My inner nerd is a little giddy right now. The other day, I was wondering if the occupants of the space station ever do spacewalks when the shuttle isn't docked. I sort of assumed that they would, but maybe there were safety issues and they didn't.

So today, I asked NASA. That's right. Thanks to the internet, I opened up the window on my instant messenger client for twitter and posted "@NASA: Do the space station residents ever take spacewalks when the shuttle isn't there?"

A few minutes later:

I then did a screen grab, uploaded to Flickr, opened the Flickr silo in Habari, and blam! Awesome. Even a few years ago, it could've taken days or weeks to hunt down this information and share it with you. Silly, maybe. But there's oh so much possibility.