ellarien | Entries tagged with work

No, there's really not much point in sitting here at stupid a.m. waiting for the poor neglected daemons of the old and mostly superseded data system to serve me up the data with which I am not really awake enough to deal at the moment. (You know the old saw about the problem with standards?)

Shiny new embargoed data is getting unveiled in a NASA press conference at 2.15pm EDT on Wednesday, which is not actually tomorrow any more except possibly in Hawaii. It would be nice to be somewhat awake to enjoy that.

Current Mood: awake

Embargoed data: still shiny, though possibly upside down and/or back to front.
Sun; mostly blank but not entirely inactive.
Mt. Wilson; the 150ft tower is finally doing something other than hold up the webcam, at least when it isn't snowing.
FITS headers: still annoying.
Weather; still warm, but maybe cooler tomorrow. (See also: snow on Mt. Wilson.)
Allergies; still bad.
Downstairs neighbor: snoring.
New dress that came in the mail today; extremely blue; fits, but needs ironing. In fact, I should probably wash it and then iron it ...

Current Mood: busy

If I'd remembered that banana bread needs nearly an hour in the oven, I might have started on it earlier than 9pm. It's been a while since I did any baking, but this is something of a special occasion. Weather permitting, around 10.26 ET tomorrow, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is due to be launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard an Atlas rocket. There's a better than even chance it'll end up slipping another day, but still. We've been waiting for this for years, so one more day doesn't make much difference. We're planning a small breakfast gathering in the conference room, with NASA TV streaming on the big screen, and I seem to have elected myself to bring goodies. If the launch does slip, I may have to do it again tomorrow, in which case I'll have to stop off for more eggs and sugar on the way home.

Current Mood: hopeful

I love tiger eye, but it's hard to photograph under artificial light.

In other news, the office and campus are still quiet, and the solar cycle is still longer than it used to be.

It was a quiet day in the office today --- except for the fan noise from my workstation, which is stuck on the desk after the floor-cleaning until I can persuade someone to lift it down for me. Also, most of the building reeks of cleaning fluid. I spent most of my time holed up in the furthest downstairs corner of the library, which happens to have a nice table complete with power outlets and internet, working on the laptop.

I seem to have survived my first day at the AGU, including giving the invited talk which was the main reason I'm here in the first place.

So the question may be, has the Sun actually been behaving oddly since the turn of the millennium, or is it just that the Space Age and the start of modern observations coincided with a period of unusually high activity which is now reverting to normal? (As soon as we figure out what normal is anyway.) This reminds me rather of the theory I've heard somewhere, that the American West was colonized during an abnormally wet period that set up unrealistic expectations for how much water would be available long-term.

I spent the lunch break wandering around the Yerba Buena gardens, a quiet little oasis of grass and trees and water in the midst of a precipitous concrete-and-glass desert. It was disconcerting to see magnolia and azalea flowers in December; mind you, they did look rather as though they were regretting it. It wasn't very warm, and afterwards the only time I felt warm enough to take off my jacket all afternoon was when I had just had a cup of hot coffee. (I was very relieved that there was hot coffee; the AGU has a habit of serving only beer (and maybe soda) for the afternoon breaks.)

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: San Francisco, CA

My workstation at work had been making more annoying noise than usual lately: I thought it was just dust in the fan, but the computer guy thought hard drive bearings. He was right; in fact, when he broke it down it turned out that the internal RAID had lost or was in the process of losing two out of six segments. Fortunately one of them was the empty hot spare, so I haven't lost any data, but that was a closer call than I like.

There was a roadrunner scurrying around in the bushes outside the office window this afternoon, which was unexpected; the university corridor is usually thought to be too urban for them, and this isn't exactly a quiet week on campus. I didn't manage to get the camera out in time, sadly.

My application for the free upgrade to Windows 7 for the new laptop has been approved. I ordered the cheap upgrade for the desktop when it was offered, too, so by November I should be a Vista-free household again.

Edit: AAARGH!

New laptop downloaded updates, wanted to reboot. Fell over. Fell over again. In safe mode now -- and me without a clue what to do next, if CHKDSK doesn't help. Not what I wanted to do this evening ...

Current Mood: okay

( Monday )

Current Mood: cold
Current Location: Birmingham, England

I wrote 1230 words today, in about two hours; this is quite fast by my recent standards, but it was a the kind of scene that pretty much wrote itself -- and presented me with a twist I hadn't thought of before.

The Editing Project of Doom has come back to haunt me yet again, this time in the form of proofs. At least they don't expect actual proofreaders' marks from me! It doesn't actually look particularly doom-laden, apart from a couple of figures that were converted to color in a hurry and seem to have lost their outlines.

It was a lovely day today, sunny and warm; the pear trees are starting to bloom, a little timidly, and it wasn't (quite) dark when I got home at about 6.45. (Silly buses. It would be nice if they weren't usually about fifteen minutes late every evening.)

Current Mood: busy

The replacement fan came today, and when I got back from lunch the workstation was snorfling away in its corner as usual. As workstations with ambitions to be servers go, it's relatively quiet, but only relatively.

