Today has been a terribly busy day. A team meeting had been in preparation since Thursday, but the time and intended attendance had not been all that clear. It turned out that the meeting started at 09:00 so I almost had to dash out of the house to make it on time. Although the meeting lasted three hours, which is unusually long for meetings in general and for our team in particular, it was quite helpful. We had not seen each other face to face for the best part of two months, so having a chance to discuss progress and upcoming work was very informative.
Then, after a very short lunch break, we had yet another meeting focusing on the planning of the actual operation slots that are scheduled for October and November. The procedures are not fully established yet, so there was a bit of discussion on what would be possible to do in each slot and it was overall good to dust off all that knowledge that had been sitting in a corner of my mind for weeks.
The trio of meetings was completed by the PhD group, where one of the students presented the problematic of data connection among low-Earth orbit satellites. It was funny because, for the first time in this (OMG!) two months of gathering with the students, I had a chance of contributing to the actual discussion. The professor was wondering about the latency of the response in satellite communications, aware as he is that GEO satellites are tens of thousands of kilometers away, so I explained that the new concept implied giving up on those expensive and hard to maintain high-altitude satellites and replacing them with cheaper satellites at much shorter distance. The comment was helpful but it somehow invited the question of when I was going to present something and, even if I explained that I was first gathering up my knowledge base and freshening up on certain subjects, his answer was "Well, then, present to us one of the papers that you have recently read".
So now you know it, in three to four weeks I will be giving a talk on a paper that I have not written in front of an audience that, luckily enough, is not expert in the field. The only consolation of the day is that now Mint 20 is happily running on my old laptop, so at least I can continue working mostly undisturbed by the failure of my battery. Stay safe and see you tomorrow!
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