experiment: I’m thinking of just taking an entire rocket stack from a Patrol craft and slapping a command module on the front for our Tug. Let’s see how that would work, shall we?

     First of all, we need to dust off our rocketry equations so we know what variables we need to consider. We’re going to need to know the Tugs dry mass, wet mass, and engine details such as propellant flow, thrust, and exhaust velocity. Since we’re using the dimensions of the propellant tanks from the Class A Patrol Craft, and possibly one of its main engines, that gives us a great place to start. In fact, lets crunch the numbers for the Patrol rocket’s main engine and an alternate, say something along the lines of the J-2 from the Saturn V’s SIV-B stage.

     First, let’s establish the tonnage for the Tug without it’s engines. We’ll want a decent sized crew module, because gaming, and also so we can have cadets aboard during all flights. In Conjunction, like in Heinlein’s Space Cadet, every UN convoy and spacecraft has a group of peacekeeper candidates learning how to work in space by working in space. I see an actual crew of about four: a Flight Commander (F-Com), Guidance Procedures Officer (GPO), Maintenance, Mechanical Arms, and Crew Systems Officer (MACS), and a Payload Officer (Payload). Add as many again of Candy-Cruisers, and you’ve got eight people in the command module. That’s a bit crowded for a Tug, but we can use hot-bunking with to limit the sleeping berths to four. The CM must also have at least a pair of robotic arms, and a sturdy docking module for carrying passenger capsules and cargo pods. Behind the CM will sit a flared-out service module, with avionics, life support, and computer systems. The SM will be mated to a 30 x 10 meter saddle truss, which is what will actually hold our propellant tanks and provide a mount for the rocket stack. But in addition to all of that, we will also need a passenger module and cargo pods, so we need to know the mass for all of those as well.

     Here’s how it breaks down:

System	Mass (kg)
CM	12671
SM	3000
Saddle Truss	24119
Propellant tanks	24119
Passenger Module	7540
Crew Avg. Mass	2400
Cargo/consumables	392883
Total Dry Mass	466732
LH₂	71204
LOX	305788
Propellant Mass	376992
Total Wet Mass	843724

     I arrived at some of these number dubiously, so take them with a grain of salt. The CM mass is from the Trans Hab Calculator on the AR website, the SM is from the JSC Tug, the truss is simply repeating the mass of the propellant tanks, since I couldn’t find any reliable numbers for that. The Passenger module is also from the JSC tug, while the consumables and cargo masses are calculated for the tugs trip out and back, as well as 30 days of supplies for the 20-person crew of a Patrol craft. And of course, we can’t forget the mass of the crew and passengers themselves, plus what ever possessions they can carry inside their regulation 100 kg mass-limit. Finally, the propellant tank mass is 6% of the propellant mass, as per Dr. Rob Zubrin, and the propellant masses came from the Useful Tables appendix from Atomic Rockets. But the most important thing to remember is that we have no engine yet.

     The Class A Patrol craft uses an easy to maintain in freefall analog of the SSME so I could simply steal copy the vital statistics. Engine List on Atomic Rockets has these available. Just below that entry is the stats for the Tug engine we will also use. These are not exactly the J-2 stats, but they are for a NASA tug, and they have the information I need to calculate with, whereas sources on the J-2 did not.

     What we want to know is, assuming a 100-hour flight time, is how much propellant will be left in the big tanks at the end? We need to have spend no more than 1/3 of our propellant mass in transit. That way, we can refuel with another third (plus a bit extra) and use the remaining less-than-a-third to take our much less massive tug home.

     This means math. So, so much math.

     Well, not so much, perhaps. We know all the vital statistics for our engines, our mass numbers, our Delta-V budget, and our distances. By establishing an arbitrary travel time of 100 hours, we also provided a much-needed value for equations, and more important, the mass of needed consumables.

   An Intra-Fleet Tug that uses a “F-2b” SSME-analog will have a wet mass of 846,901 kg, or 847 tons. Let’s see if we can get from point A to B while only burning through 125,664 kg of propellant.

     Simple, right?

