Bumping along, at a high rate of speed...

[alexpgp]

I think I about wore out the buttons on my radio's keypad today, doing "radio interpretation" for folks interested in readings in the thermal conditioning car during today's propellant loading operation, as well as several other parties trying to generally get things done outside the framework of propellant loading. Currently, I am at the полтинник, waiting for the signal to accompany management to the meeting of the Government Commission that has convened to give a go/no-go for vehicle rollout tomorrow morning.

It turns out the second login I was given had already been given out to someone else, too, so I am again without access to the Internet. Blyech! (And hooray for Government Commission meetings, which give me an opportunity to go into the office!)

Earlier was also a flurry of translation work to do at the hotel, which gave me an opportunity to again marvel at the great advances made in operating system design, especially when it comes to the "safe" removal of thumb drives. You would think that by now, systems would be sophisticated enough to tell you what programs need to be closed or whatever before a thumb drive can be removed safely.

Twice today, I got into a position where all program windows were closed and Vista still wouldn't declare my thumb drive safe to remove, and I've learned that with Vista, removing such a device without first clicking on the appropriate tray icon does not "maybe" screw up the file system on the device, it plain screws it up, requiring a scan at a later date. (To be charitable, it just may be that XP does the same thing, but doesn't offer to scan the device when it is reinserted.) Therefore, I could come up with nothing better than restarting my laptop in order to assure safe removal of my USB Traveldrive.

Indeed, as I type this while waiting for the GC meeting to start, I've been given a short translation into Russian. Signing off for now.

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I've never used my thumb drives for anything but data moving (sneakernet), and I've gotten into the habit of just pulling them when I'm done. So far XP hasn't done anything bad. For data, I think the only issue is whether the OS has written the last updates to the file system and directory, but unless your system is very busy, even delayed write seems to happen pretty fast. Knock on wood ;p

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

That's been my experience with XP. Vista <spit> keeps pestering me with a dialog box that insists I need to scan the drive, and if I do, it invariably converts what I thought was useful data to trash.

Cheers...