Like watching paint dry...

Done properly, propellant loading is the stuff of utter boredom, unless you are impressed by a kind of teamwork where your performance has a direct impact on the life expectancy of other members of your group and, indeed, on your own prospects for survival. I've noticed that the prop team works hard, plays hard (Guitar Hero, anyone?) and exhibits a high level of "tightness." It's a pleasure to work with them.

More text showed up "after hours," and since I'm the go-to guy for into-English work, I got "gone to." The stuff that's incoming is preceived as critical, so it has to be done now, which I am capable of doing, so I do it. Still, I have to be out on the street tomorrow morning at 7 am, so there are limits to my work cycle.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before or not, but the alarm clock I brought along on the campaign gave up the ghost on first use, and as I detest relying on the hotel's automated wake-up system, I've been fiddling with the Eee to implement a cron-based alarm. My first cut involved a fairly simple bash script that consists of about 100 lines that read:

beep; sleep 1

since my bash skills are largely rusty/nonexistent. Since then, I've downloaded instructions to improve my impromptu "alarm clock," but don't really feel up to implementing the improvements, since the basic scheme appears to work. In any event, we'll put the prototype system through its paces tomorrow morning.

Cheers...