Current events...

Yuri Malenchenko and Ekaterina Dmitriev got hitched today, in about the most dramatic manner possible: the bride had her feet firmly planted on the ground while the groom (and best man) were hurtling in low earth orbit aboard the International Space Station at 17,500 miles per hour.

Strange to say, but I know both of them. Yuri is a very quiet fellow, very businesslike, and though I interpreted a few crew training sessions for him back when I lived in Houston full time, I haven't spoken to him for several years. Katya used to work for my current client back when I was a full-time manager there, though our paths rarely crossed outside of work.

Good luck and good fortune to them both!

* * *I'm beginning to see red Audblog icons here and there on LJ, and signed up for the trial free Audblog post.

The idea of Audblog is to allow people to create posts with links to mp3s of voice recordings. This is done (after registration, naturally) by dialing a number, inputting some ID information, and then basically leaving a message. A few seconds after hanging up, the service posts an entry to your LJ account (it knows how to do this because you supply your LJ name and password). It's very straightforward, and has an intial cost of $3 per month, allowing up to twelve 2-minute posts in each month, billed quarterly, if memory serves.

I wish the folks who run Audblog the best of luck, but I'm likely not inclined to subscribe to the service, nor would I be too jazzed to see a proliferation of audio posts on my friends list, for the simple reason that I can absorb far more information in two minutes by reading or looking at photos than anyone could reasonably speak.

There are also collateral issues, the primary of which is the fact that very, very few people normally speak in a manner that one might call "polished," including myself. This is not a slam, just a fact of life. Very few people speak in complete sentences.

One of the proposed future enhancements to the service is some kind of voice-to-text capability. While that may sound sexy at first, it is said that one of the best ways to make anyone "sound" like an idiot is to transcribe what they say word for word and then have the intended audience read the transcript.

In any event, the good news about links to such mp3s is that you don't have to wade through the recording if you don't want to, and there may be times when a recording will provide a level of information that the phosphor word (or photo) simply cannot support. We'll see.

Cheers...

That darned interview meme...

From LJ friend tsarina come the following questions:

1. How did you end up working with the space program?

I'd love to say it was something I wanted to do ever since I was a little boy, but I'd be lying. Sure, I had thoughts - while following the progression of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights leading up to the moon landings - of growing up and working for the space program... maybe even becoming an astronaut, but I guess the desire never reached a critical level, so I spent the first decades of my life doing Other Things.

After getting laid off from Borland in 1992, I moved to Colorado and began to write for computer magazines and do translations. In the course of marketing my translation skills, I spoke with one of the co-owners of my current client, but there didn't seem to be much interest from the client's side (I didn't know that the person I spoke with had been killed in a traffic accident soon after our conversation). Then in April 1994, I got a desperation phone call from the client's translation project manager, asking if I would do a three-page translation on a rush basis. I agreed, and apparently did such a good job that the client started to send me a regular stream of work.

I was invited to visit the client's office in Houston for a couple of weeks on either side of Memorial Day weekend in 1995. I worked in the office, writing translations, and successfully survived an initiation into the interpretation side of life. I was invited back a couple of times later that year to interpret for so-called Technical Interchange Meetings, which were fairly large convocations of U.S. and Russian specialists in a variety of disciplines.

I impressed the owner of the company enough for her to offer me a full-time job as a manager, which I accepted. Almost exactly five years later, I left the company to return to Colorado, though I return to Houston (and other places) to work as necessary.

2. Tell me how you and Galina met please.

There were not many engineering jobs available for new graduates when I was getting out of school, so a friend of mine and I decided we'd try to get jobs in the travel industry, working for U.S. travel agencies that sent tour groups to Russia.

At the time, all tourism to the U.S.S.R. went through the Soviet state travel agency Intourist. We stopped by the Intourist office in Manhattan and picked up a list of such agencies, and started to call around. We hit paydirt on call number three.

I ended up working in the Soviet Union for over two years, on and off, living in the major new hotels (the Intourist and Rossiya) for months at a time. During the last year, my schedule kept me in Moscow pretty much constantly, with a work routine that left me with three days off per week.

