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Leopard is making me see spots November 7, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 3 comments

I am fighting with leopard! Oy!

Now, if you are a regular mac user, please don’t be afraid. Leopard is amazing! I love it, EXCEPT I am having trouble with my Xauthentications. What? What the hell is she talking about? If you don’t know, then don’t worry, But if you are a mac/unix/linux geek, I am going to slam my head into a wall. Somehow, I have lost the DISPLAY environment variable…so no windows will show.

Sigh….

Oh well! I will figure it out. Instead, I will listen to Jimmy Buffett and the steel drums transport me far away from the cold of Boston. I will figure out what is going on with X.. I will.

ETA: A few Fruitcakes with Buffett and I am doing much better. Now to print out more things to review!  I will survive today!

(I WANT MY JUNIOR MINTS! GIVE ME MY JUNIOR MINTS!!!)

 

 

Scaredy Cat November 2, 2007

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I was trying to work from home today. And then I f*ucked up BIG time. In trying to fix my Leopard (new OS for MAC) I somehow managed to allow my machine to have X11 on it and I can’t execute it.

 This basically means I will be running to the Apply Genius Bar at 1:10 to see if they can fix it.

 

Oh just bite me… Why did I try to fix this?
 

Why my week has been rough October 14, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science, Parenting 101 , 1 comment so far

In bullet form!

 

Smug October 10, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 1 comment so far

Smugness is when one is happy that the telescope’s command load for next week is done on Tuesday. And the a rapid response target of opportunity shows up on Wednesday afternoon that has to be commanded by 11:45pm

Yes, I am going to have to skip my mommy night out a the Melting Pot tonight to review the command load. Sigh.. 

Did you hear that? September 14, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 2 comments

That sound? That was the sound of my ass being kicked by mono. Again.

I thought that I was done with this. I have felt good lately. As in, I can exercise and not need to go to bed before the kids good. But this week has been tough. My science team has been working hard on a plan to turn off a heater on our instrument. A friend of mine mentioned that it was odd to imagine needing heaters in space. Yes, spacecraft often have heaters. Space is damn cold. We have designed a test to turn off the heater to measure the time it takes to cool. We have everything in place. However, a common phrase where I work is "Plan for the unexpected".

This is what I have been doing this week. It started last Thursday. I wrote the engineering requests to run the tests. My boss and I worked out the timings based on the communication times with the spacecraft. Then we submitted the requests and reviewed the spacecraft command load. In addition to this, we spent Friday and Sunday, writing contingency plans. What would we do if…? If the heater failed to come on? If the instrument cooled too quickly? Etc… So most of my week has been spent working on the contingency actions. We realized that we might have to do something fairly drastic and spent a great deal of time discussing this. We worked out three cases of "failure". We debated the difference between an anomaly vs a failure.

Today, my boss and I spent 1 hour discussing with a group of flight managers and mission planners and a flight director the plans. And we worked on it. Hard. We were questioned. We explained everything. We went down the path of "what if…" we didn’t do the drastic thing. And we decided to follow the basic plan that we had decided on.

This saga ended around 1:30. I was able to go and get lunch. This was the third day in a row that I worked through lunch. While I usually don’t do this, I spent this week for the spacecraft. So imagine my surprise when I returned home today to realize my ass was kicked by mono. The symptoms are coming back. The ones that really killed me early on this summer. I have been ordered by Jay to get to bed. 

So, the spacecraft is killing me. Slowly slowly…it is coming to get me!

BAH!

A moment of silence September 13, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : Kids, She Blinded me with Science, Ghost in the (sewing)Machine , 4 comments

Not to memorialize anything. Just that right now, I have a moment of silence. The commanding for our test is approved. If Selene launches on schedule, we will be fine over the weekend.

So I breathe…

I finished the chilly Willy Jammie pants the other night. The waist is 1 inch too high. Depending on my paranoia and perfection, I might rip it out and redo the waist. Or I won’t. Length is perfect. As part of my lessons learned from prototyping the pants for myself, I made a little Chilly Willy tag for the back of the pants. I can’t figure out the front or back of my jammies for lack of a tag. And the way you put them on makes a difference.

I am ready to start on the top. I need to start that tonight. I hope to sew the sides to the back. That’s not asking too much is it? (Asks the woman whose daughter went to bed after 10:30!!!!)

 

Recreational math:

Last night, Jay was at Temple for services, so I put the girls to bed. Luna was first. I asked Soleil to have her snack, brush teeth and read a book or something until I was done with Luna.

