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Woke up late. That kind of sucked. I wanted to finish my CV and hand it in today. I don't think I have the time. Found a number of spelling errors when I ported the thing to Word. Felt a little silly. I should get going. My ride should be here in a few minutes. I guess I'll just print off what I have and hope that's good enough. Man, I shouldn't have skipped breakfast..
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Oh.. just thinking about the failure of the Mars Climate Probe.. Thursday I think. During the news report, the reporter mentioned how hard it was to send probes to Mars, seeing that out of the thirty missions that have been flown to the red planet so far, twenty have failed. That's pretty bad considering that our track record with the rest of the planets (including the far away gas giants) is much better than that.
Is it just me, or are the number of NASA failures increasing? Hubble, Galileo, the various recent Mars missions, they keep stacking up. Some have been fixable, like the Hubble and Galileo, but compared to the amazing science produced my the Voyager and Pioneer missions, these fiascoes make NASA look so incapable. Perhaps it's just that these mission problems are being blown out of proportion, perhaps it's karma (must have used it all up on Apollo 13 and Voyager 2) I don't know.
I've been wondering though. After talking with someone about old FORTRAN code, I realized that a number of the scientific programs these days were written long ago by programmers who originally coded on cardboard cards. As time passed and the programs got more complex, these (usually) undocumented programs were glued and shoe stringed together to complete whatever task was at hand. After decades of following this practise, many of the original coders and juryriggers have retired or passed away, leaving their coding legacy to those who would follow in their footsteps, and what big feet they have. Some of these monstrosities are too cumbersome to rewrite, yet the tasks are too complex to write the code from scratch with the time available. A time bomb ticking away? What about the Y2K bug? (As weirDo would say "It's not a bug, since it was done on purpose!")
Perhaps I'm being too cynical, too pessimistic. Maybe I'm completely off the mark, but I would still want to be careful.. anything can happen.
Ah, I forgot. During the lunch on Thursday at the Mongolian Grill, I talked with the cook (the only one at the time) about the meats that they had. She told me that one should cook pork and chicken thoroughly, but beef and lamb did not have to be completely cooked. I knew why chicken and pork was dangerous when not completely cooked, but I wanted to ask her why the beef and lamb were safer. Never got around to asking.
I remembered something that I forgot to mention during my recount of the trip through the prairies. As I was driving the last leg of the drive to Drumheller, my gas foot was getting a little tired, cramped and sleepy. I had complained about it, and MJO asked me why I didn't use cruise control. Good question, why hadn't I? Well, probably because I never used cruise control before, and it never occurred to me to use it.. but on hindsight, it would've made perfect sense. Gee.
Oh, been told about this program called VMW.. VM Ware? I can't remember the name. Anyhoo, it allows you to control your desktop from a web browser like Netscrape off a remote machine. Cool huh?
On the drive off campus, I checked to see the railing they had up at South Campus. weirDo's right, from the front, the railing doesn't seem to follow the wall at all, and they put how much money into this thing?
Noticed that there was still quite a bit of construction near the 8/7/86 junction. They won't be finished for a while, but at least it seems as if things have started to take shape..
The ride back was fairly uneventful. Too bad I gave away all my money before I made it to the bus station. I didn't have any tokens on me either. I think I had a bit over a dollar in change on my person, which was not enough for a ticket onto the subway. I asked the guy in the booth if there was an ATM around, and he told me that there was one inside the station.
"That's not going to help me much."
Fortunately, he let me go into the station, after leaving my blades with him as collateral. So, I got my money (paid the $1.25 Interac fee.. blah) got the tokens, and got into the station.
The RT on the way home was really bumpy, as if there was something on the wheel that rubbed against the brakes, giving the RT a stuttering start and stop. Bad maintenance?
Oh, I got a couple of postcards as well. They were from the states, but were mailed from here! (I did that to Magnifica as well!) That's okay, it's the thought that counts right?
Not much else happened (except put some money into my RRSP's and a GIC - I've got quite a bit less cash now).. I just relaxed..
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