Chocolate Face

We had some people at the house Saturday night for a little gathering following my eight-year-old son's baptism (I'll have a different post on that soon). It was really quite nice with well-prepared barbecue hamburgers (thanks dad-in-law!), plenty of salad (thanks sister-in-law-in-law!), and, yes, even a chocolate fountain.

My wife and I had purchased a chocolate fountain over a year ago. We like to entertain -- but don't do so as often as we'd like -- and have found that the chocolate fountain is a great treat for everybody. We typically put out marshmallows, sliced bananas, strawberries, pretzels, and pretty much anything handy that is bite-sized.

Now, something to know: Chocolate in a chocolate fountain isn't just chocolate, but a mixture of chocolate and, usually, vegetable oil; so it is doubly-bad for you. Something else to know: Because of the vegetable oil, clothing is easily stained by the chocolate from the chocolate fountain. It seems that anybody who spends much time near the fountain always gets a drop or two on their clothes. Indeed, for our little family, my wife always has to spot the kids' clothes as quickly as she can, before the oil-stain sets.

As expected, the kids didn't show much self-control, and dribbled chocolate in rivers across the counter and on the floor. Towards the end of the evening, my daughter was sitting at the island by the fountain, consuming chocolate-coated banana slices. She occasionally would drop the bananas into the fountain and would try her best to fish them out of the bottom, sometimes with more success than at other times.

One such time she had just dropped one in and I went fishing for it myself. I had just successfully retrieved it when suddenly the top of the fountain popped up, rapidly spinning chocolate in every direction! My poor daughter, being lower than me, took the brunt of it right in the face. One of our guests got chocolate all up and down her arm. I was standing there in my nicest church suit and quickly jumped back, but still got spots on my shirt, my tie, my pants, and my church shoes.

It was a mess. After I reached forward and unplugged the fountain, I just stood there in shock, afraid to move lest I smear chocolate on my clothes even worse than it was. I didn't even notice my daughter's chocolate-covered face until everybody started giggling at her. What was even more funny was that she just sat there, blinking the chocolate away! Somebody suggested we find a camera, and that got everybody moving. My daughter didn't much like the idea of being photographed in her discomfited state, though, and started wiping at her face with her hands, smearing it even more! She got upset when a few pictures were finally taken.

Soon, though, people sprang into action, and twenty minutes later it was mostly cleaned up. My wife took fifteen minutes just trying to wipe the chocolate off of my daughter's face, especially since she had some trouble getting the chocolate away from her eyes. Her clothes were a complete mess, and quickly made it into the washing machine.

My suit, though, is still spotted. As a dry-clean only item, I'm greatly concerned it will never come clean. My wife, thankfully, took quick care of my shirt, but my tie (one of my favorites) will probably never be the same again.

My theory is that my daughter had dropped something into the bottom of the fountain that we never found, and it lifted the rotating cylinder in the middle just enough to spin the chocolate out over the top edge. We're a little nervous about the fountain now, and are afraid of a repeat incident -- especially since we're having people over this Friday! Hmm ... good thing none of our guests read this blog ...

My Little Soccer Star

My daughter had a soccer game first thing this morning. Her maternal grandparents are in town, and I encouraged her to play hard to show them how well she could play. During the game, she was nothing short of awesome! She scored four goals on her own, and passed balls to a teammate who scored goals in two other instances (in soccer they don't have a name for that, but it would be similar to an "assist" in other sports). The other team was pretty much demoralized even before the half time -- we don't keep score at that young age, but the girls all knew that the final score was 9 to 2. She had a wonderful time, and I was quite proud.

This One Reminds Me Of ...

The older kids have the week off of school for their fall break this week. Normally, we take the whole week and go camping or on some other "large" vacation, but this year it wasn't practical (see my earlier and very lengthy post on the test I was involved with last week), so we've been doing things locally that can be done as day-trips.

