Category Archives: Engineering

Engineering

Successes Bring Hope (even in small amounts)

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One part of my job as corporate trainer for engineering is to schedule and sometimes teach brown bag training sessions every Wednesday. After subtracting holiday weeks, we have about 45 weeks to fill. In the past project management training took up twenty of those, but we don’t have that going on this year. So I have to come up with 45 presentations a year.

So far this year my batting average for having a presentation is not good. After having two good classes the first two Wednesdays, three weeks in a row saw no brown bag (though I’ll blame one of those on the ice storm, even though I had nothing ready that week). I have a vendor coming in next week, and things pencilled in for the two weeks after that. But Monday morning came upon me and I had nothing planned. I knew I couldn’t go another week without a brown bag, so I bit the bullet and decided to do one on short notice.

Based on recent projects I’ve reviewed or consulted on, I decided to quickly pull together a presentation on specifying earthwork. Monday I made an outline and had about 15 minutes to make a few notes. I always try to give these sessions a sexy title–oops, the HR babe says I can’t use that word–oops, nor am I supposed to call her the HR babe–so I titled it “Down In The Dirt: Specifying Earthwork Based on Method of Payment”. I promoted this session on Tuesday.

But Monday and Tuesday gave me no real time to prepare, and Wednesday morning found be grinding away reviewing a project for our Dallas office. So about 10:00 AM this morning was when I began preparing, for a 1:00 PM class. Yet, those three hours did not pass uninterrupted, as the usual phone calls and drop-bys happened. Took my pick-up to the Ford dealership this morning for critical maintenance, and had to deal that in a couple of phone calls. So I had maybe an hour, at most an hour and a half to take my outline and flesh it out into a presentation. The prospects were not good.

We had more people than normal gather in our lunch room, and more offices than normal connect by video conference equipment, with more people than normal sitting in each office. Perhaps the layoffs in January put the fear of job security in everyone, and they decided the ought to attend these training classes while they still have a job.

The class went off without a hitch. I suppose, in discussing construction specifications, I am in my element. The problem turned out not to be a dearth of material, but going faster than I should so as to fit it all in. But fit it in I did. The feedback from the class was positive, as the many questions indicated they were listening and interested. I was glad I did the class, and felt the usual emotional release when it was over. And, I get getting camera time, something I will need when I go on my televised book tour sometime in the future.

In a related success, my truck was finished and the courtesy van picked me up with a minimum of coordination. I’m $360 dollars poorer, but the maintenance is all up to date. Of course, those $1200 dollars of repairs I put off to another time, including a new clutch desperately needed, still hangs out there.

It’s amazing what small successes add up to in terms of hope for the future. I leave the office today hopeful about life for the first time in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll weather this economic depression without losing my job or having my salary cut further. Maybe I’ll eventually obtain a book contract. Maybe I’ll get my taxes in well before April 15th and get decent refunds for both state and federal.

Hope. It’s an amazing thing.

career, Engineering, Health

Power Failure

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This morning at work we experienced a brief power failure. This is a blustery day. As I arrived at the office about 6:45 AM the wind was fresh and from the east. By 9:00 AM it was from the south, and the front was almost upon us. Radar showed a line of storms heading our way from the west, likely to last most of the day.

Shortly after I checked the radar on the Internet, our power went out. Only for a second; then it came on for a couple of seconds; then it went off for five seconds; then on again and has stayed on. Just those few seconds, but long enough to cause every computer to have to be re-booted manually, long enough to lose any unsaved data, long enough to cause everyone to get up and walk around in frustration. Whether the power failure was due to the front being upon us, or something else, I’m not sure. We have a large road construction project going on about two miles from the office, but if they did something, we would not have come on so quickly.

I’m experiencing a power failure of sorts myself. Since all the work this weekend, which I described in yesterday’s post, which followed close on the work of the previous week and weekend, recovering from the ice storm, I don’t seem to have much energy. My weight is down, the lowest it’s been since June 2003. Saturday I tried on some slacks that were hanging in my closet but not worn for years, and I fit in all of them. I should have more energy than I do, given that I’m at a better weight, almost 50 pounds below my peak weight of a couple of years ago. So what’s wrong?

I have heard it said that toxins are stored in the body’s fat, and so losing weight by losing fat will release those toxins. I did some Internet research on this, and while many people make this claim, I couldn’t find any expert web site that I felt gave a definitive statement saying this was so. Could the mere act of losing weight at a good clip result in tiredness and sluggishness, regardless of whether toxins are released or not? I’m also fighting an injured right shoulder. I say injured, but I suppose it could be just a severe outbreak of rheumatoid arthritis. It doesn’t feel like my rheumatoid usually does, however. It feels like an injury. The pain is almost constant, even when at rest. I’ve learned to avoid using my right arm when I have to move it at the shoulder, and it seems marginally better since I’ve gone to this routine. My regular doctor appointment is in a couple of weeks, so I’m hoping I can get by till then and see what he thinks.

