Category Archives: Engineering

Engineering, Writing

May the Fourth Be With You

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My attitude is definitely better today. The parking lot is paved! I spent about 5 hours there at the church, watching the work, keeping the contractor honest, and participating in the few decisions that needed to be made. Around the corner and across the street, the old derelict house is down! My chasing down the last permit yesterday provided some fruit. It should all be hauled off tomorrow, and hopefully the lot dressed up.

Back at the parking lot, the next three days will be quite busy and eventful, as they clean and seal-coat the south part of the lot, then maybe on Friday they can stripe the whole thing, weather permitting. Also tomorrow they should pour the new concrete entrance, replace some sidewalk, and maybe even replace the old exit with new concrete. It’s a lot to do, but they might just make it.

I was supposed to spend some time tonight working on the contractor’s pay application, but a large chunk of my available time was taken up with a call from our son. I hadn’t spoken with him for quite some time (a month perhaps?), so there was much to get caught up on. So my writing time and contractor pay application time for tonight are gone.

My work in general is fixin’ (as the locals say) to get really busy, as our Transportation Dept. head goes on an 11 day foreign mission trip and I pick up his work. So writing time will be virtually non-existent for the next two weeks, except maybe for working on my new Life Group lesson series. I’ll try to keep up on blog posts, maybe even increase them, but no promises.

Engineering, Writing

I’m Still Tired

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Today was an emotionally draining day. The contractors won’t show up for work either at a decent hour or at all, and the church parking lot remains a patchwork of asphalt strips and gravel base course that now needs to be re-graded and re-rolled. The City shut down our house demolition project for lack of a $50 tax–I mean permit. We had our State permit, but I didn’t know a city permit was needed as well.

Those two things threw me for a loop, even as I got back on one of my three flood studies and found out it may not be as bad as I thought it was. Perhaps less work, although I will have to have a CADD technician help me with the mapping. How nice it would be to know AutoCAD.

So I’m still not able to write much, here or anywhere. Be patient with me, and I’ll be back.

Although, the dream has taken several steps closer to the graveyard.

Engineering, Writing

I’m Tired

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It’s been an energy-sapping, emotions-draining, mind-numbing kind of week. I’ve been dealing with the plagiarism issue I wrote about on Monday. That’s taken care of for me, but a number of my colleagues at Suite 101 are still dealing with it.

The church parking lot project just drags on and on. The contractor who is supposed to do the paving has said every day he would be there first thing in the morning, finish the last little grading, and then schedule asphalt deliveries. He didn’t show at all Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday his grader operator came. He worked an hour or so, left the site in marginally better condition but not even close to ready to lay asphalt on, and went off to smoke crack, or whatever it is he does the other 23 hours in the day. Today I called his boss at 10:00, and he said he had a crew en route and had just been waiting on the asphalt plants to “fire-up today”. I told him the site was not ready for asphalt. He said he’d come by, which he did, and between him and the crack-head they got the site ready for asphalt. Of course, rain is forecast for tomorrow, so that means most likely we’ll have another Sunday with the lot unfinished. And my credibility in the tank.

The labyrinth weir project drags on and on. We got something done on it today (around 6:00 PM), and I can see the end in sight, but there a many conference calls to go before I sleep. Meanwhile, our transportation department head is leaving for a foreign missions trip next Thursday, and I’ll have to do his work for 12 days. Oh, and the man who is volunteering his time watching my parking lot job is gone for 10 days beginning tomorrow. Then there’s my two flood studies I really need to get finished, and another one I’m supposed to start.

Of course, this is the peak season for yard work right now. If it doesn’t rain Saturday, I’ve got a couple of wheelbarrows full of oak pollen to pick up and remove, gutters of pollen to clean, and two right-of-way strips to mow–oh, and weeds to pull from the rock yard. Or maybe I’ll just spray, and say to heck with environmentalism for a weekend.

I sure don’t see time to write for the next two weeks, except whatever I can sneak in here.

Engineering, reading, Writing

Logs Loosened, Logs Added, the Jam is Still

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Well, the reference book about labyrinth weirs I’ve been waiting for arrived today, just a half-hour before the third conference call in four days about the problem. A quick review of the most critical chapter in the book confirms that our weir is under-designed, and won’t pass the flow intended. At the conference call, everyone seemed pleased with the progress. But tomorrow I will have to tackle the book in earnest, and work on some solutions.

The big negative for the day was my Centerton Little Osage Creek flood study. As I reported Monday I figured out the mistake in the printing and got the reports printed correctly. That was good. Unfortunately, when I checked the spread of the flood in the model it did not match what we show on the mapping. That’s bad. That means I’ve got to figure out if the model is wrong, or if the mapping is wrong. But I’m supposed to have the exact same topography in the model as is on the maps. So how the heck can the spread of the flood be 50 percent different? More logs added to the pile.

The church parking lot continues to progress nicely. Of course, I’m getting queries about it from all quarters, along with some advice. Still, it’s not bad. I’ll have to go to the site early tomorrow (more time away from my job) and make a couple of decisions. But either tomorrow or Friday we should have asphalt down, if the rain is not too bad.

