Category: personal

Hi folks,

it’s a long, long time since my last post. You probably thought I have long abandoned the blog. But, nope, I haven’t. I was just way to busy with my rsyslog open source project. It ate up all my time. So while I made tremendous progress with that project, everything else starved. I couldn’t even visit ESA’s Columbus control center where I had press invitations for. That was really bad…

But now I have reached a some point of my project where there is gradually some time left to look at other things. So I hope to be able to carry on with my blog. I’ll start with updating those pages that really need it. Then I’ll go for new content.

I hope to find some of my readers back :)

Rainer

I wanted to share my experience with Vodafone Germany’s customer service. And, yes, I have to admit I am a bit upset…

The story begun just after Christmas, roughly two weeks ago. I ordered a phone online and the shop said it would take around two business days. With the holiday period, I wasn’t much surprised that nothing happened in 2007, but I had expected a delivery early this year. Well… it took some time, but last Friday a delivery man showed up in the office, of course when I was away. But he couldn’t leave the phone for me, because he was required to collect money for it (that’s fine), but could not find out how much (that sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?). He promised to find out and come back either the same day or this Monday.

Well, of course nobody showed up. Being patient as I am ;), I waited until today before I even wanted to have a casual look what’s going on. The confirmation mail I received after my order contained a web link that should provide status information. Nice. Not so nice is that all I could get out of that page was the fact that the application developer had obviously forgotten to handle some Java exceptions (“javax.servlet.ServletException: Error while looking for EJB” – not exactly what I was looking for…).

OK, software can be buggy, so not a big deal. I called their hotline. Well, I tried to. First thing was that there was no phone number listed at all. Bad. So I resorted to the general Vodafone hotline. The expected happend: I ended up in he wait queue and was served that nice music. But, after roughly three minutes, the unexpected happend: “all of our Agents are still busy, please call us again later” the computer voice said – and quickly hung up the phone. Ummm… not nice. So was I supposed to call back again and start at the beginning of the queue? Looks so (oh man, would I like to have the QUEUE_ENQUE_IN_FRONT setting available to me…). I have to admit that at this point in time I was already a bit annoyed.

I called again. The very same happened. Some time later, I called back again… hangup, too. At this point, I sent a quite angry email to their contact address. I have to admit that it was brief and somewhat impolite and I expressed my expectation that the mail would most probably go to /dev/null immediately. Guess what? I got an auto-responder reply. Of course, a human reply is yet to be seen…

I tried to call the hotline again from time to time, but always I received a hangup after an apparent three-minute timeout (their system seems to be even more impatient than me). So it is obviously impossible to contact Vodafone customer service at all.

Maybe that should staff up their call center – or look for a phone provider who is capable to handle a larger caller queue…

We have some problems with the email server where my mailbox is located on. Right now, I can not receive any mails, but they are queued. So do not wonder if I may respond sluggish ;)

Discovery’s STS-120 mission was a huge success. But remember, I started this blog because I wanted to record my launch viewing trip. Obviously, we are way past launch. Discovery even landed and the remotest reasoning for keeping up a STS-120 blog is now been blown away.

But, hey, this is about space faring: did you never hear about extending successful missions? With new mission objectives? It already happened to this blog, somewhat silently. The original objective was to track everything until launch. But then I said “hey, why not document the mission while it is flown”. And so I did …

All of this was great fun and I am honored to have found some loyal readers. In fact, it is so much fun, I’d like to continue.

I need to shift the focus a bit: From now on, I’ll not just concentrate on shuttle launches (have you seen an Ares article already sneaked in?). Also, I can probably not report as much in-depth as I did for STS-120. That was quite time consuming and I guess I can’t stand that in the long term. But I’ll keep every bit of useful information up, so that future launch viewers can find what they need. Along the same lines, I’ll also do a wrap-up of generally useful launch viewing information which I could not yet convey.

It would also be very pleasing if those of you intending to watch a launch could drop me a few lines after they have done so. Or, of course, anything pre-launch that may be of interest to the rest of us. I’ll gladly appoint you as contributing author for that.

I now hope that you, my valuable readers, like this “mission extension” and keep reading the blog. Feedback is also appreciated, so please don’t be shy ;)

Thanks again for all your support!