Yesterday, I took the day off of work and we went over to the Santa Barbara Zoo. It's a very nice little zoo over by the coast that had just enough to keep us entertained for a while, but not too much we had to make a whole day of it. The weather was perfect, the kids were well-behaved, and the animals were good to see, too. The park is small and intimate with the exhibits not too far apart. Unlike the L.A. Zoo, it also isn't built on the hilliest part of town, so there's not a lot of climbing to manage, either. We really enjoyed ourselves.

Anyway, on our way out of the zoo, we decided to stop in the gift shop. My oldest son wandered around and looked at pretty much everything, but kept his hands mostly to himself. My youngest son was happy to be handed a toy school bus to play with, which he rolled around his stroller until we left. My daughter, on the other hand, got into everything. She was asking if we could buy some of the silliest things. She'd pick armfuls of stuff up and walk over to me or her mother and ask if we would buy them for her. Of course we didn't ... on purpose.

My daughter did manage to knock a candle on the floor and break it, so we had to buy that. The guy behind the desk was very kind, and probably would've let us not pay for it, but we wanted the kids to see us taking responsibility. Instead of paying full price for it, though, the guy let us have it for half-off since it was damaged goods ... (But it wasn't damaged until ... yeah, it was a little strange.)

Anyway, my daughter felt awful about it, and owes my wife $4 for the broken candle. She's worked out a deal with my wife to sweep the kitchen every day, several times a day, and not complain about it for the next week. This is a huge deal for us, by the way, as sweeping is the chore she likes to do least. The whole experience was a good lesson for my daughter to learn.

There was one other thing I wanted to write about, too. While my daughter was wandering around grabbing everything in sight, she came across a barrel full of those colorful rocks that tourist traps offer to sell to their customers for the low, low price of $2.95 per little baggy filled. When she was insistent that we buy her some so she could start a rock collection like her older brother, I asked her how the rocks would remind her of her trip to the zoo. This is something we always ask ourselves when buying items from a place like that, which encourages us to buy appropriate keepsakes.

Well, without missing a beat, my daughter picked up a white rock with black spots and said, "This one reminds me of the sheep." She picked up an orange one and said, "This one reminds me of the giraffe." Gray: "This one reminds me of the elephant." That little girl is clever! We still didn't buy the rocks ...

But my wife did buy two colorful lollipops to keep them quiet on the hour-and-a-half drive home. It worked like a charm.

Good TV

So we watched "The Big Bang Theory" again last night. In one of my previous posts, I spoke about how my wife and I are pretty selective about what we watch. This one, I think, is a keeper.

During the opening sequence, my wife and I were just starting a bowl of cake and ice cream. On the show, the four uber-nerds were playing an online game together, attacking some fortress or something (they never showed a computer screen) when one of them collected some kind of powerful sword. He immediately stood up triumphantly with his laptop in hand and said, "I am the sword master!" Then he sat down, transported his "avatar" out of the area where the others were struggling against the enemy, and put his new sword up on ebay for auction.

Within seconds and while the others were lamenting how he had abandoned them during the battle, he said that somebody had already selected the "buy it now" option on ebay, when one of the other uber-nerds stood up triumphantly with his laptop in hand and said, "I am the sword master!"

It was such an absurd and hilarious setup that my wife and I both appreciated greatly. So greatly, in fact, that we both simultaneously choked on a spoonful of ice cream! It took us several minutes to recover. My wife and I are both minor nerds (kind of like a "minor planet" -- remember Pluto anyone?) and this scene resonated with both of us -- she also has a lot of experience on ebay and I've played these sort of silly games online. It was hilarious.

As I said, I think this show's a keeper.

F.H.E.

In our church, it is strongly encouraged that families take Monday evenings to have some family time -- Family Home Evening (FHE). My little family has always struggled with this, especially with little kids, but also because of the fact that my wife used to teach cake decorating that night. When she first started doing it, Monday was the only night that she could teach, so she went for it, hoping that we'd do FHE some other night of the week. Well, it didn't really work out so well because throughout the rest of the week there always seemed to be something else that got in the way. We were hit-and-miss, at best.

