Well, I just got home from finishing up work yesterday in Cedar Rapids. It's nice to be back in Minnesota (fun to see the dog at least) and was fun to stop through Ames, IA and see some friends. I just wanted to share a letter I recently wrote to the NASA public affairs heads at NASA Kennedy and NASA Johnson. If you feel like me about their rejection of SpaceVidcast (in SVC's bid to get media credentials), I encourage you to write a letter or give them a call too. Their contact info is here.
Well, it had to end sometime. I'm talking about my current co-op experience that I've been doing since May '09. I'm starting to prepare to leave after this next week but for some reason I of course feel as busy as ever. I've had lots of questions of "are you busy?" from engineers I've worked with before during the week this week and I've had to tell most that "Yes" I am busy working on this:
Yeah, see the huge bunch of pages in the binder? That's the last few months of my life also known as 500+ pages of what amounts to a kind of how-to guide of every little function of the Flight2 system that my group at Rockwell is selling to our current (and future) customers. I have been tediously rewriting and revising the whole thing because a huge amount of the control functionality for the system got switched a bit. I did make some nice accomplishments with it (finished or not) like slimming the document from 100+ MB to only 30+ MB and making it look really nice.
I went to the bar (3rd Base [url might not work]) tonight for a bit of a going-away party for myself and Mark Zerr, my one-time mentor and boss (for a program). It was pretty fun to talk about both work and other topics with a bunch of Rockwell people I know well and some I don't as well as both my current and hiring managers (one on each side of me) and my manager's manager who has been around Rockwell since the dawn of time I would guess. Very interesting discussion that lasted for around 4 hours, ending in tons of praise for me by a no-longer-sober Mark (which I was very thankful for). I found out that unbeknownst to me, Mark has just moved from being a lowly (though very smart) engineer to being a manager and he's working under my old manager, Cale, who is now a higher level manager. I guess now I just have to become a full systems engineer and that will finish off the move-up cycle.
Well, time to get some sleep before another fun LEGO League tournament here in Cedar Rapids tomorrow. Soon I'll be moving back to Ames and MN, so I may make more posts then. Happy Holidays to all!
Well, I've been lacking in posting lately mostly because I have been super-busy basically rewriting the documentation for the Flight2 System. It's pretty fun, but a lot of work. If you'll notice (looking closely) in the picture there, they have the new CDU in that picture (the 2 boxes with green text just above the engine throttles) but they don't show that it has a color screen and they also don't mention that the documentation for it isn't quite yet written! Anyhow, it keeps me busy with lots of work.
First point of the day is one that I make often: I am unimpressed with Iowan drivers. As I was driving to and from home last weekend, I was driving up in the rain with a fairly dark sky and saw a ton of cars that didn't even have their headlights on on the freeway! Come on people! Just about had someone run me off the road yesterday because they decided to pull out of the center turn lane and back into traffic as I was finishing moving into that lane (don't want to scratch my pretty car!). It just seems like constant problems not to mention the fact that they don't even have to do parallel parking to get a license (T-parking I'm not sure about). Anyhow, please get better at driving Iowans!
I was very impressed with Obama's speech tonight about Afghanistan. He said a lot of good things and while I thought that the 18 month deadline for getting troops into Afghanistan and out is a bit short, deadlines are good and hopefully it will make the army work harder to get the job done. Gotta love those little jabs at the Bush administration that he lays into speeches, though you usually have to read between the lines a bit. If you missed the speech, listen to a bit here:
I also recently have been toying with Google Wave. It's pretty neat and the ability to make edits to conversations and add images and documents is cool, but even cooler are the extensions and bots. I got one recently that records and transcribes a phone call into the wave for you (from a MIT guy), very cool. Hopefully we can put it to work for Kaleidoquiz. Hope everyone reading had a good Thanksgiving and was able to visit with family and friends, now I'm off to eat some post-Thanksgiving pie. Cheers!
