I can’t say enough how hard it is to do what we do. I don’t say that to puff myself up&emdash;”Look at me! My job’s really hard!”&emdash;but more to dispel the notion that what we do is simple and routine. Keith Cowing takes on the premise that commercial, off-the-shelf [COTS] parts can be used in all sorts of spaceflight applications in a solid piece for SpaceRef.

Commercial carabiners are indeed strong, and can be used in rather extreme mountaineering situations where it gets rather cold. In space, however, items used during EVAs can be exposed to temperature extremes that range several hundred degrees above and below freezing in a matter of minutes - depending on whether you are in the sunlit or dark part of an orbit. As such you need to use materials that are designed to function through out these temperature ranges.

The aluminum used in commercial carabiners would likely not be practical in space given that the constant heating and freezing would likely cause deterioration in the structure of the carabiner. Indeed, carabiners used in exceptionally cold climbing frays on Earth can start to behave stiffly. It would also affect the ability of the gate to open and close - specifically the spring mechanism. While there are large carabiners that are easier to use with thick gloves, the gloves used by astronauts are not renowned for their dexterity. Having used carabiners in a variety of rock, ice, and snow situations - with gloves on - I would expect that a standard issue carabiner would be somewhat difficult to use with standard EMU gloves.

According to a NASA source who is very familiar with EVA tools design, when NASA does use off the shelf hardware, the items have to be disassembled and reworked because the majority of materials and the way in which the devices are lubricated will not survive the space environment without freezing up or becoming brittle. Socket wrenches are an example of devices that require some reworking.

We’ve run into that before.

You have to put yourself in this whole other mindest when you’re designing externally-used hardware. “What will the thermal gradient do to this assembly? How do the piece-parts expand and contract? Do we need heater mats to keep us at temperature on the cold side and multi-layer insulation to keep us cool on the warm side? Does this have any moving parts? Will the lubricants work in the thermal and zero-pressure environments?” These are questions that hardware designers have to face every day, and putting up with those requirements is generally our job in manufacturing these parts. Often times, the finishing processes take longer than the actual cutting of metal on the part.

This job is not easy. It is hard, but we do it because it is worth it. Exploration is a part of the human condition. When we do it right, it’s seen as “gee-whiz cool”, usually forgotten in a month or so [longer if it's a manned mission, usually]. When we do it wrong, it’s never forgotten. Ours is the largest stage: all the world.

I’m like Magellan, I’m so gellin’.

Actually, I really am.

I’m disappointed to admit that marketing worked on me … I picked the Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles because I’d seen ‘em advertised, and I hadn’t seen the others.

That makes me a sad, pathetic man.

However, my feet are thanking me.

Have you ever picked out a product over others because it was well-marketed?

It was lots of fun to talk to the D-Man, as always.

To hear the interview, check it out via MP3 [25 min, 17.5MB].

Stop Design talks about the ripple effect:

In grade school, many of us would have loved to see a “95%” scribbled across the top of our test papers or filled into a report card. A number that high could produce a euphoric sensation, confirming just how “good” we were. Better yet, it might have meant a long-awaited trip to Chuck E. Cheese, where numbers that high would produce the maximum amount of grade-based reward tokens.

But in grown-up society, 95% is not good enough. Getting grouped into the 95th percentile is not good enough to open the doors of some of the best schools, even for an ambitious student. 95% percent correct means nothing in the business world, where a 5% error in reporting can land a business in court, or send it into bankruptcy. IT professionals would scoff at a server that boasted 95% uptime. When a doctor tells us there’s a 95% success rate for this procedure, we immediately begin to worry about the remaining 5% of cases. A 5% delta in course could result in a New York-bound passenger jet landing in Miami.

So we’ve been conditioned to think 95% good is unacceptable. And we seek out the remaining 5%, drawing as much attention to it as we can.

Same with NASA, which has a 98% success rate with STS.

Of course, that 2% failure rate means that over a dozen lives have been lost on Challenger and Columbia.

The original flaws in any product are continually magnified by a small portion of its most vocal critics. The criticism ripples outward, causing more people to join the fray, until it seems the entire product is flawed. This deception might disappear if only the critics would be silent long enough to let the ripples die out. Is it really that flawed?

We live in an imperfect world, and we produce imperfect things. Every thing and every person can use improvement somehow, somewhere. But let us not forget so many of the things which are good, lest we also forget to thank those responsible for the good.

Amen.

I pretty successfully made Carla’s new site look like her old site. There are some differences, sure, but it’s a transliteration, not a transposition.

I have David’s left to do.

[That ignores a need to get the Blogger importer figured out.]

The “worst” change I had to make with the transliteration was going into the display function and hacking the function to grab the links. I don’t think that the menu that WP generates is a nested, unordered list; I view it as a floating div with headings and unordered lists grouped under those headings. As a result, I needed to go in and hack the links function a little, but a little php-fu never hurt anyone. Plus, it gave me an excuse to stare at the function for a while.

With that done, I’m off to bed. Long week.

