I'm wondering...

To make room for the Soyuz when it will be relocated on Thursday, the ISS crew undocked the old Progress cargo vehicle yesterday. The old Progress was then deorbited according to plan sometime short of 7 pm last night. Everything went nominally, and I heard the exchange in which the MCC in Moscow reported the coordinates at which whatever was left after reentry splashed down in the Pacific.

I didn't really pay attention to the coordinates, but I wonder if they might be not far from where a Lan Chile Airbus A340 was flying last night:

Flaming space junk narrowly misses jet
28th March 2007, 11:15 WST

Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight.

The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm last night.

Hmmm. Assuming that the time quoted in the story is also WST (UT+0800), then 2200 WST on 27 March would be... 0900 EDT on the same day?

If that's the case, it can't be the same "space junk."

I guess I'll find out later today.

Cheers...

Head no longer down, not yet up...

<Insert usual rant about translation of Excel files here>

<Insert usual speculation as to ancestry, sanitary habits, etc. of people who compile Excel files for translation here>

The Excel file took longer than expected, resulting in closer than usual margins on delivery.

However, the important thing is: documents were delivered on time.

What remains is a short 500-word item due by the time I go to sleep tonight.

* * *In completely different news, I have run across a trove of marvelous stuff on YouTube (finally), mostly having to do with classical music and other types of performances (I even ran across several versions of Aznavour's La bohème, where the singer accompanies his singing with gestures one might associate with an artist).

For a while, there, I thought that YouTube had somehow escaped the purview of Sturgeon's Law.

Cheers...

Checkpoint...

The plate is completely clear as of a little while ago; literally minutes. The ISS crew went to sleep early, so the MSR shut down at around 10:45 pm, after which I went home. Tomorrow, I shall carefully review what I've done over the past week or so to make sure I've invoiced everything that needs invoicing, and fill in any discovered gaps.

I could glean no additional information regarding the "near miss" yesterday in the Pacific. News reports I saw in Russian neither confirmed nor denied that an Airbus A340 was nearly swept from the sky by a reentering Progress, and the Russians I was working with had no idea either, or at least said they didn't.

After invoicing all outstanding items tomorrow, I shall have to again turn to the ever-present paper chase.

In my "off time" (how can I say that?), I've been concentrating on various aspects of improving my mental attitude. Among other sources, I have been hitting Jeffrey Gitomer's books pretty hard. His target audience is people who work in sales, but for just about ever, I've felt that anyone who freelances (as I do) is by definition in the sales racket, to one degree or another.

I feel that I am approaching a cusp of some kind. The work this past month has been coming in steadily enough to make me start wondering if it's time to seriously look for an employee. How much more work could I find if I devoted time to getting non-agency clients? On the other tentacle, there has been a fundamental sea change in the structure of my work over the past year. (For example, it's unlikely that I'll be going to Kazakhstan any time soon.) That might argue against trying, as my stepdad puts it, "to jump higher than my butt."

Still, it's not as if I need a complete overhaul of the attitude engine. I am generally quick to recover from bad beats and rotten moods. But I'm probably still a far way from where I need to be.

Enough platitudinous malarkey. I seriously need to get some sleep.

Cheers...