When I walked in, I found her hard at work:

2+2=4

4+4=8

3+3=6

10+10=20

12+12=24

1+1=2

8+8=16

 

What’s this? I ask…

"Oh, I’m just doing some math" she replies

"Who taught you these?" I ask, rather surprised

"My brain taught me"

 

An ode to the Moon Goddess September 12, 2007

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The test was set, and commanding was approved
Waiting in space, the heaters shall disable
On earth, the DSN listens for the bird’s chirp.

But the Goddess stirs!
She demands the attentions of the antennae
She laughs at the Earthly weather!
A delay in her flight!

Now we wait in silence.
Will the Lunar Ruler grant us the time?
The time to check our lowly orb in the sky?
Or will she require us to wait
And bow to her needs?

SIGH…
Yes, we are conducting an operational test next week.
We need to check the spacecraft in a real-time communication,but the
schedule may change with the launch of a Japanese/NASA satellite. They
need to have the communications set for her burns to get into the
appropriate orbit around the moon.

And the schedule has already slipped a day due to weather.

May Selene** launch Friday, with no more issues!
This is my request today! Because I will have a hell of a great deal of paperwork to redo if this launch slips and changes the DSN schedule.

 

That is all!

 

**Astronomers, at least Americans, are very superstitious. Even though we know the name of the satellite, we use the former, on-the ground name, until it is in orbit. We did the same with our telescope, Spitzer did it, Hubble did it… It’s just how it works!

 

A little lighter August 8, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : Kids, She Blinded me with Science, Home wreckers , 1 comment so far

Sorry it’s been so heavy around here lately. It is hard to deal with Jimmy’s death still and work is funny right now. We are all still in a daze. I am frustrated that I will miss his funeral. It will be next week while we are on vacation.

Right now, I am a bit frazzled between home life, mommy life and work life, even without the complexity of Jimmy.

Home life: We are at it again! We ripped up the carpet in the living room, hallway and stairs. While we are away next week, we have a crew coming in and refinishing the floors. The carpet had been a Wookie orange color. Lovely, eh? And we kept it in place while our children were still learning to walk and fall down, etc. Now we are finally comfortable that they will not kill themselves walking in the living room without a carpet. So bye bye carpet, hello oak floors! There’s been some prep work needed. Sunday we need to move our couch into the kitchen, but it will all be done soon. That just leaves the master bedroom floor to be redone.

I also planned out Soleil’s closet for Elfa shelves. Now I am just waiting for their end of summer sale. The Container Store generally has two sales, one at the end of summer and one after Christmas. We had the Container Store plan out Soleil’s closet and I removed $131 of equipment (all drawers) for now. Once the sale happens, we will go and get what we need and then install when we are ready. Then she’ll be able to reach her own clothes! What a concept!

Mommy life: The 3s suck. I forget this. Luna has been a fricken fruitcake with nuts. Last night, she screamed for ketchup on her mac and cheese. But apparently, I didn’t put it on right, then I took it off, more sobbing, finally the evening ended with her smooshing the mac and cheese all over the table. Sigh….

Note to self: This will pass. It has to. Otherwise I will lock myself into a small room with padded walls and try to play solitaire til dawn with a deck of 51*.

 Work Life: I have been napping at work. My bosses are encouraging it to help heal the mono. That’s good, right? But I am so damn unproductive. I hate that. I am one of those people who need to constantly be doing something. I don’t care what, but something. I will pace while watching TV. Sad, I know. Right now I have four projects:

 

  1. Boresight angles and bright X-ray sources in C++ code
  2. Reorganizing the webpage of internal notes
  3. Planning and writing the code for a flight software patch (someone else wrote the patch, I need to write the commands to send the patch to the spacecraft and then in a few months we will send it up)
  4. Working on a large change to the observation database that our team requested in December and the software team is just getting to.

That’s a bit on my plate to deal with mono. But I have to get through everything, because this is what we do here!

*With apologies to The Statler Brothers.

 

Mac Developers Toolkit–update June 9, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 3 comments

Okay folks, I am a geek. Can anyone help me? (D- I’m talking to YOU!)
I am having trouble installing the Mac Developer’s Toolkit. I can download the binary, but then what? The About file assumes you have a CD. (unless I am a complete moron and can’t find this on the disk)

Help?
Update- I am a complete moron. I was on the disks that came with my mac. Duh. More on this later!

This is just sad April 25, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 3 comments

Dudes, This is sad. Like really really really sad.

I just went down the the bowels of the observatory and pulled "Textbook on Spherical Astronomy" by W.M. Smart out of the library.

I have to do some Spherical Trig.

The saddest part of all is that I could actually DO this stuff without a book when I was 16. 16!!! Now, at 36, I can’t even remember how to calculate the angle based on a chord….