     If only using 125.6 tons of our propellant, we will be operating with a mass ratio of only 1.8 By using the Delta-V equation of Delta-V = Exhaust Velocity x ln(Mass Ratio). This results in a Delta-V of 2621.96 m/s, or 2.62 km/s. We need 2.74 km/s to get to our destination, so it’s close, but no cigar.

If we attempt the same thing with our J-2 analog, we have a wet mass of 845,512 kg. This gives us a mass ratio of 1.8 again. However, the exhaust velocity is 4159.4 (I had to calculate it using the specific impulse, but that’s why we have algerbra in the first place). With the mass ratio and a lover exhaust velocity, the Delta-V is 2.45 km/s. Both engines are pretty comparable, but neither will get us out a light second and back.

     Or will they?

     The moon averages 384,000 kilometers from Earth. A light-second is only 300,000 kilometers. We actually have less distance to travel, and hopefully less Delta-V, than the 2.74 km/s we’ve been using. Possibly a lot less.

     I forgot that moving around a fleet formation like this is not remotely the same as moving around orbits. Moving from LEO to Luna is a Hohmann trajectory, which is a change between orbits from around one body moving at one speed to another body moving at a very different speed. When deployed, our constellation is all moving at a constant speed along a constant orbit/vector. This means that all spacecraft in the formation are at rest relative to one another. So we need to go from a starting velocity of (relatively) zero to a certain speed, coast, flip, and then decelerate back to zero. This is just a simple physics problem.

     This is also where our arbitrary 100-hour travel time comes in. With time and distance known, as well as acceleration (Thanks to the engine stats) we can solve for velocity and begin to figure out what we need to know.

Solving the displacement equation gives us an average velocity of 833.333 m/s to travel a light-second in four days and change. This means we need a final velocity of 1666.666 m/s. Our SSME engine will take only 721 seconds to boost our monster tug to speed, and the same to decelerate at the other end. Now for the biggie – mileage. By which I mean, just how much propellant did we use up in those 1442 seconds?

     Turns out that’s an easy one, because we know the mass flow. A single SSME tosses 409 kilos out the back every second, so our Tug will have to burn 589,778 kg. This is more than the entire wet mass of the tug, so say nothing of the “one-third” we wanted to get by with.

     As for the J-2, we need to re-do our acceleration calculation so we can figure our burn duration. Unfortunately, with a burn duration of 1282 seconds one way, the performance is even worse.

     What went wrong? This tug has half the power or a patrol rocket – it should have at least comparable performance.

* * *

 

Its right there in black and white.
Literally.

   Having gone back over my notes I discovered my problem, and it’s an embarrassing one. The Class A Patrol Craft I just mentioned, the one that’s over twice as large as this tug? It has a dead weight tonnage of 70 tons. That’s it. The Tug has a dry massof 466 tons. Well, there’s our problem!

     I designed the Patrol Craft to take into account the likely progression of materials science toward ever lighter and stronger materials. It was built out something that has the same strength of titanium, and half the mass. Add to that it’s outer skin is mostly carbon and aerogel – literally the least dence substance there is – and its easy to see that simply cribbing numbers from a design made when aluminum was the lightest thing you could build spacecraft of is a problem.

     Let’s try this again shall we?

System	Mass (kg)
Total Structure Mass	24119
Crew Avg. Mass	2400
Cargo/consumables	4245
Total Dry Mass	30764
LH₂	71204
LOX	305788
Propellant Mass	376992
Total Wet Mass	407756
With SSME	409337
With J-2	409544

     I not only went back and recalculated the structure mass using 22^nd century materials, I also hand-calculated the mass of the consumables and cargo, using NASA rations. Much better results. With these stats, the Tug can pull 4.43 m/s, and only has to burn for a total of 376, instead of 1442. This means we only burn 141,514 kg of propellant. With less thrust and more mass, I don’t feel a need to calculate for the J-2. 141.5 tons of propellant is 37% of our propellant mass. For the return trip, we’ll need less propellant, say, 25%? The Tug would only mass 126 at that propellant fraction, and accelerate at a whopping 14.4 m/s, or 1.4 gs. It will only have to accelerate for 115 seconds and burn only 43 tons of propellant, while carrying 96 tons. This is over a 100% reserve, enough that we could add another 20 tons or so to the 124 tons our Tug is pumping into the Patrol craft.