Well, a few months ago she had the opportunity to trade nights with her classes -- she now teaches on Thursdays. It was a big adjustment for her since she knew that there really is a lot of other things that happen on Thursdays that she'd have to miss if she moved her class to that night. At the time, it really was a leap of faith that it would work out well.

Tonight, I received positive confirmation that it was most definitely the right thing to do. The prophet has promised that families that have FHE will be closer, happier, and more able to overcome the challenges in the world. It seems this is coming true, even in our new efforts to have FHE regularly.

Each evening isn't exactly a well-planned event. Nevertheless, we do it together -- whatever it is we do. We usually have a lesson, we always sing a song, and we always begin and end it with a prayer. What comes in the middle is sometimes difficult to make happen, but we've been getting better at it with each passing week.

Well, tonight my daughter told me something that hit home. We were talking about the days I'm going to be able to be home with the family this week (they have it off of school), and I told her that I was glad it was Monday. She then said in a sing-song voice, "I like Mondays because of Family Home Eeee-vening. We get to play games, have dessert, and learn about Jeee-sus."

Those are very good reasons, indeed, to like Mondays. I think we may be doing something right ... but -- sshhh!! -- don't tell anybody ...

Conference Weekend

This weekend has been General Conference. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints we have a conference every six months where all the members of the church attend or watch remotely. It is broadcast worldwide in various ways, including via the internet where it can be streamed in realtime. The conference is divided in five sessions, three on Saturday (the last of which being for holders of the "priesthood" -- another topic for another time) and two on Sunday.

During each of these sessions there are talks about various different gospel topics. Leaders in the church are asked to speak for roughly ten to twenty minutes and are not given topics to speak on -- they choose their own topics and usually there is surprisingly little overlap. This time, I can't think of any two talks that were on the same topic.

This time, there were talks on faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, enduring through difficult times, and other like-topics. I was even pleased by talks on the temple, eternal families, and service. I had the chance to go watch the priesthood session last night and took the following notes in my handheld (please ignore the grammar, spelling, etc):

elder perry - high jump story with his son re raising the bar - once you reach the min standard keep raising you own bar to find the limits of your potential - be phsically able, groomed appropriately, learn to study and learn the gospel, read the b.o.m. and teach my gospel, learn abt your emotional limits and how to manage disappointment, develop in-person social skills, get a job to be able to contribute a goodly sum to the cost of the mission, be clean, and remember the spirit is what converts

donald hallstrom 70 - procrastination, don't delay needed change, easy street sign in honolulu also has a dead end sign affixed to it

whitney clayton 70 - david and bathsheba story likened to the a fish trap with bait and with barbs that are easy to swim past on the way in but not easy on the way out, pornography, popularity is not a good judge of what is good and right, ours is a quest for purity

walter gonzalez pres of 70 - lima peru disaster claimed 9 members lives, members went out to help in the darkness, we don't know when or how quakes will come and they may not be earthquakes but rather other forms of adversity, be prepared so the lord can make us equal to the challenges that come, take time to ponder the things of God that He may prepare our minds for tomorrow

pres eyring - just need to read the beginning about pleading for help to be able to do what is asked of you, assurance sometimes comes from memories, good story of a conference, forget yourself and start praying for the people you serve, just go to work and serve as you should, we are to help Heavenlt Father and JC bring eternal life to those you serve, there will always be pain or discomfort in serving - that is the nature of what we do even as it was never easy for the savior

elder monson - a true priesthood holder has vision, makes an effort and perseveres, has faith and virtue (as we think in our hearts so are we), and has prayer woven into our lives

pres hinckley - anger, charles penrose - wrote a song as a missionary on controlling anger and having wisdom 'school thy feelings'?, anger is the mother of a whole brood of evil actions, divorce is often the bitter fruit of anger, we often make a great fuss of matters of inconsequence

You can see there's a lot of good material here -- and this is just from one session! In my opinion, watching conference is one of the most wonderful things that a person can do. It's really hard for the kids to sit through, but they tolerate it well enough.

