Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The Origins of this Blog
I started this blog as an exercise for a National Press Club course I was taking on mining blogs and social media for fodder for news. It seemed logical to try to tie it to my work as a Senior Writer/Editor at The MITRE Corporation, where I had just completely re-written an article on the secret history of the origins of the pictures that were captured by the Corona spacecraft in the post-Sputnik days -- all of which eventually became a part of Project Keyhole. Google purchased this collection several years ago, and the result became Google World, one of the niftiest sites on our blue planet.
As a non-engineer, I had to walk a fine line between making things readable and interesting without sacrificing science. As the then-new Editor of a Systems Engineering Quarterly at MITRE, Collaborations (and editing what was to be a series of System Engineering texts on the side), I found myself at sea without a lifeboat, attempting to learn as much as possible what "Systems Engineering" was all about. (I knew it would be a challenge when one of the Ph.D. Engineer authors told me to hold off on editing a piece of his work as, in re-reading it, he didn't understand it himself.)
Thus the moniker for this blog which, while a dead ringer for an oxymoron, is not an inaccurate description of the task I was attempting to accomplish.
Fate and health problems intervened and, after finding property to purchase to move into just when François had embarked on his first trip to Europe after nearly not recovering from aneurysm surgery, I needed a way to share pictures of our potential new abode without causing our French friend's computer to crash because of the size of the photos. I therefore repurposed the site as a tour of what was to become our condominium. I get waves of nostalgia when I see the space which was filled hurriedly and somewhat haphazardly because of his deteriorating health and, while my goal isn't to return to bare walls and floors, some redecorating is in order now that this is no longer the equivalent of a hospital room.
I'm finding this task dauntingly clear -- and incomprehensible...
Cheers!
As a non-engineer, I had to walk a fine line between making things readable and interesting without sacrificing science. As the then-new Editor of a Systems Engineering Quarterly at MITRE, Collaborations (and editing what was to be a series of System Engineering texts on the side), I found myself at sea without a lifeboat, attempting to learn as much as possible what "Systems Engineering" was all about. (I knew it would be a challenge when one of the Ph.D. Engineer authors told me to hold off on editing a piece of his work as, in re-reading it, he didn't understand it himself.)
Thus the moniker for this blog which, while a dead ringer for an oxymoron, is not an inaccurate description of the task I was attempting to accomplish.
Fate and health problems intervened and, after finding property to purchase to move into just when François had embarked on his first trip to Europe after nearly not recovering from aneurysm surgery, I needed a way to share pictures of our potential new abode without causing our French friend's computer to crash because of the size of the photos. I therefore repurposed the site as a tour of what was to become our condominium. I get waves of nostalgia when I see the space which was filled hurriedly and somewhat haphazardly because of his deteriorating health and, while my goal isn't to return to bare walls and floors, some redecorating is in order now that this is no longer the equivalent of a hospital room.
I'm finding this task dauntingly clear -- and incomprehensible...
Cheers!
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