I reckon I’m going to have to go back to being a hyper-organized, anal-retentive engineer who scores points on his co-workers when they haven’t done their jobs. Trying to be the nice, laid-back guy who takes everyone at their word and lets them handle the details just isn’t getting parts through the shop like it should.

When I was cleaning out my office the other day, I realized that I used to be extremely organized. I think part of it was the fact that I used to not have a terribly large amount of stuff to do, so I would be really organized and have the answer at my fingertips just whenever.

The last year or so, I’ve really gotten away from that, writing notes on scraps of paper and discarding them when I’d gotten the task accomplished. I’m still very much anal-retentive about how my email’s sorted, but that’s been about it. As my job responsibilities have increased, I have been lazy and not kept up with the paperwork like I used to do, because it seemed to not be very efficient.

That changes this weekend. Unless I have to leave town [which I'm sure everyone would prefer not happen, right, Dad? :D], I’ll come up here on Saturday morning and wear the printer out, printing stuff to go in folders for each of the programs I’m working on these days: task orders, revisions, emails, schedules, parts status, etc. I want to have a plethora of information at my fingertips so I can ask pointed questions on the spot and be incisive.

I hate having to do that, and I’m sure that I’ll try to do it with the same aw-shucks manner that has me generally liked around here [I could write a whole other entry on that subject], but … dammit, I’m tired of cleaning up other people’s shit.

Glove save, and a beauty.

I was worried, but we’re stayin’ alive.

Thank you, God. [Yes, I've actually prayed about that a couple times ... the alternatives included UAH possibly dropping to club, which would wreck a bunch of kids' college plans majorly.]

Conflatulations!

I’m proud of you, Amy.

I realized the last time I saw Amy&emdash;over at Casa de Granades a week ago&emdash;that I hadn’t hugged her in, well, forever. She was seated at Misty’s chair in the office while Stephen and Jeff worked on computers, so I just walked over and gave her a hug. I think I caught a slightly-surprised look on her face, but damn … I just don’t hug my friends enough.

Yeah, I owe all you punks I know a hug.

Even Todd.

Andrew Thomas is exactly right:

Read: “We wanted to release this to piggyback on the media hype surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but we don’t want you to think we did.”

Feh.

Well, for the third time in two weeks, we’ve had the water shut off by our apartment complex to have repairs on it.

This follows coming home about three weeks ago and having zero water pressure at all.

These things didn’t happen when I lived here before; if they did, I’ve forgotten.

But man, let me tell you, not having running water is a modern inconvenience that’ll frustrate the piss out of you … especially, well, when you need to … yeah.

We’ve got water again now … I just heard the water heater fill up with the return of pressure.

Via David the “ruminator”, a meme:

Bold = been to
Italics = lived in

1) Alabama, 2) Alaska, 3) Arizona, 4) Arkansas, 5) California, 6) Colorado, 7) Connecticut, Delaware, 9) Florida, 10) Georgia, 11) Hawaii, 12) Idaho, 13) Illinois, 14) Indiana, 15) Iowa, 16) Kansas, 17) Kentucky, 18) Louisiana, 19) Maine, 20) Maryland, 21) Massachusetts, 22) Michigan, 23) Minnesota, 24) Mississippi, 25) Missouri, 26) Montana, 27) Nebraska, 28) Nevada, 29) New Hampshire, 30) New Jersey, 31) New Mexico, 32) New York, 33) North Carolina, 34) North Dakota, 35) Ohio, 36) Oklahoma, 37) Oregon, 38) Pennsylvania, 39) Rhode Island, 40) South Carolina, 41) South Dakota, 42) Tennessee, 43) Texas, 44) Utah, 45) Vermont, 46) Virginia, 47) Washington, 48) West Virginia, 49) Wisconsin, 50) Wyoming, and 51) Washington, DC.

Nearly all of those visits come from one of five trip types:

1. Family vacations to Yellowstone and D.C., which took us to see old colleagues of Dad’s along the way.
2. Hockey trips last year.
3. My work trip to Jersey.
4. The United States Air Force moving us.
5. Trips to visit family.

I’m hard-pressed to think of any state outside of Florida [three notable trips: missions to Tampa, a Shuttle flight senior year at MSMS, and a Disneyworld trip when I was a wee tyke] that doesn’t fit in the above.

I need to go out west and up into the Northeast.

Found: A Critical Examination of Calvinism. I’m posting this so I’ll take the time to look at it later.

I dearly love my Calvinist brethren, but I can’t believe that they believe that God deems some to go to Hell.

It’s funny how things get started sometimes, but WordPress is now a few days past it’s first birthday.

From humble beginnings to 1.0.1 in exactly a year. Congratulations to the dev team.

My guy Mike Escutia lives in New Hampshire, so he decided he’d cover Primary Day in New Hampshire from his own perspective.

It’s a good read, and I’m sure he’d take Q&A for any of you who are interested.

This kind of stuff doesn’t happen where I’ve lived; in fact, the only place I’ve seen many campaign commercials is Ohio. Considering that ‘84 was a Reagan rout and ‘88 a Bush pere rout, I’ve not seen a good fracas up close and personal.

