I spent yesterday morning backseating my first sim as an ARD! That’s short for ARD Support Officer, yes, a shortened version that still contains an acronym. This is NASA, after all, king of acronyms. ARD stands for Abort Region Determinator. It’s a tool used to model when the space shuttle passes into regions for the different ascent abort options. The job of the ARD Support Office is to make sure the model is always as accurate as possible. Honestly, it’s a job that we wouldn’t need if the ARD were just programmed better, but it was done in the early days of the shuttle and would cost a ton to update today. I don’t really care either way; I’m just excited to finally be in the training flow for a flight control position!
I’m leaving this afternoon for a couple days at JPL to sit in on the MSL design concept review and hopefully both learn a lot and meet a lot of the people I’ve heard about and worked with. Gavin’s going as well; he’s actually the important once, since he’s done the majority of the work and is presenting something both days. I’m cautiously optimistic about the trip. My biggest problem is myself — I have to admit that I’ve been very cynical and pessimistic about Mars stuff lately, which isn’t really good. Sigh. Why is it that I can recognize when I’m being dumb, and yet find it next to impossible to do anything about it?
I had class again last night, after an unexpected free week thanks to the hurricane madness. (I’ve decided that the whole Rita thing will always be referred to as the “madness” or the “chaos” from now on.) We presented our personal logos, the idea being to create something beautiful and elegant, simple yet complex…blah blah blah insert fluffy artsy words here. Anyway, here’s what I came up with. I did it in something like 10 minutes, and then spent hours trying to figure out some way to make it more complicated or more involved before deciding that I liked it the way it already was. Plus, this way, it’s simple enough that it reproduces well in all sizes, and could be printed in any color. Versatility, people! Like the Nike logo.
Elsewhere, I’m a camera ho and loving it.
And, the funniest line of the day from a Richard Justice article in the paper:
Me: “Would you agree the tombstone sports section turned this season around?”
Brad Ausmus: “It may have been a motivation for some players. It has been brought up quite a bit.”
Me: “What about you?”
Ausmus: “I didn’t really care.”
Me: “I have a Hall of Fame vote. Want to rethink that answer?”
Ausmus: “What are you going to do? Keep me out of the Hall of Fame? I think I’ve done a good job of that all by myself.”