Movies: The Ring (3.5): most excellent scary moody piece. Knew that a twist at the end was coming but when the XXXX came out of the XXXX then looked at XXXX with its XXXX, I would have died too. Memo: don't watch it alone, just before going to bed, unless you want to lie awake aaaaallllll night long.

Zoolander (4): So sarcastic. Death by petrol, with WHAM! as the background music. Now funny. List of cameo appearances to die for (Donald Trump, Christian Slater, Natalie Portman, Fabio, Lenny Kravitz, David Bowie, Claudia Schiffer, ....) Owen Wilson is a brilliant actor and Ben Stiller shows that can direct as well as act.

Rock Star (4): I couldn't believe that I started to care about these heavy metal wankers. But I did. Mark Wahlberg- suprisingly sincere and I even liked Jennifer Aniston in this one (which is not something I say often).

Lilo & Stitch (4): Tee hee. The ultimate dysfunctional family: mom & dad are dead, she's having trouble holding down a job, and their new pet can destroy the world. But all ends well because surf's up and men-in-black retire to Hawaii to handle social work cases for Disney.

The Mothman Prophecies (5!!): Hold the front page- Richard Gere can act! A horror story set in West Virginia. Builds so nicely. Great visual effects at the end. Freakkkky. Suspect that I liked it so much since it let me express my (occasional) sense of freakish-ness about this state (heck, this country).

Signs (4): Forget all you've read. This is a comedy, a loving mockery of 1,000 horror movies. I knew it was a spoof just as soon as I saw them all wearing the tin foil hats.

Cool: Sounds of the Season: A music channel off the satellite. Lots of cool ambient stuff. Great background music for workaholics.

Partial evaluation: I've been saying for years- write the interpreter then PE-it to generate the compiler. Finally took my own advice for the accessor system. Way cool. Way easy to debug (just get the interpreter going and all else follows).

XSLT: It takes me a while to catch on but XML comes with a data-driven transformation language called XSLT that supports iteration, sub-routines, recursion, etc, etc. Most excellent. And Internet Explorer comes with all the compiler tools, built in. So you can use it all to render HTML that anyone can read.

WAR: The flags weren't even unwrapped today at the supermarket. Sure, there were still on sale but the urgency was gone. CNN has stopped "the war on Iraq"; now its "the New Iraq". My American hosts think they've won. But I am afraid. The last weapon of mass destruction to hit the USA were American planes piloted by desperate men willing to die to make their protest. Suppose the United States of Iraq suffers at the hands of its neighbours, or its invaders? Then this American war may spawn a whole new generation of desperate men.

SPRING: Spring is here to mock my melancholy. Flowers to burn your eyes out. Birds all gayly twittering "fuck me fuck me" as they look for mates or "fuck off fuck off" as they mark out territory. Either way, its sounds grand.

FLU: Yesterday was the first time I didn't feel like crap since Tuesday. And I truly felt like crap. Drained like a battery. And I had to do my back-to-back long days that start with NASA at 9am and finish with teaching sometime in the evening. Helen is days away and there was no one to fuss over me or get me orange juice or tell me to stop whining.

HELEN: Sent her flowers for her birthday. Had to phone her family to find out if her birthday was April 21 or April 22 (it was 22). Sssh- don't tell anyone I'd forgotten.

Flu coming on. Sore throat- little razor blades all dragging down at the back.

Beautiful weather. Warm sunny days. Good to be out and about.

Currently, NASA projects have to allocated their own funds to pay for IV&V projects. Negotiating a contract for those payments, and managing the expectations and products around that work, it a major source of effort and delay in IV&V work. So much so, that it can happen that IV&V reports on (e.g.) requirements are not available till the projects have moved on to some build phase.

But that is all set to change.

After a mysterious two week absence at NASA HQ, Ned Keeler (the IV&V center director) announced big changes to the IV&V funding structure. In the proposed new world, all the funds for IV&V remain at headquarters and headquarters decides which projects get IV&V. The work is then paid for from the headquarters pool, and not by transferring funds from HQ to the projects, and then IV&V.

This change, once implemented, will have major implications. Firstly, and most importantly, projects won't have to find the money to fund IV&V projects. To them, IV&V will be a free service, not a burdensome tax.

Also, the start-up time for an IV&V project will be much less since all that project-by-project initial contractual negotiation will go away. Hence, IV&V will be able to offer more timely feedback to the projects.

Lastly, but perhaps most interesting to the research community, IV&V will know that its budget is stable. In the current situation, IV&V has to negotiate little bits of money with each project it works with, in some piecemeal manner. In the new world, the available cash will be known at the start of each financial year.

Why would researchers care about such a change? Well, it changes the mood, and hence the model of business at IV&V. Instead of squabbling each year of lots of small amounts, it should now be possible to create long term stable cash flows. This suggests to me that the time is ripe for a phase transition in the research. Instead of lots of small one year projects, we could move to larger, longer projects.

Another, possible, benefit to research is that once the tensions associated with funding go away, then it is possible that more data will be accessible from the projects.

In other news, Ned also reported that he now has a seat on the ?? quality council at headquarters; i.e. for the first time in the history of the facility, the director of the facility has a formal and routine presence amongst HQ decision makers. This move will go far to removing some of the geographical barriers that sometimes isolate the facility from the NASA mainstream.

Of course, its not all good news. Since headquarters will control the centralized pot of IV&V money, they will have more oversight of this facilty. So we can expect an increased level of reporting activity from this site.

Also, headquarters allocating large sums to IV&V will raise eyebrows (and perhaps the hackles) of NASA software quality assurance or reliability workers. The relationship between IV&V and the SQA folks at the different centers will be a matter of some sensitivity for some time.

Helen got paid today (well, yesterday). For the first time. After FIVE years on living on student wages (the money she used to earn wouldn't even fold). There was a little back pay in it so it was large- one pay cheque with nearly half her previous annual salary.

And, the good news is that, in two weeks time, she'll get paid again. And again. And again. And...