Technical downs and ups...

Turning the Eee into an alarm clock (which worked marvelously yesterday morning, even though I had already awakened when it went off) was actually pretty simple. Basically, one uses a Unix facility called cron to cause a command line to be exectued at a certain time. (Specification of so-called "cron jobs" is pretty flexible; the syntax allows specification of minutes, hours, days, months, days of the week, and combinations thereof.) The only other requirement at this point is to keep the Eee running until the cron job executes.

The command line I caused to be executed was a very simple script wherein I invoked the "beep" command at 1-second intervals for somewhere under two minutes, in a file that had no programmatic structure, outside of line-by-line execution (you can take what I know about bash shell programming, stick it in your eye, and barely feel any irritation).

I dug around some more on the Internet and found a how-to that invoked the Amarok music player via a facility called DCOP. Figuring I'd much rather wake up to the sound of something musical, I explored this approach. Along the way, I eventually realized that the line

dcop amarok player play

relies on Amarok to actually already be running for the command to work. Other commands worked as expected once this conceptual stumbling block was overcome.

However, do what I might, the command line above does not have the desired effect when run from cron (either directly or inside of a script). Scraping the 'net for information showed that others have experienced this problem, too, but I was not able to find a solution.

Ah, well... it looks like I'll just have to settle for a flock of beeps whenever I need waking. (I seem to wake up at around 5:30 am every morning anyway.)

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Getting the information I need to switch domains from one hosting company to another was breathtakingly simple. In fact, I was on the verge of assigning new nameservers to the domain before I realized that it might not be a bad idea to FTP my data from the servers at the old hosting company before assigning new nameservers.

In fact, the ideal time to make the switch would be next Friday night, Colorado time, so that the 48 hours recommended for the change to propagate occurs over the weekend. Alternatively, if I download the files by tonight (this morning, Colorado time), I could make the change tonight and likely have all the dust settle by the start of business Monday morning. One thing I can do to accelerate the process is to eyeball the content in the directory structure and delete stuff that's either outdated or most certainly backed up. We'll see.

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Today is a work day for the campaign, but since Alex P. and I were working the past two days (while the rest of the team basically took it easy), we are officially on "standby" status, though I think both of us are on the list of people who signed up to go into town today at 10 am. The two of us go "back to the face" tomorrow for two days of fuel loading, after which comes the phase of joint operations, during which everything comes together.

I got to talking to the prop team yesterday, as they were preparing to engage in another marathon Guitar Hero session in the TV room downstairs (how these guys can still hear anything is a miracle, if you ask me, though it might explain the system of arm signals that they use, but I digress...). It turns out that if you were to let a drop of fuel fall into a bucket of oxidizer, you'd hear a pop as the fuel was consumed in a hypergolic reaction with some oxidizer.

On the other hand, if you were to let a drop of oxidizer fall into a bucket of fuel, you'd get a gout of flame from the bucket until the fuel was exhausted. If I understood the explanation correctly, the drop of oxidizer would start things off by igniting a small amount of fuel, whereupon the oxygen in the air would be drawn into to react with more fuel, and so on, until all the fuel was consumed.

For this reason, explained Adam W., the senior prop engineer on the job, you always load the spacecraft with oxidizer first, just in case. His team is having a busy year (six campaigns, instead of the usual three), with the next job hard on the heels of this one.

Cheers...

A whole new world...

Today's day off almost didn't happen.

About a half hour after my previous post, I got a call to come into the office, and since my time off is discretionary (and it's more important to launch a satellite than be available to interpret for other visitors to town), I skedaddled into the полтинник, just in time to be told that the job I had been called in for had been canceled, and I had just enough time to get back to the hotel and grab my going-into-town stuff if the van was willing to wait for me for a few minutes.

It was.

Alex P. and I made our rounds of the market in workmanlike fashion. I went back to get some more of the Samarkand tea, and the seller tried to sell me a kilogram bag, which is a lot of tea! Alex stopped by the market's meat "pavillion," where he bought some smoked fish. I wandered around, absorbing my surroundings, and even managed to snap a picture of a young woman who sells eggs.


Eventually, Alex and I met up, as we had planned, with our customer's senior representative, and while Alex went off to get a haircut, I accompanied our customer as he bought some souvenirs and then went off with him to find a rumored Korean restaurant located not far from the train station.

I was not aware of it, but apparently, there are a number of ethnic Koreans who live in the area. Alex says he has no difficulty distinguishing between Kazakhs and Koreans, and while I am in no position to dispute this, I also wonder about the extent to which the groups have intermingled, which might make any unabiguous classification dubious.

In any event, the Korean restaurant was very nice, and we preferred sitting outside to the relative comfort and sterility of the inside dining room. As a complete tyro with respect to Korean cuisine, I can only report that the beef хе (transliteration: khe, which Multitran suggests is normally a fish dish), which turned out to be fried pieces of beef with raw onions in red pepper, on rice, with a fatty boullion on the side, was pretty good, though the Uzbek plof wasn't bad, either. All of this was washed down with a couple of steins of Karagandinskoye beer, which seems better than the Shymkentskoye beer that was my preferred libation during previous campaigns.

In any event, tomorrow, we go over to fuel loading, and I'm the early guy. I should probably go clean up my room and get ready for tomorrow.

Cheers...

Randy Pausch, RIP

I first heard of Randy Pausch in connection with his giving a "last lecture" at Carnegie Mellon - a fairly common phenomenen in the academic world, generally speaking, where professors hold forth on what is of greatest importance to them, as if it were their last opportunity to communicate with an audience - with the ironic twist that, in Pausch's case, his might well have been such a last opportunity, as his doctors had predicted he had three months left to live before the pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver killed him. (In the end, he lived longer than the doctors had guessed. Good on him!)

When I heard of it, I downloaded that lecture, and was imspired, and I later saw him on an episode of Oprah, and was inspired again, and then I read his book and kept trying to remind myself of the truth of his observation that none of us know how much time we have on this earth, and that we must make the most of that time, while we can (and I'm certain he wasn't talking about to-do lists and work productivity).

Right now, all the issues in my life seem pretty... petty. The key question is: Can I profit from his example and focus my attention on making the most of time I have left? Can I keep the flame of inspiration burning?

Cheers...