In our house, we stream it through the wireless internet, then connect my laptop to the television. Then we turn up the volume and try to get the kids to sit still. They're bored out of their noggins, and we aren't usually able to hear every message, but we try.

I can't say I blame the kids for not being too into it, though. I wasn't when I was a kid, either. My parents used to turn on every radio in the house and blast the volume so that the only way we could get away from the talks was to leave the house and go way out into the back yard. This worked, I think, once, until my mom figured it out and refused to let us leave the house.

Funny how times change, though; now that I'm an adult, I quite enjoy it and now I foist the experience on my own kids. Hopefully, if I do my job right as a parent, one day they'll do the same thing to their kids ...

My Daughter's 6th Birthday

My daughter had her 6th birthday yesterday. She was so excited about it that she had trouble going to bed the night before. It was a lot of fun, though, to see her wake up so excited to open her presents, but we had to squash a bit of that enthusiasm because, alas, she had to go to school. We did let her open one present in the morning, however -- a bundle of colorful striped socks that she absolutely loves (she's always liked socks like that).

That morning, my wife and I went shopping while the older kids were at school and ended up spending far too much at Costco, but we got a lot of stuff we've needed. We got home just in time to start an episode of "Stargate", which a friend of ours who owns all the seasons has been lending to us. The kids came home halfway through it, and we thought it would be okay to let them watch a little of it ... more on that in a second.

So we finally did have a chance to open the balance of Megan's gifts. We called both sets of grandparents when she opened the gifts from them, so they could hear her squeal with delight in each case. She got a Tinkerbell pillow and a stuffed dog (in a purse, a la Paris Hilton!) from my parents -- which she absolutely loves -- and the movie High School Musical from my wife's parents -- which she also absolutely loves.

We also gave her the karaoke version of the music to High School Musical -- which my oldest son has actually been using more than anybody the past day, strangely enough -- and a little bit of "Spy Gear". Last weekend, a friend of hers gave her a "Spy Gear" kit that included a motion detector, a little parabolic dish for eavesdropping, and an invisible ink pen. We were actually planning on giving that same thing to her, so Angel took it back and instead got a pair of "night vision" goggles (really just a fancy set of green-tinged glasses with lights mounted on the side), and a funny little device that mounts on the hand with lights on each finger. She loves them!

But that's not all. My wife got her a Wonder Woman costume for her to wear on Halloween. She had a very hard time finding one that was appropriately sized and appropriately modest -- eventually buying one on ebay. My daughter's been wanting to be Wonder Woman for Halloween for months, but funny enough, yesterday she was telling us she wanted to dress up as a spy! Needless to say, we were very firm that she is going to be Wonder Woman for Halloween, and she can't change her mind. She was a little put out by that, but we weren't going to tolerate a change of mind after all the effort that my wife had put into finding the costume.

Anyway, as the evening progressed, the kids needed to go to their respective practices -- my daughter to soccer practice, my son to tennis lessons. I went with my daughter with my younger son in tow and she wasn't exactly focused on what her coach was telling her. She didn't follow instructions very well, nor did she participate as she should have. Today's soccer game will be very interesting knowing that not only is she unfocused but that her coach won't be there.

Afterwards, we all rendezvoused at "Elephant Bar and Grill" restaurant, which is her favorite place to eat out. Since we don't ever have extended family around for birthdays, we've made it a habit of allowing the children to choose what we do for dinner. (My older son, last week, chose to have "breakfast for dinner" -- pancakes and eggs.) She chose her usual -- chicken fingers and fries -- and they also gave the kids an ice cream dessert with their meals. She loved it.

It was a late night, though, since it was a Friday night and the restaurant was very busy when we went to dinner, so by the time we got home, it was bedtime. On the drive home, the kids peppered me with questions about "Stargate", of which they only saw about five minutes, and clearly didn't get "closure" when we didn't finish the episode because it got a little too scary for them. They are absolutely convinced now that there's a stargate buried somewhere that is just waiting for us to discover. Funny kids.

