new vocabulary today...

mofwic ("muffwick")... mother-F^&*$% who's in charge -- military acronym for the local boss or CO or other authority figure

figmo ... f&*#-you, I've got my orders -- expression referring to being in a state where the future is determined and hence present performance can go hang. Related to "senioritis" in graduating classes...

Otherwise, today's conference was OK, and this evening Gregg Maryniak gave a good evening banquet talk on the X-prize and commercial space, including lots of onboard video from the SpaceShipOne flights.

surfing on chaos...

Actually, only a tiny bit of chaos... I was up in front of 50 people at the conference this afternoon, giving my paper in front of most of the field's major participants. And then, about halfway through... my graphics began showing on the large screen behind me as black-X squares with "must have a TIFF reader or Quicktime installed to display image" error message. I had sent the conference organizer my slides, done in Powerpoint... but on a Mac. They loaded it on to an apparently stripped PC laptop that drove the A/V equipment and projector.

So... in front of 50 people, looking expectantly at me, and my presentation is obviously broken. Undissuaded by this, I crack jokes, refer to "if you could see this picture, it would show you..." and use the fiasco to illustrate the need for accurate metadata and common standards in sharing air traffic data among organizations. More jokes. I'm getting more attention than if the presentation had gone off normally, as the audience watches to see if I can handle this and keep up the ad-lib schtick to compensate for the missing graphics. I do. Summary, questions, and congratulatory words from FAA and Boeing guys in the foyer afterwards. I rocked. :) Whee.