     So, there you have it, RocketFans, a glimpse into the hair-tearing-out, thankless job of designing a realistic spacecraft. I’m glad I just have to make these look good on paper. But the important part is, I can now draw a spacecraft with all the particulars I wanted to, and it will not only look realistic, it will be realistic. It’s capabilities and limitation will suggest numerous plot points and story ideas, and I can be assured that each and every one of them will pass the litmus test of plausibility, because I did the math up front.

     Next time I hope to actually have an image or two of new art to show you...

Drawing Spaceships Crooked (Isometric Projection)

     Just to be different, RocketFans, I thought I'd actually make a post.
     Kidding aside, I've been working at a day job of late and dealing with getting myself back into the groove of time management, scheduling, and all the things I haven't had to think about since comas and brain damage removed me from the conventional labor force.  I'm not sure how to describe the experience.  Imagine having to re-learn not only the moves and routines of something you've done all of your adult life, but have to re-learn some of the concepts behind the routines and moves.  Only a strict regimen of bi-hourly doses of insulin and daily doses of anti-depressants and anxiety meds.
    I only mention this to explain my sometimes (okay, often) erratic postings and tendency to tail of in mid-series.  I'll put it this way:  Normal blood sugar is between 70 and 90.  Mine has gone from 461 to 39 in the space of six hours.  At least once a week.
    Moving along...
    As the title suggests, I've been playing with isometric projections and cutaways.  If you're not 100% familiar with the concept,  It's like this:

Tantive IV FTW

     I love these kinds of images.  I've got all of the Incredible Cross Sections books and I've dreamed of being able to make my ships into art like this.  After all, I taught myself how to make the deckplans, the orthos, the CG models, and everything else you've seen in my previous work, what's one more technique?
     To start with, I got some iso-grid paper.  This wonderful stuff is great for folks who do not have drafting tables and 3 degree triangles in their inventories and better still, it takes a lot less time to use than blank paper.  After watching a brief YouTube tutorial on how to draw isometric circles, I was off and running!
     Here is an image of what could be a variation of the Heinlein Rocket's Keel:

     Rather than try to ink this little sketch, I did what I think is the smart thing and scanned it into the computer and printed it out at three times the original size:

     This is the version I inked.  I used pens and did it by hand, because I'm old school.  And because it's faster...

 
     But after that, I put the inked imaged back into the computer, fired up the GIMP, and cleaned it up.  I not only scrubbed out the blue guide lines, I fixed mistakes and added some details that were just too fiddly for me to work in with a hand pen.  Thank goodness for a computers extreme zoom!

A drawing like this can still be confusing if left in un-shaded black-and-white.  Besides, I wanted to capture the style of the ICS books, so I colorized the image and added some additional details.  This is the latest iteration:

     I did not add any shading or people to the image, because this is only a test.  Now that I've managed to create a workflow and get some practice in, I'm going to start working on making some real spaceship art.  I will naturally be posting the results regularly on Patreon and here, and once I've finished a collection for a particular spacecraft, a published volume would not be out of order.  I look forward to it.
     I just want to take a moment and sing the praises of the Patreon system.  Back before the advent of monthly crowd-funding, I would never have felt like I had the time to work on this kind of art.  I had to stay within the bounds of the admittedly narrow style I had already developed for making deckplans and churn out books monthly if I was to expect to see any decent money from the enterprise.  Even then, the money wasn't that decent, but for a family of five living on $17,000 a year, it meant the difference between a real birthday party for the kids or just a present and box cake.  With Patreon, however, I'm at the level I of monthly income slightly above that of when I had to get a thirty-page book out every thirty days.  That means I can actually explore new ideas, like the nano-fic, the maps, and these isometric drawings.  Now I know I can take my time and work on a single, long-term project because I not only have a venue with which to share the progress, I have the support it takes to finish it.  So thank you to all my Patrons out there, for making this possible.
   Got a little sentimental.  It happens.  Anyway, soon-ish, I'll be talking about my next major project and what books Debra and I are working on, as well as whatever Rob Garitta has cooked up in his devious little mind.  See you then!

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