Baker, CA

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Leaving Las Vegas

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Rose Bowl preparation

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Here's the blahblahblah: Joe and I and others were going to watch Illinois play in Orlando at the Capital One Bowl since it was (1) on the same side of the country as us and (2) it seemed more likely that we would qualify for the Capital One Bowl than the prestigious Rose Bowl in Pasadena. If Illinois qualified for the Rose Bowl... too far, too expensive, etc. In fact, with good luck and good wins, Illinois did qualify for the Rose Bowl -- first time since 1984. So we thought again and too far/expensive was thrown out of the window. New Years in southern California with former university friends and roommates sounds good to me.

Look for me in the crowd. Ha.

The cool thing about this is that I was also able to get two tickets for my parents. They get to see the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade (I suspect I'll still be sleeping during the parade) on 1 January, and then I'm going to take them on a shotgun tour of the Mojave on 2 January: over the San Gabriel Mountains; through Mojave, California City ("home"), and Trona; into Death Valley; and back to Las Vegas for their early morning 3 January flight home. I thought it would be cool to show them our playground from spring 2005.

If you would like to see more about the trip, I am putting notes together on my personal wiki and have created a map in Google Earth, which you can see below.


View larger map

I will be doing my part to pollute as I drive in a huge loop across the desert, but I tell myself that every trip I take to the desert -- my last was a side trip during a business excursion to Vandenberg Air Force Base -- is research for a book that I am sometimes writing (usually not) about our spring in Mojave. It's hard to believe that was nearly three years ago.

Nowhere, Sangamon County, IL (near Lanesville, maybe)

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Act surprised: delayed O'Hare flight

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I'm sure that Cincinnati is a nice city. However, I was hoping to go all the way from Washington-Dulles to Cincinnati to Chicago-O'Hare to Bloomington with no problems. It's through O'Hare in the winter in busy season, so I'm neither surprised nor upset that part of the chain is broken. United -- whose people have been nice -- say to expect to leave here to Chicago at 11:30 instead of 7:30... That nixes any flights to central Illinois today.

The issue is, still: how do I get where I'm going? Peoria, Bloomington, or Springfield would all be good -- or drive overnight from Chicago? How long is the drive from Cincy to Springfield?

Meh.

Personality

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About a week ago -- while unintentionally backing up my SSP06 email to my Gmail account... -- I discovered a long lost personality test that was given to us participants at the ISU Summer Session Program in Strasbourg, France. I was going to post it sometime anyway, for "fun," but after giving someone a hard time and trying my best to ruin their Christmas yesterday, what the hell, I'll post it today.

Maybe this makes sense to you -- what do you think?

Link: Personality

Attached is your personality profile from the questionnaire you filled out at SSP06 this summer. Be sure to open the powerpoint file in the NOTES view (if it opens in the slideshow format, right click, choose EDIT and Notes) so that you can see the text explanations for the graphs.

There is no such thing as a 'bad' personality profile. Each profile identifies the characteristic way a person responds to the world if there are no strong situational constraints shaping our responses. For instance, we act very differently at a funeral than we do at a party. It is the situations that limit what behaviors and responses we choose to display. Your profile may have identified predispositions to deal with the world that present challenges to you or make things more difficult at times (e.g., if you were quick to anger). These should be considered to be elements of your personality that you can focus more attention on developing more positive ways of managing your response to the world. By adulthood, personality (the predisposition to react in certain ways) is fairly well set…it changes in mostly minor ways as we grow older. In rare situations, extreme experiences can bring about dramatic personality changes but for most of us, we must learn to emphasis our strengths and modify the impact of our less favorable traits. For example, people who are quick to anger may develop strategies to give them time to calm down before trying to interact with others or shy people will use a job role to help them initiate conversations with others. Once we know what our natural predispositions are, we can look for ways to enhance the best and buffer the rest...

Least surprising trait: I score high on the scale for neuroticism. Who would have thought that?

Thanks to Sheryl Bishop for providing this for us and for being a hell of a cool instructor at ISU. Now I have to ask your permission to post this...

Kittell Graph

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True story: Kittell Graph

In its full glory:


From MathWorld

Why would I waste your time in such a way? No distinct reason. After setting up kirkkittell.com, I was curious exactly how someone might come across it. Searching for "kirk kittell" brings you more or less directly here. Searching for "kirk" is hopeless... unless you're interested in Star Trek or Kirk Douglas. Searching for "kittell" is slightly more interesting. Kittell is not a common surname--being an Anglicized version of a German name and all--so all results make me think it is a different branch of the same tree.

But this I. Kittell, who published "A Group of Operations on a Partially Colored Map" in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, who knows?

This is your largely uninteresting comment of the day, internet folk--imagine how lucky you would be if you had to deal with this junk in person. Every. Single. Day. (Why, you'd be a very lucky lady indeed, hey, hey)

New site: kirkkittell.com

Instead of posting the TODO's here every day, I've finally set up kirkkittell.com to help me keep things in order. See the wiki, especially.

