powered by SignMyGuestbook.com
powered by SignMyGuestbook.com
Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2001-07-25 - 8:25 a.m. Trust the Hedgehog In a shocking development, I�m actually trying very hard to work for a living and people keep filling my day with meetings. Going up against the wall today are the people who want to philoposphize during meetings. You know, the people with no work at their desk, the people who want to talk and ramble just to hear the sound of their voice, just to feel important. I [Disturbing thought - Is that what a diary really is? Hey, at least you can skip reading these things.] I'm beginning to understand why they made Socrates drink hemlock. Can we do that to all the annoying people? Meeting management Alan-style: "You don�t want to get out of the boat. You get out of the boat and wander off in the jungle looking for mangos and you�ll get eaten by tigers. Stay in the boat!" Paint me stripy because it takes medium level verbal abuse to bring the ship to safe harbor � but I�m good at that. However, lying in wait in my office is the team from my previous project who wants a rebrief on the Kalman filter. [technobabble translation �skip this if it bores you � if you�re going to steer a spacecraft you need to know two things (1) current attitude/currient orientation/where you are and (2) target attitude/where you want to go. This filter is a fancy math algorithm that is an alternate method of determining where you are.] We�re going to change the spacecraft orbit and *may* have to switch to this backup. And, since they�re doing this while I�m at Pennsic, they�re all panicking they�ll be no one to fix it if it breaks and they want my cell number � like I could fix this from a cell phone at War. What these people need is a teddy bear, so I gave them the stuffed hedgehog that haunts the top of my monitor � it has good karma and it�s very clever which I know because Francesca (la Curiousa) gave it to me. My teammates didn�t seem reassured, but they took the hedgehog anyway because it�s always good to have beanie objects to throw. Data mining the hard way � going through my files for documentation and trying to find the old tests. That was the real work, finding the test results which were somewhere in a box somewhere in the thousands of feet of lab space in this building. �Then a miracle happened� and we found the boxes which then led to digging through the seven huge boxes for the five reports we wanted. Did you know a lot of bugs make their homes in unattended cardboard boxes? I guess that�s covered on my performance plan under �other duties as assigned.� I thought of Gen because she (mostly) finds bugs just fascinating. What are the big greenish bettle things? They scuttle really fast and it�s amazing how many big strong NASA (guy) engineers are very squeamish. I think the expression �Squeal like a girl� needs to be revised around my work. Trust the hedgehog. � � � 
|