Have I mentioned this month that I find white noise rather the reverse of soothing? This seems to be particularly true when I'm low on sleep, which I am, currently. The new-year determination to keep more sensible hours is mostly manifesting, so far, in my getting up somewhere between half an hour and an hour earlier than usual, but without any noticeable increase in efficiency, or earlier bedtimes to compensate. I may have to stop going online at breakfast-time; back in the old days before broadband, I used to be able to get through my morning routine in thirty-five minutes flat, but that tended to involve eating my cereal standing up and drinking coffee as I got dressed. I don't know if I can do that any more, but I should probably try.

Current Mood: tired

The issue with the workstation seems to be a dead fan on one of the CPUs. (I can't help feeling that there's something quaint about having two physically separate, single-core chips, these days, but even at three years old the beast is fast enough for most of my purposes.) The manufacturer is kindly sending us a couple of free replacements, even though the box is a few months out of warranty, and I should be up and running again by Thursday. This is a considerable relief; I don't mind worrying about and futzing with my personal machines, but I like the work desktop to be dependable.

Current Mood: relieved

Last weekend was not a good one for me, technologically. For a start, the home desktop is mysteriously not keeping good time, which caused me (having grown accustomed to trusting the computer clock more than the wall-clock above it) to have to rush for the bus on Saturday afternoon; then I got to work and found that the desktop there, (a heavy-duty Linux PC with a terabyte of raid disk, 4Gb of RAM and two 3GHz processorts, three years old but hitherto almost entirely problem-free), had frozen and wouldn't reboot; and then the PDA had somehow gotten configured to alarm silently, so I was late getting up on Sunday morning.

This morning the work desktop booted for the technical guru as if butter wouldn't melt in its floppy drive. Then it fell over again in the late afternoon, booted up under the eye of a different technical person, fell over again five minutes later and took three goes to boot for me ... we have no clue, but I suspect it's a hardware issue rather than software. And then it was time to come home. (And of course the home desktop was still hooked up to the hub after last night's backup, and wouldn't boot under those conditions, but that's a minor issue I know how to deal with.)

Current Mood: frustrated

Dragonhaven by

robinmckinley (Yes, really!) and Empire of Ivory by

naominovik both arrived today.

In other news, not much is happening here. The proceedings-editing is still eating my brain, and my relationship with Diamond (the new desktop) continues somewhat rocky, though we're slowly coming to an understanding (which seems to involve my accepting that it's about as stable as its Win98 predecessor was at age three) and the new wireless antenna helps a lot. The monsoon is finally gone, and we're enjoying sub-90-degree temperatures and only moderate humidity. It's cool enough in the mornings now that I'm starting to get antsy about that new furnace I was promised, though I probably won't need it for at least a month, and it goes dark early enough that I have to bring work home in order to get in before nightfall.

And I'm hooked on Freecell again, for the first time in years.

Also, I think I need another pair of glasses. I seem to spend all my time looking over the top of the ones I have whenever I want to see anything small, these days; I don't think it was this bad when they were new, even though that was less than a year ago.

[Poll #1057584]

Current Mood: curious

I'm not living entirely in memories of my vacation, really. It's just that my current life consists almost entirely of fascinating conundrums to do with the three-author rule[*] in journal citations, against a background of hot sticky weather, would-be fratkids running around campus, and occasional barrel cactus flowers.

( [*] )

Current Mood: headachy

I made a note today: Running authors need to be fixed.

(It's amazing how many different ways intelligent people can manage not to comply with fairly explicit instructions.)

Current Mood: cryptic

Ambassador has reached 18,282 words.

On the other hand, after successfully writing a IDL program to create a LaTeX author index from a text file exported from an Access query and a bunch of LaTeX files (which were themselves generated from text files using another IDL program), I then broke it again trying to deal with Spanish accent codes. The Spanish names (double and triple-barrelled, and scattered with accents) give me more trouble than all the rest put together.

Hah. Firefox apparently recognizes the correct spelling/capitalization of LaTeX. Perhaps, given its open-source origins, I shouldn't be surprised. (Word doesn't, also unsurprisingly.)

Current Mood: tired

( Monday -- includes pictures )
( Tuesday )

Today I scanned my passport, filled in an application form, and walked about a mile in 106-degree heat to FedEx Kinko's to get a bad photo taken and send off for my Chinese visa, then walked back to the office. (On the way back, a young lout on a bike came up behind me and snarled, which was a bit disconcerting.) I also lectured to the summer students, bought a copy of Black Powder War to replace the one presumed lost in New Mexico, and did some work for the meeting after next.

We're down to the hardest bit of summer, the brutal heat and barely-double-digit humidity that drives most of the casual population out of town. In a few more weeks, if all goes to schedule (which it doesn't always, and didn't last year) we'll start seeing the clouds building up thunder-pillars in the afternoon, and eventually the monsoons will arrive with a shattering thunderstorm and a brief respite from the heat.

Current Mood: accomplished

An 'Ocean in View' nickel.

The last Amazon shipment of the year, including Worldwired, the new Enya CD, and Season 1 of Stargate:Atlantis.

A double-digit number of views for my latest photo on Flickr.
(

)

A formal invitation to speak at a meeting I'm going to anyway.

And ... ( wait for it ... )

Current Mood: excited

Intersection Logs

Flowers, beads, words, and other shiny things

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Surfacing, briefly

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Monday

Random afternoon

Brrr!

Monday

Fixed

Mystery solved?

Overdependence on technology

I can has dragons!

Editing question

Editorial Headaches

(no subject)

Some Progress

China, day 3,4 : The meeting

Monday

Good things that have come my way today

Mission Statement

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