Plugging away, at 60 seconds per minute!

There's no use - and little interest - in rehashing the sleep cycle. Let's just say I didn't get much, so it should be a pretty interesting next few hours.

The battery on my eSlate has, I think, given up the ghost. The pack gets uncomfortably hot when the computer is plugged into the wall, and if I unplug the power supply, the battery has just enough power to keep the machine running for about two minutes. Literally, two minutes.

The good news is that the machine works (and is cool) if I use the external power supply and keep the battery out of the case.

I got to the MCC a couple of hours early today, in order to get some miscellaneous stuff out of the way. Unfortunately, I forget the eSlate's power supply at home, so I had to make do with what was available at my work station.

Unfortunately, about the only thing I could was something quite a way down on my to-do list. It involved writing a PHP script that would allow me to manage files in my Web server's 'upload' directory. (Earlier, I'd modified a PHP script I'd found in print to allow files to be uploaded from a computer to my server by using the computer's Web browser.)

The management script started out as a simple routine that just listed the files in the directory, and then I incrementally added the display of times last modified and last accessed, and the file size.

So far, all of that was pretty mechanical and not a tremendous technical challenge. My next step was to turn each file name into a hypertext link, so that I could fetch or download the file. This was also pretty straightforward.

Finally, I set a checkbox next to each file name that, when checked, would instruct the script to delete the file after clicking on a Submit button at the bottom of the page. This was probably the hardest item to cobble together, as I had to figure out how to examine the value returned by each checkbox to see whether the file needed to be deleted. Eventually, that problem was solved and it was all over except for the formatting.

The result is a heck of an improvement over opening an FTP application (or running FTP via a DOS window), logging in, etc. Instead, now I can open a Web page and see all the available files, download the ones I need and then delete the ones that are just deadwood.

'Tis a small victory, but mine own.

Today's day for the ISS crew promises to be about as slow as yesterday. According to the schedule, they'll be regenerating their air scrubbers and talking to family up to about lunch, which is when Mike T. and I will be relieved.

Cheers...

A limerick, expressed as an equation...

The following equation, when read aloud, has the same meter and rhyming scheme as a limerick:


( The limerick in words... )

Slam shift...

This early morning's shift was pretty uneventful, which in a way is good. Flying on a space station ought to be pretty boring... sort of like flying on a commercial aircraft... the less excitement and fuss, the better. Between the two of us, Mike T. and I must have said a total of a dozen words all night (then again, we probably repeated those dozen words several times, but I digress...).

The "highlight" of the night was having a guy drop by from the department that maintains the audio loop interface. He comes into our work area and asks, with that half smile that seems to adorn the kisser of everyone who is about to lay some surprising-in-a-bad-way news on you, if we know that the audio units we are using are going to go off-line at 7 am for scheduled (and long-overdue) maintenance?

Of course we didn't.

After picking his brain for a while, we figured that starting at 7 am, we (and the shift that arrives at 8 am) could transplant ourselves to the Shuttle flight control room (FCR) and jack into some backup loops there. On that note, the Bearer of News left us.

Later, it turned out that not everyone supporting the ISS flight could go over to the backup loops by the appointed time, so the Flight Director delayed the maintenance outage for a couple of hours while the affected disciplines got their ducks lined up. By that time, of course, Mike and I were long gone.

I stopped at the Einstein Bros. bagelry on the way home and had their traditional lox sandwich. It's a little pricey, but includes lox and cream cheese on a bagel, with tomato, onion and capers. Heaven!

I think it's the capers that do it for me. That, plus their really excellent coffee (I like their French roast), which doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Anyway, once I got home, I puttered around the house, throwing more stuff out. Around 11:30 am, I went to sleep, just as I had the previous two days. When I woke at 2:30 pm (granted, I had help: Lee called), I did not go back to sleep, but rose, got dressed, and went up to Memorial and Kirkwood to visit a new store that carries "Russian" goods.

The place is called - surprise! - "Moscow" and is roomy, well-lit, stocked with Russian wine and beer, but expensive. I picked up a few bottles of the beer and some snacks (marinated mushrooms, vegetable salad, red caviar) and went to meet Lee at a local restaurant. After a late lunch, I followed Lee home to take a look at the place she shares with her friends Dwayne and Jessica.

So here I am, back in Pearland, listening to Carmina Burana again, sipping on some wine and picking at some mushrooms and herring. There is no television here (big deal), no animals (except for some fleas that were left behind by Jessica's cats, and the fleas are being dealt with), and no other people.

This makes for a pretty lonely situation, but I think I can weather the week like this. If nothing else, it will give me an opportunity to take a close look at PHP and MySQL. :^)

Cheers...