My sister works for NASA. Okay, not really for NASA. She’s employed by a NASA contractor. But she does get to work with the astronauts, and she’s plugged into the shuttle launch schedules. Those are her work deadlines. (Way cool, huh?)

So you’d think that when I want to know about the next shuttle launch date, I’d call my sister. Or look at her blog. But she doesn’t blog about work – lots of us don’t. And if I want to talk to my sister, I’m most likely to use Instant Messaging. It’s less obtrusive than a phone call. She can answer a quick question online while she’s working, and get right back to it.

But actually, I rarely IM my sister about the shuttle launch schedule. I rely on a service that watches web pages for me, ChangeDetection.com. It’s free. I just set up an account and entered the URLs for pages I care about. Now, when the page changes, ChangeDetection sends me an e-mail like this one:

At your request we are sending you this alert to let you
know that a page you have been monitoring has changed.

The following monitored page has changed:

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html

To see the details of the change, please click on the link below:

http://www.changedetection.com/log/gov/nasa/schedule_log.html

Sure, I could talk to my sister about the launch schedule. But we have other things to talk about. On IM. And yes, even on the phone.