It seemed like a good day for her, though, even though she was really tired and had the occasional fits of disobedience and grumpiness. We tried to work through them well enough, and today she seems quite happy, and I hope she remembers it as a good day.

Neurotic

My oldest son has a horrible habit. He bites his nails -- all of them. Even his toenails! Tonight I walked into his room to put him to bed after giving him some time to read, and found that he had his foot in his mouth! He looked at me, and knew immediately that he was in trouble. It's just horrifying to find him munching on something and then to ask him what it is, only to have him roll his eyes with guilt and admit that it's a finger- or toenail. Ewww.

He's always had some kind of bad habit, though, as long as I can remember. It started with his drooling as a baby -- but who can blame him for that?! Except, he didn't just drool, he drooled. The kid produced so much fluid that he literally would stain his clothes yellow. I'm not even sure where all that fluid came from -- especially since my wife nursed him for a good long time, and she wasn't exactly a shriveled up prune. It was amazing.

Then he moved into his picking-the-lip phase. This was simply awful, as he would cause his own lips to bleed by picking at them so much. He'd stop doing it long enough for his lip to scab over and heal a little bit, but then he'd start right back up again.

Then he moved into the picking-his-nose stage. He still does that fairly regularly, but lately it seems he only does it when he's bored in church as we're sitting near the front where everybody can see him. I swear, everybody's going to know him as "that boy that picks his nose". He also has a tendency to do it while watching TV. It's absolutely aggravating because he doesn't even have anything in his nose to be picking at!

And now we've got the picking/biting-of-the-nails habit. His teacher apparently hasn't really noticed it in class, probably because she keeps him so busy. At home, however, we find he does it pretty much any time he's reading a book. Occasionally he'll do it at tennis lessons when he's not paying attention. We also notice it when he's nervous about being in a new learning environment.

His nails are always bit/picked down to the skin, and even so, he still finds nail at which to pick or bite. There was a time we would have him wear gloves to school -- didn't work. We'd have him wear socks all the time -- didn't work. We tried the nasty tasting nail polish -- it still doesn't work (which is probably how he added the picking part to the biting). It's a miracle he doesn't cause his fingers to bleed. We've even tried bribing him -- offering him a toy of his choosing should he break the habit long enough for us to need to cut his nails. No go. We literally haven't had to cut his nails in several years.

As a young child, I learned to crack my knuckles. It was the cool thing to do that my parents hated, and I still do it on occasion to this day. (To relieve tension! Really!) Perhaps this is just payback, and I should be grateful he doesn't have nervous twitches, outbursts of cursing, or severe flatulence problems.

I just hope he learns to control this habit one day, but if not, I suppose there are worse habits to have.

The Last Three Days

On the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) project, we have a UHF radio that can communicate with landers and rovers on the surface of Mars. On its way to Mars right now is a lander called Phoenix which is headed for the north pole of Mars.

These past few days we've been in the middle of a major training exercise to help the Phoenix project learn how to operate the lander when it gets there. Since the Phoenix spacecraft has no means of communicating directly to Earth, all the information that passes to and from it must pass through one of the orbiters that are at Mars right now. That includes MRO and Mars Odyssey (another spacecraft I worked on when it was first launched back in 2001).

To that end, coordinating which orbiter is talking to which lander (and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are likely to still be alive when Phoenix gets there next May) and when is a complex planning problem. In addition, ensuring that the different UHF radios are going to function as advertised, at the right times, can be a difficult challenge to manage.

For me, I'm in charge of all-things-"relay" on MRO. I am coordinating the MRO activities during this training exercise, which has been time- and attention-consuming. My wife and children have been very understanding, particularly since I've been working every evening for the past three days.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to record the reports from the last three days. This first one is from Monday:

All,

I wanted to provide a report on the status of the ongoing Relay Surface ORT.

