low key

I'm in Huntsville, Alabama currently, attending a set of project reviews for vehicle health management. The company (Northrop) has heeded hopeforyou's suggestions from December and rapidly improved their design tools. That's very good. What was less good was that today's presentations seemed to drone on.

Yesterday I rendezvoused with hopeforyou in Houston -- she came from San Jose, while I had left at dawn and connected through Minneapolis from San Francisco, thereby giving me a 3-hour lunchtime with Nancy. Hope's plane was late, and we had to run to a different terminal.

This evening, after the meetings we drove to a state park on top of a ridge... beautiful views of low forested mountains, bluish haze, and a small waterfall. And I pointed out a millipede to Hope, who played with it. Then we both played on the see-saw before driving back to Huntsville for dinner at a Thai restaurant. Thence several calls and working on slides...

A distant acquaintenance...

Looks like I won't be completely alone next week! I now have a second (after boubabe, who is too far away on Hokkaido) contact in Japan. At the IAF congress in 1999, I chatted several times with a young female university student who was intensely interested in space exploration. We exchanged e-mail addresses, and she invited me to contact her if I ever visited the country. So, whimsically, I sent an email to her old address... and she replied! She's finished grad school, lives near Shibuya, is now working at Sony on wireless networking, was planning to attend the Nara conference on her own on Wednesday, and wants to get together in Tokyo.

And I'm also renting a cellphone with SMS while over there... email me if you'd like the number.

Stretch

Sitting in a meeting on the 6th floor of Building 4203 at NASA-MSFC... hopeforyou is sipping her tea, two seats over. This morning has been less monotonous -- more active discussions. And an 802.11b local access point...