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Today just seemed to be my day...
Feb. 20th, 2001 09:43 pmI met a fellow today who has started a company with the idea of developing microphones for the EVA suit that's to be used on the first manned mission to Mars. That really blew me away. That's what I call vision!
I mean, it's difficult enough to get anyone excited about the ISS. Heck, there's a crowd of people out there who think the whole space program is a waste of money, and they'll waste no time telling you about it, from the comfort of their space-enhanced lives.
But this guy...he's got his eyes on Mars! We need more of that kind of vision in the world, both for Mars and a variety of other goals.
On a more mundane note, my laptop drove me nuts today. It even had the temerity to suggest that, as attempts to rouse the animal from "hibernation" didn't seem to work so well, perhaps future attempts ought not be made. I agreed wholeheartedly, as zero out of four attempts to come out of hibernation mode simply did not work. On other fonts, on the whole, I've been running at less than 50% success for shutting down the machine, and somewhere below 66% for successfully starting it up without having to reboot.
If my laptop drove me nuts, then some of the files I was given to translate put me up on the green in quick order. One "radiogram" received from Russian was a Word file with an Excel spreadsheet embedded as an OLE object. Ye gods.
Word is, at least, workable from a translation perspective. Excel is simply not a suitable environment in which to do translations. And after I started worked with the embedded spreadsheet, it turned out that as soon as I stopped editing it, the font used to represent it turned all of the Cyrillic characters into '?' characters, which made the part designators (which are not translated) look rather funny.
Another file had a bunch of embedded hypertext links, which require special handling to deactivate. I think I'll learn just enough Word Basic to write a macro that will do the task of deactivating embedded links automatically, as they are a royal pain to deal with.
Tomorrow's telecon assignment provided the putting skill to put me away. I'm scheduled to interpret a discussion on "imagery," which sounds innocuous enough, but since I have no...uh, oh. Not only do I not have any agenda, but I don't seem to recall getting anything at all regarding tomorrow's telecon.
Off to hit the emergency pager...
Cheers...
I mean, it's difficult enough to get anyone excited about the ISS. Heck, there's a crowd of people out there who think the whole space program is a waste of money, and they'll waste no time telling you about it, from the comfort of their space-enhanced lives.
But this guy...he's got his eyes on Mars! We need more of that kind of vision in the world, both for Mars and a variety of other goals.
On a more mundane note, my laptop drove me nuts today. It even had the temerity to suggest that, as attempts to rouse the animal from "hibernation" didn't seem to work so well, perhaps future attempts ought not be made. I agreed wholeheartedly, as zero out of four attempts to come out of hibernation mode simply did not work. On other fonts, on the whole, I've been running at less than 50% success for shutting down the machine, and somewhere below 66% for successfully starting it up without having to reboot.
If my laptop drove me nuts, then some of the files I was given to translate put me up on the green in quick order. One "radiogram" received from Russian was a Word file with an Excel spreadsheet embedded as an OLE object. Ye gods.
Word is, at least, workable from a translation perspective. Excel is simply not a suitable environment in which to do translations. And after I started worked with the embedded spreadsheet, it turned out that as soon as I stopped editing it, the font used to represent it turned all of the Cyrillic characters into '?' characters, which made the part designators (which are not translated) look rather funny.
Another file had a bunch of embedded hypertext links, which require special handling to deactivate. I think I'll learn just enough Word Basic to write a macro that will do the task of deactivating embedded links automatically, as they are a royal pain to deal with.
Tomorrow's telecon assignment provided the putting skill to put me away. I'm scheduled to interpret a discussion on "imagery," which sounds innocuous enough, but since I have no...uh, oh. Not only do I not have any agenda, but I don't seem to recall getting anything at all regarding tomorrow's telecon.
Off to hit the emergency pager...
Cheers...
