Today I stupidly scheduled a training class right in the middle of lunch. Friday lunch! How could I be so silly? Traditionally, a group of us basically spend all Friday morning arguing about where to go and then end up going to one of the same 5 places that we can all agree on to eat lunch out. But its nice, and social, and everyone goes. Even M. goes and he's a machine about packing his lunch the other 4 days of the week (we like to tease him for being way too predictible). But it should be a cool class, some button pushing and item entries into a mockup of the space shuttle computers and maybe I'll get a better idea of how everything works....

[ok, diverging on a tangent now]

That's one thing the simulator I flew out in California didn't have -- it had all the flight controls, but no simulated computers, since they really aren't needed for approach and land. Its amazing the level of functionality that was programmed into these 128 kb computers back in the 70s! And they still work! Its more amazing to me what we could do with modern computers -- think about all the vehicle health monitoring, and guidance algorithms, and self-testing... With robots, neural networks for abort logic, and better (more-automated) programs -- we could really reduce the army of people involved with operating a space plane (both in flight and during turnaround) to a mere handful - more like an air traffic control tower than anything else. What a cool future that would be! And then the space program's resources could be turned to exploring the solar system. Ok, apparently my college internship experiences with the "Vision SP" people has rubbed off. The only thing I would personally do differently than their proposals is keep a pilot in the loop -- all those algorithms do not replace the ability of a person to deal with the unexpected.

[off tangent]

I guess this means my coworkers will get to go to a steakhouse or something today :) (here's to hoping I can talk them into bringing me something back since I'm boycotting the cafeteria...)

Cari and I went to the Hobbit Hole Cafe for dinner last night. Yum yum! I love any sandwich that has an entire avacado on it!