Giving Webcam32 another chance...

After noodling with the iVISTA for a while, I was just not comfortable with it. So, I turned back to Webcam32, and decided to run the program while monitoring my laptop's performance with the Windows System Monitor.

It has been working fine for several hours now. The issue of a grey box appearing on my cam page instead of an image disappeared after I decided to go back and take another look at the applet code that's supposed to take care of that detail. Duh, there was a typo that kept the display from happening, and once I fixed that, the whole concept just kind of snapped into place.. the page updates and everything.

* * *Whoo. Four hours left!

To make life really interesting, some kind of strange interference is making my and Mark's life miserable, since it hinders us from hearing the exchanges between the crew and the ground, and listening to it even with nobody trying to talk is an eardrum-abusing experience.

Cheers...

Twilight Zone...

Me and my big mouth.

Something just spontaneously happened on my laptop, the upshot of which is that it rebooted, displayed the ME splash screen, and is now scanning disks on the way to establishing Safe Mode.

Wunnerful. I hope I recover from this one... I did.

The cam image of 1:48:50 will be the last one uploaded for a while. I don't have time for this.

Cheers...

Over the hump...

I've noticed that any kind of middle-of-the-night work like this involves a low point during the night when you really, really, really want to sleep.

I had my episode about an hour and half ago.

We're about 20 minutes into the EVA. The ISS is flying over Africa as I write, and the ground track shows it will be going over Afghanistan (of all places) in about 20 minutes.



This photo was taken earlier in the shift, shortly before the laptop did the Spontaneous Reboot thing. That's me in the center of the frame, sitting at my console. On the left is Mark L., the fellow I've been working with the past week or so, and with whom I'll be working for the rest of my time here this trip.

We're just getting some video of the EVA crewmen outside the ISS. Both Dezhurov and Tyurin are wearing Orlan space suits, which resemble scaled down space vehicles more than anything else (you get into them by opening a door in the back of the unit). The suits are light brown, which sort of grates on my senses, as I'm used to seeing EVA crewmen doing their thing in white spacesuits (which is the color of the American EMUs).

The oncoming shift will arrive in about half and hour, and we get to skedaddle out of here half and hour after that. After we're dismissed, we'll have just over 18 hours to do anything we want before reporting back for tomorrow's shift.

(Geez, there are times, while doing this job, that I feel as if I'm back in the Marines.)

Cheers...

Feeling human again (sort of)...

I managed to grab 5 hours of sleep after forcing myself to stay up until the post office opened. I'd come home around 6, made the necessary changes to my return (I found the receipt with the number I thought I'd need to call about), printed it out, attached all the ancillary paperwork, and had it ready to go by 7:50, expecting I'd be right on time for the opening of the post office.

Except that the local post office opens to the public at 9. Aargh!

Anyway, I managed to get the return sent off and then went back to the house and to sleep.

Upon rising, I assembled all my clothes (which are dirty) and did a laundry run.

Have any of you ever washed a shirt with a fountain pen still in the pocket?

I can now claim this accomplishment to my everlasting, undying credit. Fortunately, the pen had a sense of humor and did not void its contents all over my clothing. (Not that it would have mattered, as most of the items in the washer were one shade of blue or another to start with.)

* * *When machines spontaneously reboot, the cause is likely a situation called a memory leak.

What happens is that some application (or combination of applications) repeatedly asks the operating system for a chunk of memory in which to do something, and then neglects to tell the operating system at some later time that the memory is no longer needed. Eventually, there's just no more memory left, at which point a number of things can happen. Spontaneous reboot is one of the more common (certainly, the most noticeable) consequence. Lockup is another.

Looking at the Surveyor site tells me that I'm not the only one who has experienced sudden reboots while using Webcam32. I've taken the advice posted in one of the messages on the support forum and downloaded something that's supposed to solve the problem (a third-party shareware memory manager called MemTurbo II). I might try it out tonight, if there is time.

* * *A call on my cell informed me that my schedule had been changed. Again.

Tonight (more accurately, tomorrow morning), I am to start at 1 am and work until 9 am. Then, I return at 11:30 pm on Tuesday for a reasonably normal shift that goes until 8 am on Wednesday. So far, so good.

Then it's back to marathon mode. On Wednesday night, I go in at 11:30 pm and then home nearly 12 hours later, at 11:15 am Thursday. I'll have all of 7 hours and 15 minutes in which to drive to and from work, prepare for and rise from sleep, and sleep, because I'm to be back at 6:30 that night for a shift that lasts until 5:45 am on Friday.

I guess that means I'll have all day Friday to do anything I want, until the hour nears midnight, again.

Good thing I did laundry.

Cheers...