While I hibernated a bit on this blog, things have evolved elsewhere. Thankfully, though, the Carnival of Space has remained. So let me re-start and old tradition today and introduce you to “Lounge of the Lab Lemming: The space carnival has the biggest tent this election” which has a very interesting selection of sites.
Work as a Human Bond
This is from a conversation with a collaborator on rsyslog, after his country was hit by a nature disaster. We went a bit philosophical, and I tried to explain how important I think it is to believe in your work and how I feel about cooperating. Again, that’s a previously unpublished bit that I thought is useful to be found (timestamp changed to original date).
To me, work (including rsyslog) is much more than just “doing something for a living”. Of course, that aspect is involved, I can’t deny that. But to be good at something, one must love what one does. So any work we conduct should ideally match our interests and be something we can be proud of (which also includes failing to deliver good work should make us ashamed and thus trying to fix the situation).
Not everything, even well done, is “good work”. Good work is work that benefits society at large. That doesn’t mean I need to be Einstein – every garbageman also provides a useful service to society (and should be proud in what he does, provided that he does it well). As a side-note, in that sense I do not see that any one work is more valuable than any other: people who try similarly hard to provide good service to society, each one with all the capabilities they have, deserve the same respect, no matter how large their contribution to society is being considered by other people. In fact, a highly educated scholar working on something light-hearted is in my opinion much less respectable than a garbageman who tries his very best in fulfilling his duties.
Having said that, I do not consider work to be something “external” to me. Instead, it is a very important part of my personality. Not the only one, and I don’t try to assign priorities to different parts of my personality so I can’t say if it is the most important one or not – but that doesn’t really matter, I think. In that sense, if you help me succeeding in my work, you also help me succeeding in growing my personality. You help me being more proud of what I am doing because you help making it better, more well-known and, importantly, more valuable o society at large. And I hope that my contribution to your work (e.g. by providing some basis) will have a similar effect for you. What’s more important is that the borders between “my work” and “your work” go away.
So it becomes “our work”, something we jointly work on, and something we are actually being tied together. And, in a sense, part of my personality becomes yours and vice versa. Doesn’t that justify to also care a bit about the person who is behind that shared work? To me, I think so, even though we “know” each other only via electrons traveling a global network…
German IT Blog…
By invitation from Spektrum Verlag, I have recently begun to blog about IT topics for the non-IT literate. After some preliminary work, I just blogged the first entry of real substance on “How do machines compute?“. Unfortunately, this is a German-language blog, so it may not be of real benefit for you (plus, do you really consider yourself IT-illiterate? ;)).
To me, it is an interesting experiment. It took me quite some effort to (try to) phrase things in a very generic way (mostly) without any technical vocabulary. I am now looking forward to the feedback I receive (if any). It will be most interesting to see if I can capture some momentum on this blog. If you understand German, you may want to have a look yourself – and be it only to see if I messed up ;)
being back…
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
Vodafone Customer Service Misery…
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…
problems with the email server
STS-120 was a success – so what now …
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!
Still clouds, no cell coverage
launch “on time” stats
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.
oops … did not notice comments…
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 :)