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Where else but on a launch campaign in Kazakhstan might you find 8 crazy hardy individuals standing outside in an ever-expanding cloud of mosquitos, waiting for a point of light to appear in the sky to their southwest?
That was the scene last night at about 10:15 pm as I joined the group to watch the ISS scream by, 350 kilometers or so above me and lit up like the planet Jupiter (or at least as brightly).
I had brought my video camera with me, just to see if there was any percentage in trying to film the pass, and I concluded - between the best possible theoretical result (tracking a dot on black background) and actual practical result (bupkis, and out-of-focus, at best) - that the right thing to do was to swat at mosquitos with the camera while I gaped upward toward the ISS.
That, and continue to record the group's banter as we stood there in the gathering darkness. Assuming anything recorded is actually intelligible and not libelous, I may be tempted to post an mp3 of the proceedings.
We've got new washers and dryers downstairs, manufactured by Bosch. The door to the washer is supposed to open automatically - and only automatically - after the laundry within has completed its wash cycle, but for some reason, this did not happen yesterday, whereupon I found out the hotel staff had a ready fix: set the machine for the super-fast 15-minute cycle and wash the clothes again!
Drying the clothes was fun, too. The dryers are apparently designed to save energy by extracting moisture from heated air and sending the air back into the drying chamber, so as not to heat huge volumes of ambient air and then dump it - hot and moisture-laden - out through the exhaust vent. These dryers have no such vent, which means that any heat lost in the process ends up in the same room as the dryer, which is not appreciated by the ladies that work in the laundry room.
As I watched my clothes tumble for yet another cycle in the dryer yesterday (it eventually took three cycles to dry my duds), I turned to the ladies and observed that this technology might possibly be a German attempt at revenge, which got a good laugh all around (indeed, the grandmotherly woman who runs the hotel with uncanny efficiency was still laughing this morning).
Cheers...
That was the scene last night at about 10:15 pm as I joined the group to watch the ISS scream by, 350 kilometers or so above me and lit up like the planet Jupiter (or at least as brightly).
I had brought my video camera with me, just to see if there was any percentage in trying to film the pass, and I concluded - between the best possible theoretical result (tracking a dot on black background) and actual practical result (bupkis, and out-of-focus, at best) - that the right thing to do was to swat at mosquitos with the camera while I gaped upward toward the ISS.
That, and continue to record the group's banter as we stood there in the gathering darkness. Assuming anything recorded is actually intelligible and not libelous, I may be tempted to post an mp3 of the proceedings.
We've got new washers and dryers downstairs, manufactured by Bosch. The door to the washer is supposed to open automatically - and only automatically - after the laundry within has completed its wash cycle, but for some reason, this did not happen yesterday, whereupon I found out the hotel staff had a ready fix: set the machine for the super-fast 15-minute cycle and wash the clothes again!
Drying the clothes was fun, too. The dryers are apparently designed to save energy by extracting moisture from heated air and sending the air back into the drying chamber, so as not to heat huge volumes of ambient air and then dump it - hot and moisture-laden - out through the exhaust vent. These dryers have no such vent, which means that any heat lost in the process ends up in the same room as the dryer, which is not appreciated by the ladies that work in the laundry room.
As I watched my clothes tumble for yet another cycle in the dryer yesterday (it eventually took three cycles to dry my duds), I turned to the ladies and observed that this technology might possibly be a German attempt at revenge, which got a good laugh all around (indeed, the grandmotherly woman who runs the hotel with uncanny efficiency was still laughing this morning).
Cheers...
