Here’s a NASA employee who isn’t impressed with the new NASA Information Technology czar.

Apparently, Mr. Strassmann recently took a tour of the Information Technology aspects of NASA and described it as like “an archaeological expedition”; not an entirely flattering remark, but perhaps he said it to a crowd of employees summoned to a parking lot somewhere, which would bring it up to NASA’s standards. One thing Mr. Strassmann might want to educate himself on is the small budget issues that have been eating NASA alive for the last few years: it is something of a challenge to revamp a center’s computing strategy while the space station is moaning “Feed Me!” Also, he might interrupt his chanting of “One NASA, Good NASA” long enough to notice that NASA is, in fact, quite diverse, with quite diverse computing needs.

We range from the people at the Cape who fill the tanks with fuel and push the big red button to the folks in Cleveland who are trying to figure out how to get the blue light to come out of the warp nacelles. The same dumb terminal fiber-coupled to his new computing center at Marshall is not going to meet all those needs. And finally, I have to wonder just who Mr. Strassmann visited on his archaeological expedition. I can state for a fact that he didn?t visit me: if he can look at what I am doing and see it as fossilized footprints in the creek bed of computing, then one of us has our plug out of the wall, and it is not me.