Maybe this personal power failure is partially due to economic conditions. Maybe it is partly due to the growing realization of the futility of trying to publish books. Maybe it is another (or two) life circumstances I am dealing with. More likely it is a combination of all of the above.

God, help me out of these doldrums, that I might better serve You in power and boldness.

career, Engineering

Hunkering Down

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No, not because of a winter storm. That’s what I had to do last week. No, this week I’m hunkering down due to an economic storm.

Last Friday the company I work for laid off about 37 people nationwide. That’s small potatoes, you would think, compared to announcements of thousands of layoffs by some companies. But for us, that was 30 percent of our work force. That by itself would not be so startling except this is our forth layoff since November 2006. We peaked, sometime around May 2006, at about 265 people. We are now 105. Not all of that is specific to the economy, at least not directly. A certain good client cancelled a certain program in February 2006, not for economic reasons but for legal reasons, and 25 people were without projects. We hung on for a while without laying off, even still adding staff in key areas, but it couldn’t last.

After that, we found obtaining new work increasingly difficult. One client after another decided to build fewer stores–or none at all. We experienced a lot of attrition, and did not replace any of those.

This might not be so bad except we don’t know if this is the bottom. Might we go even lower? The economy, to me, looks like it will be in the doldrums until around 2016. Are we at a sustainable staff level, or is another cut in the future?

Oh, I survived and still have a job, but with a 10 percent pay cut, the second cut of that size during these times. The managers took a 15 percent pay cut after a 30 percent cut last time. I work for a good company, well-managed and compassionate. I’m still corporate trainer for engineering, but will have to be taking on more project work.

On a better note, this morning I reached an almost six year low in my weight. Yeah! Of course, with less money to spend for food I shall have to on my dad’s diet: water only, and that just to wash in.

career, Engineering

Eight years to go, and counting

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At work, and at other places as well, I often give people the number of years, months, and days left until my retirement. People probably think I have a countdown meter somewhere, I do it so quickly. But in reality I can do that because I will retire on my 65th birthday, which happens to coincide withe the last day of the year. So the countdown is easy. I know the year, and I can quickly figure how many months and days left in the year.

Today the countdown reached exactly eight years. That is, unless if economic conditions are such that I have to extend my working days, a distinct possibility the way things are looking right now. Having to work until I’m 67 or even longer is a real scenario.

Of course, I hold a slim hope to the possibility of my writing career taking off, and of supplemental income from that resulting in early retirement from engineering. Yes, I’m not quite free of my pipe dream.

My computer clock now shows it is 8:03 AM, and I must be about my employer’s business.

career, Engineering

Growth and Success

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My thoughts may be somewhat random today, written over a period of time between other duties at work. Last night I worked until 10:30 PM, breaking from 6 to 7 PM for supper with my mother-in-law. The urgent need was the utility drawings and specifications for a road widening project in Bentonville that our transportation group is designing. Another department had designed the utility improvements and prepared the drawings and specs, and our Transportation Dept manager took me up on my offer to check them. I began that late Monday afternoon, but decided to hit it hard yesterday and not leave until I finished checking the drawings, leaving the spec for today.

I did this because our TransDept manager, Greg, seemed particularly stressed out over this. He was handling the stress well, but I could see that he needed some support to get his project out. Greg is one of the good ones, wanting always to do things the right way. He and I have had many conversations in the two to three years he’s been here, always centering on doing engineering the right way. So I offered to check this part of his construction documents. I enjoy doing quality control checks, so the work was enjoyable, if somewhat intense.

Why did I offer to do this? Part of our CEI vision statement says, “…we are committed to the growth and success of each other.” Last week we had some special leadership training concerning “corporate culture”, and the vision statement was the star of the show. So it was fresh on my mind. What exactly does that mean, “we are committed to the growth and success of each other”, or, personalizing it: “I am committed to the growth and success of others [in the office, in the family, in the community, at church, etc.]?

Why trying to fully grasp this statement, I figured it at least mean, “I will assist a colleague who is under the gun and who is having to use staff not under his direct supervision and who may or may not know what they are doing.” That’s an easy application of the principle to actual practice.

I notice that no one ever seems to do that to me, to put themselves out for my “growth and success”. In fact, it usually seems to be the opposite. When I need a CADD tech (since I am not CADD literate), department heads seem to disappear into the cubicles. When I need help modeling a creek, people make commitments then say they never so committed. When I ask for reviewers of a new guide specification, or for someone more knowledgeable than myself to actually write the document, people forget how to read e-mail, though they sure recognize the function of the delete button.

Alas, this is the way of the world. I’m not sure why I’m surprised at that. I guess I’m not surprised at all, just saddened by people’s lack of vision–our specific vision statement.

