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Interesting times...
Nov. 8th, 2000 10:37 pmOne of the side effects of my resignation is being able to work the technical side of the business for a while. The work is reasonably good, although sometimes the hours leave something to be desired.
Tomorrow's schedule is not too bad. I have an all-day sim that starts at 7:30 am. The only down side to that is that there really isn't enough time in the morning to do things right...I generally end up rushing around like a maniac, cooking breakfast, taking care of the animals, grooming, dressing, etc. Plus I'll be getting home at the "usual" time, which means there'll not be enough daylight to do much except cook a meal. Then again, maybe I complain too much.
For the following three days, though, I've volunteered to take the night shift supporting the so-called "Moscow Control Room," which houses a number of specialists visiting from various places in Russia. It's their job to work with the rest of the MCC to work out any issues that come up in the course of ISS operations. Under normal circumstances, it's not a terribly stressful assignment, though there is a certain amount of routine work that occurs during the night, Houston time, since this group generally wants to consult with the folks back home in Moscow, who only get to work there about midnight Houston time (9 am Moscow). At any rate, I'm going to take a whack at quickly falling into a schedule where I go to sleep around 3 pm and get up around 9:30 pm, so I can be on console at 11 pm for the whole night and most of the morning.
Seeing as how I may be spending a lot of time at the MCC, I went out and got a new laptop this evening. Pricewise, it's toward the bottom end of the scale, but offers a 550-MHz CPU, 12 GB of hard disk space, 64 MB of SDRAM, and a 13.3" XGA TFT screen. I've spent the last couple of hours loading various tools on it (glossaries, dictionaries, tutorials), and I plan to take it in to work tomorrow. One thing is for sure...I better get a couple of paying jobs quick, else spend some time in the hurt locker for laying out the cash for this equipment.
Segue.
Speaking from a historical perspective, the situation in Florida is very interesting. There must be a bunch of people there who today are kicking themselves either for not voting at all, or for voting for the "wrong" candidate.
Talking about the "wrong" candidate, the Libertarian Party noted that it collected just slightly fewer votes than Buchanan for President, but did reasonably well - all things considered - in local elections around the nation. The numbers for the Presidential race were somewhat disappointing, but I suppose a lot of folks who thought they'd cast their ballot for a third-party candidate chickened out at the last minute. Even Nader did a lot worse than was expected. We had a couple of local races here in Harris County that featured Libertarians running mostly against Democrats...dunno how they did, though.
And that leads me to a conversion with an (ex-)coworker, who ridiculed Browne's anti-drug-war stance. "To be successful, a government must intrude into the lives of the citizenry," asserted my companion, and thereby started an interesting conversation, which included mention of several Amendments in the Bill of Rights, discussions of civil forfeiture, victimless crimes, and historical precedent. In the end, nobody moved an inch from their starting position, which is what makes politics so, um, interesting. It just seems to me that anyone who seeks political power ought to be disqualified from doing so, precisely on that basis!
Cheers...
Tomorrow's schedule is not too bad. I have an all-day sim that starts at 7:30 am. The only down side to that is that there really isn't enough time in the morning to do things right...I generally end up rushing around like a maniac, cooking breakfast, taking care of the animals, grooming, dressing, etc. Plus I'll be getting home at the "usual" time, which means there'll not be enough daylight to do much except cook a meal. Then again, maybe I complain too much.
For the following three days, though, I've volunteered to take the night shift supporting the so-called "Moscow Control Room," which houses a number of specialists visiting from various places in Russia. It's their job to work with the rest of the MCC to work out any issues that come up in the course of ISS operations. Under normal circumstances, it's not a terribly stressful assignment, though there is a certain amount of routine work that occurs during the night, Houston time, since this group generally wants to consult with the folks back home in Moscow, who only get to work there about midnight Houston time (9 am Moscow). At any rate, I'm going to take a whack at quickly falling into a schedule where I go to sleep around 3 pm and get up around 9:30 pm, so I can be on console at 11 pm for the whole night and most of the morning.
Seeing as how I may be spending a lot of time at the MCC, I went out and got a new laptop this evening. Pricewise, it's toward the bottom end of the scale, but offers a 550-MHz CPU, 12 GB of hard disk space, 64 MB of SDRAM, and a 13.3" XGA TFT screen. I've spent the last couple of hours loading various tools on it (glossaries, dictionaries, tutorials), and I plan to take it in to work tomorrow. One thing is for sure...I better get a couple of paying jobs quick, else spend some time in the hurt locker for laying out the cash for this equipment.
Segue.
Speaking from a historical perspective, the situation in Florida is very interesting. There must be a bunch of people there who today are kicking themselves either for not voting at all, or for voting for the "wrong" candidate.
Talking about the "wrong" candidate, the Libertarian Party noted that it collected just slightly fewer votes than Buchanan for President, but did reasonably well - all things considered - in local elections around the nation. The numbers for the Presidential race were somewhat disappointing, but I suppose a lot of folks who thought they'd cast their ballot for a third-party candidate chickened out at the last minute. Even Nader did a lot worse than was expected. We had a couple of local races here in Harris County that featured Libertarians running mostly against Democrats...dunno how they did, though.
And that leads me to a conversion with an (ex-)coworker, who ridiculed Browne's anti-drug-war stance. "To be successful, a government must intrude into the lives of the citizenry," asserted my companion, and thereby started an interesting conversation, which included mention of several Amendments in the Bill of Rights, discussions of civil forfeiture, victimless crimes, and historical precedent. In the end, nobody moved an inch from their starting position, which is what makes politics so, um, interesting. It just seems to me that anyone who seeks political power ought to be disqualified from doing so, precisely on that basis!
Cheers...