Many thanks go out to Bill <> and company for getting the simulation up and running this morning. The testbed engineers were able to synchronize the clocks within the various testbeds in Denver within seconds of each other. MRO's first overflight of PHX got started up at roughly 7:25 this morning Pacific, with a conclusion of the overflight at about 7:50. At the time, there was no telemetry flowing into the JPL MSA due to issues with the query servers; this was later resolved before the next overflight, which got started at roughly 9:20, with the overflight terminating before 9:45. These first two overflights showed successful data flow in both directions, with the forward-link product (a Phoenix command loss timer reset command) successfully transmitted in both cases (at least that's what the telemetry indicates, though we're still awaiting positive confirmation from Phoenix).

On the first overflight, we returned 2102197 bytes of data, which PHX says is about 2/3rds fill frames. On the second overflight, they "burped" (can't we find a different word?!) 108074 bytes of data -- it is unknown at this time how much of this was fill frames. Electra and MCS appear to have functioned nominally in both cases in response to the Relay NIPCs constructed from the inputs provided by PHX.

The ITL is clocking out exactly as expected, and I witnessed the third overflight of the day (182_04) begin execution within 1 second of the expected time just minutes ago. The background sequence is also behaving normally, and data is now flowing everywhere it should.

Earlier in the day, there was trouble with the Electra "mega"-query script, as it was not correctly extracting telemetry. This was resolved later in the day (still not sure how), though I do believe that some updates are expected to be made this evening by Ricardo Mendoza to clean up some other issues with the script. The "scorecard" script functioned as designed, but had some oddities that confused some people on the other projects (it reports first lock time and last lock time, not total time in lock; it also reports all forward-link frames, not just those that contain forward-link data) -- these are expected to be cleaned up, if not before the end of the ORT, then at least before the next one.

There have been issues with the testbed DOM going into the ORT, which appear to have been resolved. It was decided a few weeks ago that flight data would be mirrored to the testbed DOM in order to allow the ground processes the opportunity to be tested in a more flight-like manner while it was processing Electra data. This had the unfortunate side-effect of filling the available space in the testbed DOM to 97% before it was shut off (in less than a week of being turned on! -- that's how much flight data MRO produces in an easy week!). This could have brought the ground system portion of the ORT crashing down, but this morning, with the flight data flow halted and the HiRISE images purged from the testbed DOM, the used space was brought down to 64% (which is currently down to 50% after some more cleanup). In the midst of all this, the first return-link product came back right as expected, being available for PHX to extract from the DOM at 7:51 this morning. However, the second return-link product was delayed significantly until 11:33 am, but PHX didn't even notice, due to their own issues about which I'm not fully informed.

At 1 pm this afternoon, there was a tagup with the other projects where it was learned that PHX had plenty of GDS issues of their own, but they, too, have been working through them. I do not know for sure, but it seems that their tactical timeline was broken today. Odyssey also had a glitch in their testbed, which required them to restart, and they ended up not supporting a "burp" that PHX had planned -- they were not concerned.

In general, the MRO testbed and associated command products have performed (apparently) flawlessly. Robin <> and all those whom she has called today (you know who you are!) have been invaluable in keeping the GDS running today, as well. Everything seems in order at the present time.

The third overflight has now concluded and there was no data in the link (this was unexpected), and the prox-1 product was tossed. This appears to be a PHX problem, and they're working it now.

Before the night is out, there should be one more "burp" and one overflight that PHX isn't expected to respond to. Tomorrow morning, we will have three sessions where MRO will hail, with only the middle one (at ~8 am) being responded to by PHX -- this will be their primary download for the next day's tactical planning cycle.

At 9 am Pacific tomorrow morning, there will a Short-Range Relay Coordination Meeting where we will discuss some of the lessons that were learned in the past few weeks during the planning portion of this ORT. At 1 pm, there will be another tagup, where we should hear the report from the RDE folks regarding how well the overflights from the past day have gone. I will hold a quick status meeting at 3 pm for MRO personnel.

