I've been back from the sim for a little while, rubbing Galina's feet and watching the Letterman program (his writers have really latched onto the Nowak incident!). Apropos of which, on the way home, I noticed a headline in a newspaper vending box, to the effect that NASA has called for a re-examination of its screening process.
As if nobody saw that coming in the aftermath of an astronaut getting into such trouble.
In any event, during the sim I figured out a dirt easy, no cost way to "defeat" the password protection in the Adobe Acrobat files I received earlier today, which prevents me from doing anything useful with the files, like putting them through the FineReader OCR program. I just tried it out and it works: open the file in Acrobat Reader and print it to PDF format using a generic PDF driver such as PDFCreator.
It would almost seem worthwhile to have not spent the extra time and effort to protect the files, y'know?
(Yes, I am aware that whoever put the files together could have made life a living hell for the prospective data-scraper. For such cases, there are reasonably priced, legal commercial solutions.)
I feel pretty tired, probably because of the crazy schedule I've adopted to get everything done (I got up at 4:30 am to talk to folks in Europe, then went to sleep at around 7:30 am for three hours before my sim). I really need to get myself back to "normal."
For the record, I am beginning to acutely miss having a dog around the place. Having said that, with me preparing to travel to New York to visit my dad several times this year, and with Galina preparing to go back to Pagosa to take care of matters there, I'd be ill-advised to acquire a dog.
Still, I miss having one.
Cheers...
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