TGTYIFOP!

Thank Goodness This Year Is Finally Over Post!

A few more hours and we can put this year to bed. A year ago today I was flying to LA to meet up with Slaw & Dana for our trip to New Zealand. I had just quit one job and was scheduled to start another upon my return. Sign-on bonuses are a wonderous thing.

Not much exciting for the next few months as I even had to skip Vegas b/c of work stuff. Then summer and working with an old friend and the start of my final job search. Landed the dream job and 5 days later all hades broke loose in the form of Hurricane Ike. You all know the rest. . or most of it.

Here's hoping next year is a healthy and profitable one for all!

who in the UK keeps texting me?

Can whoever in the UK that keeps texting me, please sign their name! I have no idea - well, yes I do, but would be nice to put a name to these messages.

cheers!

Dinda

just to depress myself further. . .

I spent most of the evening poring over the Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report. Interesting how they very carefully sterilized the report so as to not name any one astronaut, though if you knew the crew it was easy enough to figure out who was who. They also released it at a time when no one from the media or general public would have time to make a big deal out of it.

The section on training caught my eye, b/c that was what I did and my contribution to human spaceflight. And while there was no fault per se in the overall training program, the curriculum was dinged, and rightly so, due t the disconnect between systems training and emergency training. There's a point when you need to forget systems training and trying to 'fix the problem' and just focus on survival and in current training, that point happens much too late. In reality, there is not much the crew can do to save itself once the vehicle launches. Buy me a beer and I tell you all about it sometime.

Bottom line, the crew died as direct result of management negligence. The same basic failure as in Challenger. Management deluded into thinking that just b/c it never happened before it would never happen. I'm kind of glad the whole Shuttle program is being retired and something new will take its place. I just hope the entire management structure gets retired along with the program.