As I said, today’s entry is somewhat unfocused and rambling.

Engineering, flood studies

Little Osage Creek

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My main work for over a month has been the flood study for the headwaters of Little Osage Creek in Centerton, Arkansas. I’m way behind on the project, and am soon to be over budget (in part because the project included a flood study of the headwaters of McKisic Creek as well; yet the budget is 80 percent consumed). I let this project sit almost a year, then got a promise from another department in the company to piggy-back it on one of their projects along the West Branch of Little Osage Creek. Somehow they didn’t do it, saying they never claimed they were intending to. So I had to take it back into my work load, dust off my “tools”, and get the job done.

As of today, I am really, really close. I have completed a complicated computer model for calculating the flood flows. This model includes 18 detention ponds, some 21 subbasins, and a number of stream runs (called “reaches” in the vernacular). I have run this model for the 100-year storm, and had believable and predicted results. Next, in a separate program, I merged the existing FEMA stream geometry model with the CEI stream geometry model (the one my project was supposed to piggy-back on), filled in the 600 foot gap between them, corrected a considerable number of errors in both, added missing culverts, added needed cross-sections that were left out of the FEMA model and due to which the model never should have been approved, and finally, today, ran a successful stream geometry model together with the flood flows from the other model. I have an answer!

I still have some tweaking to do. The results (i.e. the flood elevation, which drives the spread of the flood waters) are not as favorable as I would like, so I have to look some more at it and see if anything in the merged geometry is too conservative. If so, I might be able to reduce both. If not, the City will just have to live with the calculated flood elevation and spread.

When I started the study I had some goals in mind as to how to improve the situation on the existing flood maps, which contained obvious errors along with some things that drastically changed from the previous flood map, but which may or may not have been errors. One of the obvious errors will be gone on the new map; the other looks like it will remain. That’s not a final answer, but it’s most likely.

Why am I writing this? Today there has been an emotional release with the success of these models. I still have much to do on the project, including model tweaks, calculating flows for other storms, writing a technical report, making a presentation before an unhappy city council, putting an electronic and print submittal together for FEMA, and then working through the (probable) six month FEMA approval process. But with the successful model having all missing links plugged, no obvious errors, and believable results, the release is at hand.

Engineering, poetry, Writing

Alignment

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You hear of stars aligning, and astrologers will say that means something. Or you will hear someone say, “The stars must have been aligned for me!” Well, tonight events align for me. Significant events; events that demand my immediate attention, that will consume the evening.

Yes, today is payday, and in today’s mail will be my monthly bank statement. So tonight I get to balance the checkbook, see what bills have to be paid (or automatic payments recorded), and plan out my budget for the month ahead. Rarely do these two events come on the same day of the month. I will also use this occasion to enter several months’ worth of expenses into my budget tracking spreadsheet. So the evening will be consumed with the mundane.

Oh, you were expecting these events to be something momentous? Expecting me to announce a book deal, or some other publication acceptance? Sorry to disappoint. The mundane, common-place events of life govern, I’m afraid. In this regard I think of Charles Lamb, on of my favorite authors, a Romantic-era essayist and man of belles lettres. He worked at the East India House as a clerk, and did his writing on the side. His job was not strenuous, nor his hours long by today’s standards. Yet he always claimed his real work were not his essays, poems, and letters, but rather the endless ledgers in which he recorded endless sums for endless ships with endless imports.

So, perhaps, may it be with me. The works I shall be known for will not be the poems, essays, or novels I hack out in 30 minutes stretches on work day evenings or two hour blocks on weekends. No, it will be volumes of construction specifications, engineering reports, training class notes, internal e-mails and thousands of business letters. These are my works, world. Look upon them and despair.

Don’t mind me. Received a rejection last night, for a poem I submitted eleven months ago, and had long written off. I’m surprised it came, because it had the old postage on it.

And my key board here at work is acting up. Many letters I have to pound twice to get the pixels to behave, and the space bar is spaced out.

Engineering, poetry, Writing

Trying to get engaged

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For some time now I have not been applying myself wholeheartedly to anything. At work, I have been in a position that doesn’t require significant application of brain power. As senior engineer in the company, I’m assisting people on their more difficult problems. I’m coordinating training courses, and on occasion teach one. That has taken up a lot more time than I expected it to do. But it’s easy. Make calls, send e-mails, repeat. I spend a lot of time on what I call research and development, studying new trends in our business, taking notes, plan some training, write some simple design guides or specifications–most enjoyable, but not brain taxing.

For the last several weeks I have disengaged from writing. All I’m doing is organizing, filing, and typing a few things I wrote some time ago. I’m also back-checking the latest round of edits on Doctor Luke’s Assistant before discarding the mark-ups. I was working on some new Bible studies to write, but I’ve set those aside as well. Oh, yes, I also wrote a couple of haiku over the last weeks. These were not simple 5-7-5 ones, but rather well-thought out for the fundamental haiku elements.