Sometime tomorrow (mid-day?), it is expected that PHX will be providing us with an update to change the parameters for one of the overflights that are scheduled tomorrow evening. This will need to be turned around by MPST into a new Relay NIPC to be loaded to the testbed. This should be the extent of all further commanding required into the MRO testbed through to the completion of the simulated portion of the ORT. I plan to work these personally.

I will provide another status report tomorrow evening. Good night!

-Roy

There's a lot of acronyms in there, with plenty of other stuff that I won't even bother to try to explain. And while it's not strictly rocket science, they pay me well to understand this stuff.

This next one is from yesterday (Tuesday):

All,

This past day has been fairly uneventful. The OTB continues to function well, as does the GDS -- flowing all data where it is expected. The overflights from the past 24 hours looked like the following:

Overnight and this morning:
-- 182_04 - No data was received. This was unexpected and is being investigated by both the Electra team and by PHX.
-- 182_05 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data returned. All went as expected.
-- 182_10 - MRO initiated a hail, but PHX did not respond. This was expected.
-- 182_11 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data returned. All went as expected -- this was PHXs "PM" pass.
-- 182_12 - MRO initiated a hail, but PHX did not respond. This was expected.

The first overflight from tonight looks like:
-- 183_05 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data expected. It clocked out, as expected, and a small prox-1 data product (5096 bytes) was produced.

Other overflights from tonight should look like the following:
-- 183_06 - Nominal overflight with a small roll towards PHX, with a small amount of data expected.
-- 183_07 - Nominal overflight with a large roll towards PHX, with radiometric data collection included.

Last overflights tomorrow morning and afternoon should look like the following:
-- 183_11 - Nominal overflight. It is unknown whether or not PHX will reply to the hail.
-- 183_12 - Nominal overflight. PHX has made a "tactical" change to bump up the return-link data rate to 128.
-- 183_13 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data expected.
-- 184_05 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data expected.

Regarding overflight 183_12, PHX originally was anticipating bumping up the data rate for 183_07 to 128 kbps, but after considering that past testing has shown that 8/128 links with radiometric enabled has had poor success when forwarding command products, it was determined by PHX to keep 183_07 unchanged, and instead to bump up the data rate on the 183_12 overflight to 128 kbps. PHX has an "idiosyncracies" list they are keeping on which this will be recorded. For the record, the time it took to process the updated Request APF into the single Relay NIPC SCMF (and have it on the DOM) was 22 minutes; additional files would no doubt have taken more time, and doing the whole thing on the flight side would have taken less time.

It is anticipated that the 183_07 overflight will include their forward-link command load for tomorrow, and it seems likely they will provide it to MRO just before the DDUT of 9:45 pm Pacific. I will be watching this from home this evening and will ensure it gets to the testbed.

At the 1pm tagup today, the RDE statistics were discussed. The results generated by the updated/corrected "scorecard" script were noticeable in the last overflight recorded. All seemed well. Phoenix will provide positive confirmation that PHX did indeed receive the command loss timer reset commands during each overflight in which we closed a link.

For meetings tomorrow, MURO at 9am Pacific has been cancelled, which leaves only the 1pm Pacific Relay Tagup, where we should hear the report from the RDE folks regarding how well the overflights from the past day have gone.

The simulated portion of this ORT is scheduled to end at simulation time 184T15:00 (which is 2am Pacific Thursday morning), however, MRO's last supported overflight concludes at roughly 7pm Pacific tomorrow evening, with data expected on the "ground" within the hour. I can't think of any reason why it would be necessary to keep the OTB up and running once the data is confirmed received, but we will re-evaluate tomorrow.

-Roy

Things have been going fairly well, but the radio geeks found a glitch in their protocols which could be a big deal ... or not. In any case, the powers that be think that there's good to be derived from stretching the simulation portion of the test through tomorrow mid-day.

The following is what I put out tonight:

All,

It would be nice to say this past day has been uneventful, but some quirks have been encountered in the radio protocols. It seems that when the start time of the relay sessions do not closely match between PHX and MRO, there is an issue where PHX may not be prepared to return data to the MRO radio, and some frame accounting goes badly. I'll let the radio experts try to explain it in better English later.