Plan: 17 December 2007

TODO:

1. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H. -- waiting for response -- post response


2. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


3. Get a domain host that supports MediaWiki (link)


4. Email Rachel for Raghunandan.


5. Post ISR Staff notes.


6. Email Jeff about ISR Staff board.


7. Post on Orbital jobs


8. Fix RSS feed icon source in SEDSWiki Updates.


9. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.


10. Consider daily processes.


11. Find password for SGC2008 Twitter account.

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one


4. List giveaways and sellaways.


5. Ship SGC photos

Plan: 16 December 2007

TODO:

1. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H. -- waiting for response -- post response


2. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


3. Fix RSS feed icon source in SEDSWiki Updates.


4. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.


5. Consider daily processes.


6. Email Rachel for Raghunandan.


7. Post ISR Staff notes.

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one


4. List giveaways and sellaways.


5. Ship SGC photos

Done:

1. Send SEDSIC money to Florian

ISR Whiteout

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Lots of snow at the Ingersoll Scout Reservation staff alumni party

War Memorial Drive, Peoria

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Dayvo and Jen

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Old Chicago's, Peoria, IL

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Plan: 14 December 2007

TODO:

1. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H. -- waiting for response -- post response


2. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


3. Fix RSS feed icon source in SEDSWiki Updates.


4. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.


5. Consider daily processes.


6. Email Rachel for Raghunandan

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one


4. List giveaways and sellaways.

Done:

1. Reply to Will P.


2. Christmas and New Years travel.


3. Finish updating M's resume.


4. Update CV for IAF SEOC.


5. Send SEDS-E mentor report to mentors. (This will be much easier with internet.)


6. Notify AAS mentors of postponement of program to 2008. (Who's idea was it to start this between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Oh yeah. Me. Nice work, Smart Guy.)

ATL to BMI

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Looking Forward: 12 December 2007

Schedule:

• 8:30am to 7:00pm -- Orbital


• 7:00pm to 8:00pm -- gym


• 8:00pm to 9:00pm -- grocery store

TODO:

1. Send SEDS-E mentor report to mentors. (This will be much easier with internet.)


2. Notify AAS mentors of postponement of program to 2008. (Who's idea was it to start this between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Oh yeah. Me. Nice work, Smart Guy.)


3. Introduce Will/Alison.


4. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H. -- waiting for response -- post response


5. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


6. Fix RSS feed icon source in SEDSWiki Updates.


7. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.


8. Christmas and New Years travel.


9. Consider daily processes.


10. Update CV.


11. Email Rachel for Raghunandan

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one


4. List giveaways and sellaways.

Done:

1. Get rovers proposal to Alison and UKSEDS. -- Proposal on Google Docs

Looking Forward: 11 December 2007

Schedule:

• 7:30am to 5:00pm -- Orbital


• 5:30pm to 7:30pm -- basketball

TODO:

1. Send SEDS-E mentor report to mentors. (This will be much easier with internet.)


2. Notify AAS mentors of postponement of program to 2008. (Who's idea was it to start this between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Oh yeah. Me. Nice work, Smart Guy.)


3. Get rovers proposal to Alison and UKSEDS.


4. Introduce Will/Alison.


5. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H. -- waiting for response -- post response


6. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


7. Fix RSS feed icon source in SEDSWiki Updates.


8. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.


9. Christmas and New Years travel.




1. 22 Dec, IAD-PIA; 2 Jan, ATL-IAD




10. Consider daily processes.


11. Update CV.

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one


4. List giveaways and sellaways.

Done:

1. Transfer credit card balances.


2. SEDSWiki Updates post. Updates

Looking Forward: 10 December 2007

Semi-exclusive list of things that are or should be happening today. We'll organize and reduce granularity later.

TODO:

1. Get rovers proposal to Alison and UKSEDS.


2. Introduce Will/Alison.


3. SEDSWiki Updates post.


4. Email "Bob" about promoting PongSat again in 2008, this time under auspices of AAS VP-Edu slot.


5. Notify AAS mentors of postponement of program to 2008. (Who's idea was it to start this between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Oh yeah. Me. Nice work, Smart Guy.)


6. Send Lavina/SEDSAT-2 Comm question to Chris H.


7. Send SEDS-E mentor report to mentors. (This will be much easier with internet.)


8. Share code for Recent Changes/Comments in Roller.

Done:

1. Road Trip to Space post ("Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back"). Happy Birthday Sir. Arthur C. Clarke!


2. Finish calling people for staff reunion.


3. Send pic to Pallavi and Abhishek. (I've only had this for--what?--10 weeks?)


4. Reply to Bee about SEDSIC article. -- Forward email to SEDS-Earth list for comment


5. Create a scheme for posting SEDS-Earth meeting notes à la SEDS-USA -- http://wiki.seds.org/index.php/Category:2007_SEDS-Earth_Meetings


6. Email Sunil and Kevin about music files, and general how-are-you-doing because they're good guys.


7. Reply to Mark, re: AAS mentor.

Longer term:

1. Find Flexible Spending Account receipts.


2. Who gets the 25 Orbital Christmas cards?


3. "Thank you package" to VIT, et al. (Too long in coming on this one

Spring cleaning

Everything