You know, they say "idle hands are the devil's tools," and they're right. I struck up some acquaintances, among whom was one Boris A., who was one of those marvelous individuals who was half-Georgian, half-Jewish, half-Russian, and half-Kazak, with a smattering of other ethnicities mixed in. He knew everyone in Moscow, it seemed. He took me along to a number of parties and functions and I was happy to go, even though I knew I was attending on the basis of my "novelty value" as an American whose Russian pronunciation was very good (and whose vocabulary and grammar skills were getting better day by day) and yet not one of these poor sappy Yanks who had been smitten with the "Russian soul" and went around singing "Moscow Nights" and talking endlessly about peace, brotherhood, and the friendship of peoples.

One night, Boris takes me to this party and, well... you can guess the rest. It was at Galina's apartment, and I tried my best to say as little as possible (it took longer for people to guess I was an American that way). I thought Galina was lovely the moment I saw her, though it took her a little longer to warm up to me. That was in September, if memory serves. We got married at the end of December.

3. Do you think there is hope for Russia to get itself together and survive?

Russia will survive whether it gets itself together or not, and there is always hope.

The key to progress, in my opinion, will be the eventual loss of influence of the older generation as it dies off and in particular, of the older ruling class.

On the plus side, Russia has the capability of transcending the past and jumping directly from the 19th to the 21st centuries, especially from the perspective of technology. On the minus side, Russia will continue to be wracked with corruption because, frankly, much of the world works that way. If there is to be any movement toward what we like to think of as a "Western" societal foundation, I believe it will take a few generations for things to stabilize.

4. If you could go back to college and study anything you wanted, what would you choose?

I'm probably a jaded son-of-a-gun, but I'm not sure I'd get what I want out of a college education any more. The classical emphasis on having students think about what's being taught and encouraging diverse viewpoints has been largely supplanted, in the name of diversity, with teaching students what to think about the material, i.e., to have opinions.

But if I could go back I think I might try to find a school that engaged in a classical education (instead of one that serves as a thinly disguised day-care center for the 18-to-21 group) and study art, or theater.

5. What's the best movie you've seen recently?

That's tough to say. Taking your question literally, the answer would be Casablanca, shot in 1943 but viewed by me just prior to leaving for Houston. It's my favorite film.

Cheers...

All. Over. Again.

There would appear to be a circuit inside of Natalie's dear, sweet little demon cat that determines when a being in its vicinity needs complete quiet (fo example, when trying to fall asleep in the middle of the sidereal day), and thus places said cat into caterwauling mode with the volume ramped up to the maximum.

Sheer fatigue eventually allowed me to fall asleep around noon, after I locked the cat in Natalie's room. I woke up shortly ago to the sound of aluminum foil crinkling as sheets of the stuff moved in concert with changes of air pressure leaking past cracks in the fenestration and the door. Owing to the fact that, in my desire to avoid having the place look like a crack house or something worse, I did not tape the foil to the window panes themselves, preferring instead ot tape sheets of the stuff inboard of the venetian blinds, leaving a big air space between the foil and the actual window.

"Big mistake," as Ahnuld would say.

The farblegargling cat continues to caterwaul (making it a candidate for the coveted "Vocal Cords of Iron" prize), so I just chased it back into Natalie's room and put Mozart's Sonata in D on at full blast to try to drown out the awful noise. It's not really working.

At any rate, I've got to go do an expense report, and then fume think about how to get more than two and a half hours of sleep between work days.

Cheers...

Quirky behavior...

Interestingly enough, Natalie does not have Word installed on any of the machines in her computer farm here in Pearland. On the other hand, in order to print from my VAIO, I'd have to install Yet Another Printer Driver (I'm lazy) and purchase Yet Another Network Cable (I'm lazy. And cheap.)

So I tried to do a "Save As..." into Web page format from the VAIO's version of Word, but the result was "most horrid" (the cognoscienti will recognize the associated limerick), and any attempt to comprehend the underlying "raw" HTML is doomed to failure.

Trust me on this.

In any event, I feel quite accomplished today, having submitted invoices and an expense report where necessary.

Now if only I could get some sleep!

Cheers...