Work around the house doesn’t take much effort, nor does the reading list I’m going through. So I have felt my brain slowly disengaging. Certainly at work it is somewhat, and now off work it is as well. This is a terrible feeling in a way, for I have always had my brain engaged in many things; scattering concentrated thought around many projects. Now it seems the toughest thing I have to decide is whether to keep a certain piece of paper or not, and if kept where to file it. I wrote a triolet about this sort of thing last November:

Conflicted

I long to live that day when I will rest,
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die
and stand before my Maker. Yet, I’m blessed;
I long to live! The day that I will rest
is somewhere out there, far beyond the quest
that now demands I try, and fail, and try.
I long to live that day when I will rest
and cease to tax my brain, then I will die.

But beginning last week, really Friday of the week before that, I began working on a project at work I had put off for a long time. It required learning a new computer program, and what I feared would be tedious work depicting a large drainage basin for calculating flood flows. Only one person in the office knew the program, and I didn’t think he knew it much. While waiting on him to answer an e-mail of a request for help, I worked on learning the program myself through reading the manual and just trying stuff. I got pretty far along, far enough to enter a dummy project and get it to run. I finally had this training session and it turned out the guy didn’t know any more than I did at that stage.

As I feared, the work is extremely tedious. It requires me to really think about what I am doing. My brain as a consequence has rebelled. By the time I finish a full day of working on that, I have nothing left to think at home. Hence I have been reading, doing a few of these simple writing things, and playing mindless computer games. For an hour or more.

My hope is that this difficult project at work will be like exercise for my brain. Can the brain atrophy, like one of the voluntary muscles? When I cease to tax my brain, will I then die–intellectually if not physically? Hmmm, enquiring minds want to know. Hopefully this will turn out to be good for me. Maybe a few more days of having to use my brain the full eight hours at work will strengthen it, and I will find myself with something left in the skull come evening. Hey, this evening I had enough left to write this post.

Engineering, Wesley

New Name for Blog?

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Well, my conference is finished. My presentation went well yesterday, with several in the room coming to see me afterwards, and a few stopping me in the exhibit hall even later. Heading home tomorrow, back to the real world. Or maybe this is the real world for me, the world of scholarly engineering with a Christian worldview as a foundation, not the world or authorship and novels, non-fiction, etc.

I’m thinking about changing the name of this blog. When I first created it last December, Todd Blog was just a place holder as I thought about what to name it. I’ve taken my time, and thought about it much. I’m thinking about re-naming it “An Arrow Through the Air”, after the passage in the John Wesley letter I blogged about in April 2008, over several posts. I love what Wesley said:

“I am afraid of nothing more than of growing old too soon, of having my body worn out before my soul is past childhood. Would it not be terrible to have the wheels of life stand still, when we had scarce started for the goal; before the work of the day was half done, to have the night come, wherein no one can work? I shiver at the thought of losing my strength before I have found [it]; to have my senses fail ere I have a stock of rational pleasures, my blood cold ere my heart is warmed with virtue! Strange, to look back on a train of years that have passed, ‘as an arrow through the air,’ without leaving any mark behind them, without our being able to trace them in our improvement!”

What better way to describe my current life situation? While I’m much older than Wesley when he wrote this, and am more than half-way done with my life, and thus maturity issues are not a factor. But I feel in my own life the urgency of accomplishment that Wesley so eloquently expressed. I find myself riding a sinusoidal wave between Wesley’s arrow and Emerson’s “time-enough-for-all-that-i-must-do.”

Anyone have any thoughts about the blog name change?

Engineering, travel

Orlando

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Yes, I am in Orlando, attending the StormCon 08 conference. I will present a paper tomorrow: “A Water and Wastewater Engineer Retools for Stormwater“. It will tell of the differences in the engineering approach to storm water as compared to water and wastewater, and give my 11 step program for how I’m working through the problem.

This is the first engineering paper I have written and prepared since one about wastewater odor control at a conference in Barcelona, Spain in 1990. I co-authored a paper that was presented in August 1990 (actually, I was listed as co-author, but in fact had little to do with the actual writing), but in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2 of that year I was not able to make the trip to that conference.

It’s good to be back on the “conference circuit”, I think. Went to this same one last year, in Phoenix, and made lots of good contacts. This year, however, I have more noticed the difference in age, my age compared to the average conference attendee. Very few people here are my age. Possibly this is because storm water treatment is such a new field for engineers, as is low impact development, that this is a young person’s game. Then again, perhaps I’m just getting old.

I don’t know when I will post again. I doubt much will come from this conference that will be of interest to the typical reader of this blog. And my writing suffers at this time. I expected to be able to write some, but so far not so. Maybe next week.