Ok, looks like i need to send all these notes when i am back at the hotel. No wireless internet here, can not connect via cell network.

Its 7:45 now and tehere are still a lot of clouds above us. Ksc gets busy now, mire and more folks come in.

I was pointed to this interesting article today:

http://cbs4.com/topstories/topstories_story_219064717.html

According to it, only 40% of the space shuttle launches are on time. Interestingly, the number one reason for delays are technical issues. They are to blame for about half of the launch delays. The weather, which I thought to be number one, is actually the second-most reason. About a third of all launches are delayed due to bad weather.

Sorry to all folks who commented on my blog – I did not react at all. Shame over me. If you take time to provide your ideas, you deserve at least a little bit of reaction.

The problem is that I am an email junkie – I set mail notifications for everything I do. And if I don’t get an email notification, it is almost sure that I forget about it. And when setting up the blog, I forgot to enable email notifications. Guess what happened then…

The good new is that the notifications are now enabled, so I will now reply much more promptly. I enjoy your thoughts and discussions, so keep them coming. Maybe we can even manage to network a couple of folks who want to view this launch. Wouldn’t that be nice? So, if you are in for it – please spread word about my little blog and help get more cool people to read, comment and discuss :)

I just stumbled upon this webcam image which I thought I should share. It shows Discovery in the VAB, roughly two hours ago. Its getting ready to be mated to the external tank and the solid rocket boosters.

Ah, the joys of blogging. When I started this blog a few years ago, I kept it focussed on one topic – and thus had a few other blogs for other topics. Then, these nice labels appeared in blogger. That looked like an ultimate solution to me: just put everything in a single blog and then use the labels (or tags, as others would call them) to generate topic-specific feeds. Now is the the first time that I really did this. And, guess what, it doesn’t seem to work as nicely as I initially thought.

Mixing rsyslog/logging and a field trip to the space shuttle launch causes some confusion. I do not like confusion ;) So I have created another blog for my space shuttle launch viewing trip today.

I hope this will work out. I sincerely think it is in the best interest of all readers. The next days (as time permits, its obviously not a priority task…), I’ll create some useful links to get the different pieces together if you are interested in the big picture. Also, I’ll remove the shuttle posts here and change them to redirects.

As time progresses, things change. This is also true for blogs. When I started this blog, it was all about my STS-120 launch viewing trip. But then I discovered the beauty of blogging and converted it more and more in a general space related blog.

This is where we are right now: This blog is about space and space flight in general. For obvious reasons, it covers space shuttle launch and operations, but I also keep a keen eye on the Constellation program with the Ares launches and Orion crew exploration vehicle. And, of course, the international space station ISS and its helpers (including the European ATV) are also on-topic.

I try to convey news but with my personal point of view. Feedback is highly appreciated and reader stories are posted when I receive them (of course, assuming that they are on-topic).

I hope you have fun reading this blog. Feedback is always welcome.

For completeness, here are previous mission statements:

Up until mid-November 2007:

This is my blog about viewing Space Shuttle launches. I have tried once in Summer 2006 (with no success) and will retry in October of 2007 for the STS-120 mission. I blog about my travel preparations, things that come to my mind and the overall experience. [read more about what’s in this blog]

This blog is about viewing space shuttle launches. To be even more precise, it is about me trying to view a shuttle launch. I hope it will be interesting to you to hear about my fate when trying to actually see it.

I have already tried once, in summer 2006. That time, it was the STS-115 mission, which were endlessly delayed due to a number of issues. But that’s another topic. If I find time, I’ll try to dig out my past travel logs and convert them to blog posts. Will see ;)

But, hey, why read this blog? First of all, you will probably have a good laugh at what I am trying when it gets problematic [and I bet it will] ;) Other than that, you may possibly want to go yourself one day. In that case, you can probably learn a bit out of my experiences(and, yes, I plan to write about the cool things, too ;)). Some may even claim that they somehow feel closer to the launch experience if the read the notes of someone who does.

And, remember: the last shuttle is set to rocket off Kennedy Space Center in 2010 – so if you want to experience a launch, there is not much time left! Better you be prepared.

So – have fun and keep reading. I will possible save this post as a reference and update it from time to time.