All is well...no exciting news to report...they all survived

I was really hoping to be able to report some exciting news, but all the squints survived just fine. Although we got the Door open later than planned, they weren't worried. They were just biding their time over there, patiently waiting. How boring.

BTW I was right about them not getting invited to any parties, in fact they pretty much were snubbed by the natives, which was only expected as they snubbed the natives as well. The high-tech scientists didn't think the backward natives had anything to contribute, and the kick-back natives thought the techies were too uptight. Apparently the squints never even tried talking to the natives. One look at the native agricultural society and the scientists put down the entire world. Talk about judging a book by its cover. Ha!

Good news: Based on the experiments they did, the scientists are planning on reporting to the government that there is no reason to keep us shut down, so I'm gathering a group together to get a real hunting party going. I've got friends who've hunted big game in Africa, India, and even South America, so I'm going to let them have a chance to see what they can do over on the other side of the Door. Can you imagine putting up on the wall, next to a lion or tiger or bear, the head of something that has never been here on this planet? What a conversation piece. (I actually don’t know what there is over there, but I know it’ll be something interesting.) I’ll make certain that they take pictures, and then I’ll post them. You’ll want to see that!

On the tech side of things, the charging is going well, and Frank almost has a full second set of capacitors hooked up, so future rescue operations will go over much smoother.

That’s all to report for this week. See you in seven days.
P.S. Check out the poll. I’ve extended the time to respond.

Delayed, what do you expect?

Apparently there were problems in slowing down the charging cycle. As the capacitors get closer to a full charge, they charge even slower, so there wasn't enough power to open the Door on schedule. Frank says it has something to do with the Law of Diminishing Returns. To quote him, “The charge approaches 100% asymptotically.” Yeah, right, whatever that engineering mumbo-jumbo means.

Anyway, the techies need a lot of help getting a full charge, so I'm on call to fix things for them, but I want to make a quick comment on the poll we had on the bottom of the page. We asked where you’d like to vacation. Most of you (75%) agreed with us. An Out of This World Vacation certainly sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The rest of you need to open up your minds and consider the possibilities. The poll for this week (or so) has to do with what you’d bring with you on such a trip. If you have any better ideas, let us know.

Keeping it short this week as Frank is frantically running around trying to get the Door open and ‘rescue’ the squints. (They hate it when I call them that, but it’s a habit I picked up from Seeley.) See you next week!

Just waiting...

We’re still charging the capacitors, but we’re keeping the cycle slowed down during most of the day, only running it up to full power in the middle of the night so that it won’t affect the neighbours; we’re trying to stay on good terms with them. Fortunately the slowdown has been calculated so it won’t affect the plan to open the Door by the end of next week. I really want to be there when the squints come back through. I’m curious to see how well they’ve survived out there in the open world. Knowing them, they’ve probably built a whole lab…including a basement, but we’ll just have to wait until later to see.

While the charge continues to build, Frank and the techies are working on trying to fully understand the technology that makes the Door work. They think that pretty soon, they’ll be able to actually control where the Door opens. Apparently at this point, they can open it, but they can’t aim it. It’s gotten so bad, according to Tom, that when he’s sitting over there, on the other side, ready to return, he’s had to sprint to get over to where the Door appears, so he can get through before it shuts. It hasn’t happened yet, but even if he does miss the Door, he knows that we’ll re-open it as soon as we can, so that’s not really a problem, but the way things are right now, it could be as much as another whole week before we get up enough charge for a rescue attempt. That’s why Frank is trying to get a second set of capacitors connected up. He wants to get them charged and keep them on the side, just for emergency openings. You never know when we might need to get Tom back in a hurry. Tom’s solution was to only open the Door at night. That way the light from this side will shine through and be easily visible, and he can start running as soon as it starts opening. I'd rather get the Door to Tom, rather than hoping Tom can get to the Door.

Until next week, we’re all still waiting. See you then!

We've been shut down :-(

Apparently, despite the fact that the government dumped the equipment we’re using, now they want it back. They hadn't considered using it as a commercial venture, and we’ve already shown that there's some real money to make. Fortunately, at this point they haven't actually shut us down. All they've done is force us to let a bunch of scientist go through to the other side to do some real experiments (not like the ones Tom has been doing, but I bet they won’t get invited to any parties). I don’t know what they plan to do, but they took an entire chemistry set, a bunch of wires and batteries, and more sealed cases than I’ve ever seen before.

So far there’s only been one party of almost a dozen squints, but keeping it open long enough to get all of them, and their equipment, through the Door drained our stored power to the point where we won’t be able to open it again for another two weeks, so we’ll just have to wait until then to find out what they’ve discovered (if they share any info with us). At least we don’t need to worry about being sued; since they’re all military scientists, it’s not our problem if they don’t survive. (Of course that doesn’t mean we aren’t concerned.)

We’re continuing to upgrade and stabilize the Door, and we’ll tell you more about it next week.