From last night, the two other unreported overflights looked like the following:
-- 183_06 - Nominal overflight, with a small roll towards PHX, with a small amount of data returned. All went as expected. PHX did not model the roll, but MRO behaved appropriately.
-- 183_07 - Nominal overflight, with a large roll towards PHX, with radiometric data collection included with a large data volume. All went as expected, and a radiometric data product was produced (which PHX has not looked at). PHX did not model the roll, but MRO behaved appropriately.

Overflights from this morning looked like the following:
-- 183_11 - Nominal overflight. PHX did not reply; this was fine.
-- 183_12 - Nominal overflight. Last night, PHX made a "tactical" change to bump up the return-link data rate to 128. This link went badly due to the aforementioned issue.
-- 183_13 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data returned, as expected.

There is only one overflight scheduled for tonight:
-- 184_05 - Nominal overflight, with a small amount of data expected.

Due to the aforementioned issue, during the 1 pm tagup it was decided to continue the simulation into tomorrow to try to test out the startup issues with PHX. Therefore, we expect two more overflights to execute:
-- 184_11 - Nominal overflight, but PHX is not expected to respond.
-- 184_13 - Nominal overflight, with a large amount of data expected.

This afternoon, PHX did provide an updated Request APF (v6) that changed the start time and durations of 184_05 and 184_13 (which also had a rate change). These were processed, for the record, in 15 minutes between the delivery of the Request APF and the completion of the SCMF by the ASP. (Of course, on both of the past two days, I was waiting for it ... so I may be setting a bad precedent ...).

Tomorrow, the last Relay Tagup of the ORT is scheduled for 1 pm. The simulated portion of the test should conclude (really!) at 11 am Pacific tomorrow.

-Roy

So tomorrow is the last day of this training exercise, called a "Operational Readiness Test" or ORT. I can't wait for it to be done ... but then we get the wonderful opportunity to pull together "lessons learned", which will end up with action items, items to be verified, and an enormous amount of paperwork. All in the next months when we get to start this whole thing all over again! Busy, busy.

Movie Review: TMNT

How many of you readers know what that acronym stands for? Anybody? Anybody? Okay, I'll tell you. It means "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Anybody who lived through the '80s probably knows that, except those who were not paying attention to popular childhood culture at the time.

This particular movie is a computer animated film that was reviewed as nothing more than middle-of-the-road. As it turns out, I quite enjoyed it. I put it into our Blockbuster queue, fully expecting that it would show up sometime in 2009, but suddenly it was on it's way, and we were obligated to watch it. (Okay, I was -- my wife wasn't so convinced.) What I found was pretty compelling stuff. Read on.

The fact that the main characters are mutant turtles that walk, talk, and eat a lot of pizza was actually fairly irrelevant. They could have been replaced by any four (or even three, as the case may be) brothers with a penchant for the martial arts. The movie itself was actually quite grown up -- there were only a few flatulence gags and, strangely enough, I thought there were far too few utterances of "cowabunga" and "dude" for the characters being portrayed.

What impressed me most were the themes involved. Portrayed were the concepts of honor (of course, what ninja movie can do without?), brotherly kindness, teamwork, forgiveness, and long-coming penitence. All this was wrapped around fairly grown up dialog, steadily paced through the film in a manner that was quite contrary to what one would expect. The action sequences were very well done, particularly for CGI, and a rooftop scene in the rain where two of the brother-turtles were fighting each other was nothing short of poignant.

All in all, I'll give this a 3 out of 4 stars. I think it's well worth renting once, particularly if you remember the Turtles from your youth and want to take a more grown up stroll down memory lane. All in all, it was even fairly child appropriate -- if you children know anything about the Turtles. We decided not to have our kids spend 2 hours in front of the TV watching characters with whom they have no emotional history.

I wonder what Blockbuster will send us next?!