Mane

  [Alkuun/Homepage]   [ the index ] [ Comment by email ] March Thursday, 2005-03-30 Strange day Today did not start well. I was somehow so stressed, and afraid of something, that I could not sleep more than 45 minutes without waking up. Terrible, I was just devastated in the morning, and I have to confess that I shed a tear for my lowly existence. But then, after wise advice and comforting words from   S , things started to get better. First of all, I tried to reach professor emeritus   Kerrobrock , but he had disappeared. So, I decided that I have next to nothing to lose, and called   John Houbolt . He is the man, who most the most vocal advocate of Lunar orbit rendezvous. He agreed to answer our questions by email. We all are so proud and happy. This is a privilege. Tomorrow, on Friday, we (me , Bill, and Ben) will go and interview   Robert C Seamans , who was the Associate Administrator of NASA during the LOR-decision. Quite a privelege, too....

Strange day Today did not start well. I was somehow so stressed, and afraid of something, that I could not sleep more than 45 minutes without waking up. Terrible, I was just devastated in the morning, and I have to confess that I shed a tear for my lowly existence. But then, after wise advice and comforting words from S , things started to get better. First of all, I tried to reach professor emeritus Kerrobrock , but he had disappeared. So, I decided that I have next to nothing to lose, and called John Houbolt . He is the man, who most the most vocal advocate of Lunar orbit rendezvous. He agreed to answer our questions by email. We all are so proud and happy. This is a privilege. Tomorrow, on Friday, we (me , Bill, and Ben) will go and interview Robert C Seamans , who was the Associate Administrator of NASA during the LOR-decision. Quite a privelege, too. No wonder I had some stress, I would say. I gave the our team's presentation in the Product development class. I decided to...

I may have to cut down the amount of blogging. I have taken so many courses, and most of them are now nearing their final project, that I am a bit unsure how I will cope with all of them. Anyway, I try to write something a few times a week. After all, I need to keep record what is happening. But I have to exercise the utmost care with my time management during the coming 7 weeks. A short time, but lot of things to do. The trick is to be able to sleep enough. Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs March 2005".

Group work I have written about group work earlier, so bear with me. I just cannot help wondering how much different groups differ from each other: in some groups things are easy, results come without any real effort, and everyone has real fun. Some other groups are the opposite: the amount of results is less than individual work would accomplish, work is not fun, and everyone just suffers. I do not know what causes it, but I know that the following are some of the necessary conditions for a group being better than doing things alone. 1. People have more or less similar speed of thinking. 2. People can trust each other to do what they promise and if something is not OK, to tell it openly and in time. 3. Everyone is able to understand some common language, and understand without excessive repetitions. 4. There are no secret subgroups reversing common decisions. 5. People communicate with each other: sending status emails must be a common habit. 6. People have somewhat different backg...

Spring , civilized things It seems that spring is here. I had a walk with Kössi in the morning in nice sunshine. We bought New York Times, from the guy who sells them in the corner of Fairfield and Commonwealth Avenue (it is, by the way, the only newspaper that requires a plastic bag for carrying to the cafe). In order to feel belonging to some civilized community of decent humans, we went to have caffe latte in the cafe Sonsie in the Newbury Street. They serve excellent coffee in porcelain cup. Today, they had opened the wall to the street, and one could really enjoy oneself, the beautiful people, sunshine, and newpaper. So nice. On the way back home, we made another discovery: the small grocery shop in the corner of Newbury and Fairfield sells several brands of real chocolate and, to out great surprise, even Finnish licorice. Arms President Bush, and his subordinates (or is the other way round), has decided to sell F-16 fighter planes to the dictator of Pakistan. As we all r...

Air traffic policies The best way to start a new day is to read New York Times (online), and do some work. Today, I wrote two proposals for my term paper for the air traffic policies-seminar. Developing a set of general requirements for evaluating the different proposals for NGATS. Without knowing and evaluating requirements, we cannot decide whether the proposed new policies are acceptable and desirable for the stakeholders of NGATS. Furthermore, we cannot know whether NGATS is feasible from economical and environmental point of view. In addition to defining the types (availability, reliability, speed, safety, cost, etc) and instances of requirements, we also need to define the acceptable ranges for each requirement. Then, we need, at least for some of the requirements (as time allows), we need to take a look at the current values (both averaged over the whole system (e.g. speed), and locally (e.g noise)), and the likely direction of development of the values. Finally, we can...