Spirit Sol 1097

Ugh. I'm sorry, but getting here at 07:30 is just brutal. It puts me in a bad mood.

And I'm not the only one. Ray Arvidson is in a bad mood, too. He's often kinda grumpy, but today he's particularly grumpy, snapping at engineers and fellow scientists alike. When there's some hesitation at the SOWG meeting about picking a name for thisol's IDD targets, he half-snaps, half-whines, "Just pick a name, folks, so we can move on."

Later, I propose offline that we should use a new target namespace -- the names of different kinds of bugs. Ants, grasshoppers, crickets, etc. And the goal would be to guess which kind of bug crawled up Ray's butt today.[1]

For our relatively simple two-sol IDD work today, Khaled -- shadowing, and so in the seat as RP-1 -- decides to use one of the new R9.2 software features, AutoPlace. This lets the IDD FSW itself figure out how to put the IDD on a target, so we have to do less work. The mode Khaled's using it in is a kind of hybrid mode called "manual autoplace."

"Is that anything like jumbo shrimp?" I ask him. But not in a grumpy way.

[Next post: sol 1101, February 7.]

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Footnotes:

[1] I feel the need to be painfully clear about this, though: Ray is a great, great guy. On this particular day he was pretty grouchy and I wanted to make a joke about it -- maybe in part because I was pretty grouchy myself. But I can hold any one data point like that up to hundreds of others showing Ray in a terrific light. He's a great guy.