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Watching Cassini I'm currently sitting here in a conference room at work watching the events as Cassini enters Saturn's orbit. While I don't work directly on that project, I'm privy to some of the data that they're receiving from the spacecraft so it's kinda neat watching the data and then watching it on the TV. It's not as exciting as the two nights for MER, but still a nice experience regardless. It's nice to have a life outside of manga and anime (despite what this journal portrays :)). Cassini should be starting it's ~1:30 burn now... |
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Playing with the Mac I finally got permission to take my new mac laptop home from work, and I've been playing with it ever since. I am still very impressed by what Apple has pulled off. I got two iSight cameras last week, one for my parents in Santa Cruz and the other for me down here. Both of us have DSL connections, but given my previous experience with web conferencing back Cornell with QuickCams, I was kinda skeptical about the quality. Iis mean, I had a full T1 connection back then and it was pretty mediocre. However, my experience tonight has been pretty amazing. The video quality is pretty good, the audio is awesome. I think the noise canceling microphone helps a lot. The only complaint I have is that this laptop heats up so much that I can't put it on my lap. Speaking of Cornell, a tragedy occurred today. Very very sad, indeed. |
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Toys! I received my pager for work today. I think it kinda makes me feel important that people would want to talk to ME to get something fixed. However, a lot of my co-workers don't feel the same and would run away rather than being chained to a pocket bell. I'll see how it goes. At the same time, I got a Mac 15" laptop! Whoot! I love macs. Finally, no updates for the weekend as I'm taking a little road trip back home. I have 6 manga on my desk to be reviewed, which I'll do after I come back. I believe I'll finish a few more by that time. |
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From a Posting on Slashdot For the media, bad news is good news (storywise). Here we have unprecidented sucesses of the MERs (and Mars Express - within DAYS of working it has found evidence of it's top mission objective), and now there's all this press about the "failures." Or has NASA been "asking for it," as they keep saying how "amazingly perfect" things are going, setting themselves up for scrutiny when they fail? My opinion: no, but what about you? If you actually knew what goes on daily with operations, both ground and flight... |
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What a Night I just came back from "work" and it's now about 2am. Although I'm not on the MER project, I wasn't on the front lines when the data started flowing in. However, since I'm working on the ground communications side, I could see the data as it was coming in. On the first landing, someone was wrong with our program and apparently data didn't come though in real time. So while people were celebrating on TV, we waiting 2 minutes before we were able to confirm it. However, this time around, we got real time data and it was quite neat seeing it on our computers and then hearing the people on TV confirm the same data. Very neat. |
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Landed I'm sitting here in a conference room at JPL watching monitor data and the nasa tv at the same time. We landed! And how coincidental that Al Gore and Gov. Arnold pop out after it was announced that the rover got to the Mars. But as of now, it's still rolling. |
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No 'mo Rover The big thing in the news today was that JPL apparently lost communication with the rover, at least the part that transfers all the science data and telemetry. Funny thing is that last night my supervisor told me that he was over talking to the MER people (what I work on is related to any and all missions in general, so they're one of them) and they told him that there was some anomaly with the rover on the ground (actually, a little more detail, but anyhow). Didn't expect it to turn out to be such a big problem. |
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