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Telecons just do me in...
Feb. 19th, 2004 08:18 pmThis morning's telecon was plagued by a bad connection, but bad connections are better than no connections, so everyone struggled through it. Especially me.
The subject was fairly innocuous: PDAs for the ISS crew. This has been an ongoing subject of fun and games since late in the Shuttle-Mir program, when Andy Thomas, if memory serves, took his Palm Computing Device™ along with him on Mir.
The fun and games are the same as for just about any off-the-shelf item that someone proposes taking into space: how safe is it? Which is a reasonable question considering that most common sense rules of how stuff works just don't apply when you're zipping along at 18,000 miles per hour, a couple of hundred miles above houses, farms, and fields, with no "up" or "down" to guide you and where the rules of "common sense" follow a different set of ground rules, so that your entire life's experience is well-nigh useless when it comes to grokking the fairly mundane stuff that's happening around you.
Don't mind me. Everything is under control.
My translation client then surprised me by increasing today's work load by a mere 50%. Clients do that kind of stuff all the time, and we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters take it on the chin, think ourselves accursed, and hold our so-called free time cheap and delay our time abed, and proceed to toil until what seems the ending of the world...
Enough!
In between all, I managed somehow to pay some bills, get tax paper to the accountant, open an IRA, and clean the car (somewhat... don't want to strain, y'know).
Back to the face of the salt mine (only 2000 words left for the day!).
Cheers...
The subject was fairly innocuous: PDAs for the ISS crew. This has been an ongoing subject of fun and games since late in the Shuttle-Mir program, when Andy Thomas, if memory serves, took his Palm Computing Device™ along with him on Mir.
The fun and games are the same as for just about any off-the-shelf item that someone proposes taking into space: how safe is it? Which is a reasonable question considering that most common sense rules of how stuff works just don't apply when you're zipping along at 18,000 miles per hour, a couple of hundred miles above houses, farms, and fields, with no "up" or "down" to guide you and where the rules of "common sense" follow a different set of ground rules, so that your entire life's experience is well-nigh useless when it comes to grokking the fairly mundane stuff that's happening around you.
Don't mind me. Everything is under control.
My translation client then surprised me by increasing today's work load by a mere 50%. Clients do that kind of stuff all the time, and we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters take it on the chin, think ourselves accursed, and hold our so-called free time cheap and delay our time abed, and proceed to toil until what seems the ending of the world...
Enough!
In between all, I managed somehow to pay some bills, get tax paper to the accountant, open an IRA, and clean the car (somewhat... don't want to strain, y'know).
Back to the face of the salt mine (only 2000 words left for the day!).
Cheers...
