Pleasant words...

I am not blessed with the world's best memory for names - and sometimes faces - but Sergei G. turned to me yesterday during one of the several dead periods in the sim and asked how come I didn't do telecons anymore.

As my mind raced to connect his face to a particular set of telecons, I told him that I'd been away from JSC, living in Colorado, since January of last year and that I came to Houston from time to time to interpret for the program.

He nodded his head and replied that he still remembered my work from a couple of years ago at some of the management-level conferences, and said that he appreciated my efforts - in the course of what threatened to become very confrontational meetings - to inject some "softener" into the remarks.

I'd always hoped nobody'd notice, because although I was sure I was doing the right thing by inserting the occasional "please" into the discussion or tempering "That's out of the question" into "I'm afraid that's out of the question," you can always depend on some righteous smartass with a degree in interpretation to pipe up with 43 reasons why such a practice is academically unjustifiable. And while I can hold my own in any one-on-one with such persons, their usual modus operandi is to complain to your boss about your atrocious work as they wave their academic credentials around the place.

Myself, I observed the following a long time ago: when a Person In Charge addresses some Other Person and says, "I'd appreciate seeing your complete report on my desk tomorrow morning," the "I'd appreciate..." part is decoration, and the message is: "I want your report tomorrow morning!" Given a choice, I'm sure most people would prefer to hear the order couched in the first formulation.

But here it is, 9:30 am already, and I have a ton of things to do. I believe the first opportuntiy to land the Shuttle has been waved off, but another opportunity is coming up soon. I shall have to remember to take along my cell phone today :^) and call my client's office to see what, if any, changes have been made to the immediate sim schedule.

Cheers...

GPS work...

Not that it's essential, but having the GPS unit crap out on me bugs me, so I called Magellan support. They introduced me to a reset sequence (I knew there was one, though I don't recall seeing it in the manual), so now the unit is outside, sucking down signals from several satellites and rebuilding what the Magellan rep called the unit's "almanac."

I just called the office, too. Everything seems nominal for today's sim. I just hope it goes better than yesterday's session, where a decision was made early on in the scenario to stand down from a rendezvous attempt, which left about 6 hours of the sim to go.

During those hours, the sim team (the people who are in charge of the hardware that simulates reality for the flight controllers and crew) scrambled to come up with a feasible set of other "mals" (malfunctions) to keep everyone busy. As it was, the Russian members of the sim team came up with such imaginative mals, the sim supervisor (the sim team lead) wanted to wait until after the end of the sim to introduce them, just to see what their ultimate effects would be.

I didn't stick around. Neither did the folks I was working for.

Why am I babbling on like this? I have things to do!

Cheers...

An unproductive day...

Of course, no day is really completely unproductive, but today felt as if it came close.

When I went back outside after a few minutes, the GPS had settled down, locked onto a number of birds, and was happily tracking its position. I'd written down most of the coordinates that I'd captured previously, but most of them are not terribly useful. No biggie. It's just nice to have the unit back.

I left for JSC around 11:30 am and got to the National Tire & Battery place on Bay Area Boulevard at about noon, to get new tires. The ones on the car were pretty worn, it turned out, so I got a complete new set. I was due at JSC at 1:30, but since the NTB folks promise a one-hour turnaround, I wasn't worried. I left the car and went next door to the Miyako restaurant and had some sushi for lunch.

When I got back around 12:35, no work had been done on the car, so I started to worry. They finally finished at 1:40, and I left for work cursing NTB under my breath. I managed to find a parking spot in the parking lot next to the MCC and rushed upstairs, only to find that the sim had been canceled owing to the Shuttle landing. I have no idea why there should be a connection between the two, but there is one, apparently. I called the office to confirm the cancellation, and was told I could charge 4 hours for my trouble.

On the way home, I stopped at the EPO parts outlet and bought some NiCads for my 2-m handheld and a fan for my desktop. I then stopped at Barnes & Noble and picked up the current crop of Linux magazines. When I got home, I started to work on the nuclear job that's been sitting in my bag and after a couple of hours, I got tired and took a nap.

Dinner was light. Afterwards, I watched The Luzhin Defence with John Turturro, and enjoyed it very much. It's rare enough to find a film that treats chess intelligently, but this film had much more than that. It genuinely touched me. Besides, I plan to do a little more research about the locale in which the film was shot, as I think I would like to visit it someday.

Tomorrow's sim starts in the afternoon and runs until midnight. Friday's work is from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, after which Lee and I need to start getting ready to leave for Pagosa.

It's really hard to get things done outside the framework of work. Just getting the tires on the car was a struggle. Ah, well.

Cheers...