As some of you may know I actually work at NASA. This is somewhat amusing picture I took from the driver’s seat at the Mission Control Center.

It’s rather fuzzy, my Nokia let me down with the photo quality. This is from the main screen in the front of the control center where we normally show a worldmap with the location of the space vehicles we monitor and a 3D bird’s eye view picture of the space station as it’s flying over the Earth. The machine which runs these programs is a Windows XP machine but after a recent patch upgrade it started complaining about the “User’s Credentials.” Cracks me up. All the lisences on these machines are valid, however the new security protocols which must be used to log on are absolutely ridiculous and it’s an artifact of these strict policies that such a pop-up showed up. It took them weeks before they figured out how to log in properly or to disable the warning message, but it was up there the entire time until they did.

Windows really does suck, and I’m using Vista myself as I submit this post!