Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

As usual here today I'll talk about the aspects of the field trip yesterday that I would not want to tell the general public.

The coordination was good between the company management and the students, and at least they had the good sense not to turn us away after having traveled 5 hours to get there - not completely anyway.

They had foreign visitors slotted for 8am, who arrived more than an hour late.

So they bumped us up an hour to accommodate the potential investors or whatever.

The lecture by one of the engineers at the site seemed ad libbed, not providing vital (and non-confidential) information about the satellite and their operation until the students asked it.

The acoustics in their main lobby was bad, with the "lecturer's" voice being drowned out by the chatter from their control room at the mezzanine and down the hall. Either they were than loud or our speaker was that inaudible.

But I think given that he didn't exude much confidence about his subject matter anyway, it's understood why he wouldn't speak more volubly.

He would also interrupt his lecture with side tracks such as the visitors they had earlier or asking why there weren't more of us.

When we did get a tour of the outside of their control center what was most prominent for the students was that a paused screen of Free Cell is vital for satellite operations.

The joke we shared afterwards was that maybe he was the one tasked to talked to us because he was caught playing games at work.

At the question about how many volts the satellite used, he said it depends on the number of channels being used, and said he didn't want to give a false estimate and would refer us to another engineer, but he forgot that later in the tour.

He was also supposed to let us under their huge dish, but it was raining when we got to that part of the facility. We moved back to the lobby, where we could see outside that it had stopped raining, but he didn't lead us back the two minute walk to where the dish was, and I didn't press it anymore.

I would recommend returning there, but only if we could have a list of questions emailed to them beforehand that we would like answered.

Session 1769 sees visitors as an interruption to his vital work. Class dismissed.