Le sigh.

Alex King is sponsoring a CSS competition for WordPress.

Last week, I released a CSS Style Switcher hack that lets visitors easily change the look of the standard WordPress install by swapping out the CSS stylesheet. This is a great first step, but it would be even better if there were a number of different styles out there for people to use.

To this end, I’m sponsoring a CSS Style Competition for WordPress. Please blog about this to help spread the word.

I tossed my hat in, not to win the competition, but to fund it. I don’t want kudos for that; I just want to sweeten the pot so good designs come from it.

Rules:

1. Your design must be an original work and you must release it under the GPL license (you retain copyright).
2. You can enter as many different designs as you want.
3. Your design must be for the default WordPress 1.0.1 template.
4. The styling should be done using cross-platform CSS techniques and can include images, etc. following the structure used for my CSS Style Switcher hack.
5. Designs I deem to be offensive will not be included.
6. You must submit your entry by 11:59pm PST, Friday February 6, 2004.
7. Winners will be announced on Monday, February 9, 2004.

Throw your hat in the ring!

Well, but you see, I was supposed to move offices today.

I’d gotten it down to just moving my computer and a dozen or so boxes. [Quite unlike my last personal move. Oi.]

But no … “Tuesday” meant next Tuesday, not today. Neither Ed nor I knew that, though, so we’ve busted ass the last day and a half packing.

Oh well … we’re mostly packed now.

Dennis Wingo boldly says that we can achieve Bush’s goals of going to the moon and Mars on a budget. I was laughing at him until I got here:

For this process to work some legal method of working outside of the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and the NASA/contractor process and culture must be considered. The FAR and NASA processes are designed to monitor, control and cost the system developed by the aerospace industrial complex and the government over several decades. The FAR’s are completely inadequate to the task of producing the lowest cost, highest reliability, and fastest implementation for the Bush plan or any other plan for that matter.

No kidding, jack.

We’ve been doing “rapid response” hardware development and manufacturing the last three years, or as I called it when to a former colleague last night, “rapid response hardware hell”. But even our turns on some of these manufacturing jobs [four-to-six months], would get laughter from folks in the commercial world. In fact, I get lots of laughter from my friends, many of whom work commercial contracts in the telecom hardware world.

:sigh:

My boy Adam Omelianchuk got an article about generational identity crisis in the American church published in RELEVANT Magazine’s online edition.

An excerpt:

One might be able to scoff at the effort of a complete and final “system” of the Bible’s truth, but we must remember that this was (and still is) the way that modern Christians sought to listen to God. Whether or not this project succeeded or failed is irrelevant, but one thing it did prove is that Christians are, as Stanley J. Grenz would say, “a people of the book.” If we are to listen to God at all, we must listen to the message of Scripture. It’s as if we are like Charlton Heston of the NRA, raising a rifle above his head saying, “From my cold, dead hands!” So we are with the Bible.

Amen, and conflatulations, Adam!

Going undercover to sell cars … a heck of an idea.

I’d love to have Sean’s reactions on this.

My computer’s been acting a little wonky of late, and I realized that I hadn’t ever run Windows Update on this machine here at work. Surprise, surprise … there are a ton of patches it needs.

Why our IT people don’t put these patches on their cloning CD’s, I don’t know.

I’m happy to say that I’m running WordPress v1.0.1. It’s got bugfixes that people found in the 1.0 release. I’ve been running a nightly for the last few weeks, thanks to the suggestion of Alex King. If you’ve been squeamish about going to v1.0 because of problems others have had, make the leap now.

Now, what I want to know is, “When will I remember to make a copy of index.php before upgrading?” Thankfully, after realizing that I’d fouled it, I did a View Source on a cached copy, which allowed me to get back running in five minutes.

It’s above 50F right now here in Huntsville, and it’ll get up to 65F today.

It’s raining somethin’ serious, too.

This is not winter.

I am not amused.

Last night, I gathered together with a bunch of guy friends [most of whom are married] to get together, play shoot-’em-up video games, eat pizza, have a few drinks, and generally relive college years.

One of the many things we did was to play NHL 2004 in multiplayer mode. Sean and Rick both joined in the game, which was fun. We played cooperatively, which was hard for all of us, including me, someone who’s played a lot of NHL 2004.

I was impressed with the way not locking a controller into a position allowed you to rotate through the many positions. If we regularly did this, we’d probably get to the point where we specialized in a position and locked ourselves in to that spot on the ice, but when you do that, you also have to consciously skate over for shift changes and such. That would be odd.

It’s too bad that you can’t have six controllers for a PS2, or I’d really be tempted to give that a whirl.

I am very happy to be listening to an advance copy of Andrew Osenga’s Souvenirs and Postcards.

It’s quiet, acoustic, and melodic. There are strong influences of Springsteen and Dylan.

I like it, Andy. Thanks for sharing, and I can’t wait to have a production disc with your smiling mug on it.