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The day started early, with me auditing one of our old-guard interpreters at the Assembly telecon. It's hard to believe that the first crew will be occupying the ISS by the end of October. Heck, that's less than three months away! And then next year, and the year after that, and once again after that, the plan is to launch 7 Shuttle missions a year to incrementally assemble the ISS.
Meanwhile, people scattered all over the planet will be conversing by phone, exchanging documents via fax, and pushing electrons through wires in new and creative ways to make this whole dream come true. Of course, once it goes through the infrastructure, someone has to do something with the information...and that appeared to be a problem for the participants this morning (a couple of faxes did not get through). The interpreter did fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.
Back at the office, there was the ever-popular managers meeting that, thank God, took up only 30 minutes today. Then there were a number of tasks to attend to, as well as the usual brushfires and mini-crises that have to be dealt with on an ongoing basis.
I think I took large chunks out of three goals for the week, but I'm not at all sure I can ever be effective in such an environment, since as soon as I start to get a handle on something, it seems I get redirected to go solve some other problem, with the end result being that I resemble one of those old vaudevillean plate-spinners, busy trying to keep everything going at once without letting anything fall, except that their confusion and the precariousness of their situation was an illusion; in my case, it's not and every once in a while, one of the plates in my charge falls off its stick, making a loud noise in the process.
I suppose that if I were to allow myself to carry on about work, I could weave a very telling tapestry of frustration and other negative emotions, but the danger there is that I would begin to excel at it, and there is little or no percentage in getting good at something like that. Someday, instead, I shall have to describe how, despite some fundamental disagreements between us, I have learned a lot from my boss.
In those in-between moments, I'm browsing through the O'Reilly UNIX Power Tools book in a continuing effort to bone up on the UNIX stuff I never knew. Hopefully, we'll be able to get a Linux server on our internal network set up soon, but I can tell that our IT manager is not really gung-ho about the idea (she's an NT person). I can't really say that I blame her, since the level of effort required to keep our shop in shape digs severely into any `spare' time that she might use to come up to speed in anything such as Linux. As an example, we've been struggling with a font-related "problem" that is nothing more than a configuration issue on the client's side. Another item that I looked into was a request on the part of one of the editors to be able to use the scroll wheel on his IntelliMouse(TM). After downloading the driver/install file for the thing (I didn't realize it was over 4 megs in size!), it turns out the install requires Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) to be installed on the machine or it's no go! Yikes!
Anyway, I suppose I should be happy that our commercial Linux box hasn't been unceremoniously reconfigured as an NT box by now.
No time to do much after work, today. We ate take-out Chinese, after which I took another walk (albeit to buy dessert for my sweet). In the City of Angels, the Democrats engaged in another day of self-promotion, under the approving eye of the media, who rebroadcast the Democratic spin as if it were long-established fact.
Anyway...time to go do something else other than hang out on this computer.
Cheers...
Meanwhile, people scattered all over the planet will be conversing by phone, exchanging documents via fax, and pushing electrons through wires in new and creative ways to make this whole dream come true. Of course, once it goes through the infrastructure, someone has to do something with the information...and that appeared to be a problem for the participants this morning (a couple of faxes did not get through). The interpreter did fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.
Back at the office, there was the ever-popular managers meeting that, thank God, took up only 30 minutes today. Then there were a number of tasks to attend to, as well as the usual brushfires and mini-crises that have to be dealt with on an ongoing basis.
I think I took large chunks out of three goals for the week, but I'm not at all sure I can ever be effective in such an environment, since as soon as I start to get a handle on something, it seems I get redirected to go solve some other problem, with the end result being that I resemble one of those old vaudevillean plate-spinners, busy trying to keep everything going at once without letting anything fall, except that their confusion and the precariousness of their situation was an illusion; in my case, it's not and every once in a while, one of the plates in my charge falls off its stick, making a loud noise in the process.
I suppose that if I were to allow myself to carry on about work, I could weave a very telling tapestry of frustration and other negative emotions, but the danger there is that I would begin to excel at it, and there is little or no percentage in getting good at something like that. Someday, instead, I shall have to describe how, despite some fundamental disagreements between us, I have learned a lot from my boss.
In those in-between moments, I'm browsing through the O'Reilly UNIX Power Tools book in a continuing effort to bone up on the UNIX stuff I never knew. Hopefully, we'll be able to get a Linux server on our internal network set up soon, but I can tell that our IT manager is not really gung-ho about the idea (she's an NT person). I can't really say that I blame her, since the level of effort required to keep our shop in shape digs severely into any `spare' time that she might use to come up to speed in anything such as Linux. As an example, we've been struggling with a font-related "problem" that is nothing more than a configuration issue on the client's side. Another item that I looked into was a request on the part of one of the editors to be able to use the scroll wheel on his IntelliMouse(TM). After downloading the driver/install file for the thing (I didn't realize it was over 4 megs in size!), it turns out the install requires Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) to be installed on the machine or it's no go! Yikes!
Anyway, I suppose I should be happy that our commercial Linux box hasn't been unceremoniously reconfigured as an NT box by now.
No time to do much after work, today. We ate take-out Chinese, after which I took another walk (albeit to buy dessert for my sweet). In the City of Angels, the Democrats engaged in another day of self-promotion, under the approving eye of the media, who rebroadcast the Democratic spin as if it were long-established fact.
Anyway...time to go do something else other than hang out on this computer.
Cheers...
