Travel
I almost never travel for business.
So the fact that I write this on my third day of being in Boston is a bit strange. I'm here to support on-going operations for NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. Ball Aerospace built some key pieces of Chandra. One of them is the Aspect Camera, which allows high-resolution X-ray images to be registered to the celestial sphere to an accuracy of about an arcsecond. Anyway, the guy who wrote the software that controls the Aspect Camera will be retiring soon, and I have to take over responsibility for providing any patches that the Chandra team might need in the future. One scary piece of this, however, is that I have to become an expert in the FORTH programming language. Oh well, job security, I suppose. Anyway, I go back to Colorado tomorrow evening.
Stranger still, next month I'll be in Washington, D.C. for a few days. Who hangs out around that part of the country? Russell?
So the fact that I write this on my third day of being in Boston is a bit strange. I'm here to support on-going operations for NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. Ball Aerospace built some key pieces of Chandra. One of them is the Aspect Camera, which allows high-resolution X-ray images to be registered to the celestial sphere to an accuracy of about an arcsecond. Anyway, the guy who wrote the software that controls the Aspect Camera will be retiring soon, and I have to take over responsibility for providing any patches that the Chandra team might need in the future. One scary piece of this, however, is that I have to become an expert in the FORTH programming language. Oh well, job security, I suppose. Anyway, I go back to Colorado tomorrow evening.
Stranger still, next month I'll be in Washington, D.C. for a few days. Who hangs out around that part of the country? Russell?
posted by Unknown @ 9:01 PM
3 Comments:
At 12:10 PM,
Unknown said…
Yeah, there's some responsibility, but I'll have to do things for Chandra only on rare occasion. The hard part will be staying up on a new language, even though I won't be working with it full time. Fortunately (or unfortunately in some sense), I'll be working with FORTH also to support Ball's standard tracker line. The one guy who wrote and understands all of the FORTH stuff will eventually leave me to take care of it.
Most of my work will continue to involve simulation and development of high-accuracy trackers. That's all being done in C and C++ (and the occasional Octave script :^).
At 3:16 PM,
R said…
Sounds like you are becoming a critical asset to your employer - ask for a raise!
Let's try and hook up when you're in town -- call or email.
At 8:41 PM,
Unknown said…
Russell, I received quite a decent raise just this month. The work is usually interesting and challenging. The only real issue is that there is the need for secrecy, not only in some circumstances because of national security but also in other circumstances because of the need for the company to keep industrial secrets.
Secrecy is not a practical issue for me. I can live with keeping secrets, especially if it be necessary to support my family. But it is not ideal. If one works on cool stuff, then not being able freely to share the details of the work with others is unpleasant.
I sent you a private e-mail with some elaboration. I'll be in town around Mar 1--2.
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