Writing goes well. I continue to read in Poets and Writers, finally getting past the features into the regular columns, several of which include advice for writers. I’ll get through at least one of those tonight. My actual writing has been confined to passage notes for the Harmony of the gospels. I’ve written seven sets of passage notes since Sunday. I’ll get two more done tonight, then may pull off for a while and work on my next Life Group lesson series.

I’m back in a routine, getting stuff done. I’m not writing creatively, nor reading for pleasure, but it’s still a routine, still a good groove.

Engineering, Writing

A Couple of More Logs Loosened Today

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The rains held off, which means the contractor for our church parking lot project was able to get some good work done. Which means he is working towards laying asphalt on Thursday. Which means the project might be finished by the end of next week. Today I helped him layout the new entrance to be cut in. Tomorrow I’ll give him sketches on the rain gardens to be added. A log loosened from the logjam. Oh, and I called the second contractor, the one who is to demolish an old house across the street where we hope to add some overflow parking. A small log loosened.

Today I was able to figure out why the floodplain modeling results were not displaying correctly on the Little Osage Creek project in Centerton. FEMA had given me comments concerning this, thinking the results were wrong. I was pretty sure that the results were correct, but that for some reason the output tables were not displaying properly. I made little progress on it last week. Today I took more than an hour to go through some program manuals and some sample projects, and figured it out. By 5:00 PM I had printed a very nice looking encroachment table, with the right results. Tomorrow I should be able to get it turned in again. A log loosened from the logjam.

This evening I brought some work home, the printouts of the outside peer review of the labyrinth weirs on the project I’m not supposed to talk about–some kind of confidentiality agreement they failed to mention to me until the last couple of days. I worked on the calculations the peer reviewer presented. The calcs were correct, but his presentation of the key equation had a typo in it, repeated in two places. In the morning I’ll inform him of his error, with gladness in my heart. Unfortunately, if when the reference I ordered arrives I learn that he rightly applied the equation and variables and adjusting constants, it will show that our design won’t work as intended. Still, this is another log loosened.

This evening I found time to read a couple of articles in Poet and Writer, working my way slowly through the issue. The next one has come, so I need to get on it. Then I came downstairs and completed two sets of passage notes for the Harmony of the gospels, and began a third before breaking to write this post. This makes two nights in a row I returned to my routine from before tax time. Two days doesn’t make a pattern, but I came close to that pattern on Saturday. This isn’t writing that is likely to ever lead to publishing, but it’s writing, it’s enjoyable, it’s Bible study, and it feels good. Another log loosened.

I’m not sure when I can declare the logjam broken apart and floating downstream, but it’s getting closer. Probably not till the parking lot project is finished and I fully make up the time I’ve been siphoning off from my employer’s expectations. I worked three hours at home the last two days. I probably have another 6 to 8 to go before I’m back even. When I finish this mag there’s many more to go. Plus the m-i-l’s taxes. I think once I get back on those, probably in a week, and get them done, I will declare the jam broken and the river running free.

Engineering

If You Have Nothing to Write About

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Once in one of his letters to a good friend, Cicero wrote, “If you have nothing to say, write a letter about that.” Or, something like that. I don’t feel like pulling up the letter at present.

I know tonight is a night I should write in the blog, but I’m a little without topic write now. Today was a good day, very busy with my silt fence studies. I finally pulled up a blank specification template and actually began writing the specification for silt fence. I found it to be a little more difficult than I expected. When I got to the part of entering what types of silt fence fabric we will accept, I went to the highway department list of accepted products. I found fifteen different fabrics accepted. On our standard drawings we have four listed. So I had a lot of work to do.

I found the highway department’s list terribly out of date. Or maybe full of errors. They were using some products that aren’t really silt fence type fabric. They had one company down as a manufacturer when they are actually a re-seller, not even a value-added re-seller. The products they listed varied as to apparent opening size by 2.8:1, and by permittivity (a measure of flow rate) by 145:1!!!! Clearly, someone wasn’t thinking when they put all these products on the list. Hmmm, one naturally suspects kickbacks in a situation like this.

But as I was trying to view manufacturer’s literature, I found I would have to take a step backwards and actually do some design work before I could specify the darn thing. This is how I should have done it in the first place.

I must digress to say that on March 31st I will be presenting a paper at an erosion control conference in Bentonville (almost walking distance from the new office), the subject being “A Thousand Little Treatment Plants: Process-based Design of Erosion and Sediment Control Practices.” The premise of the paper is that the industry has been treating these things as “best management practices.” As management practices they are art, not science. Hence they don’t get designed. Hence they don’t get detailed and specified correctly. Hence they don’t get selected, installed, or maintained properly.

Well, here I am writing a paper saying the industry isn’t doing the right design work, and I’m trying to write a spec without first doing some design work! Ridiculous. I had done enough study to know that my spec should not allow vastly different types of fabrics in it, and to know what the key properties were that affected the design. But do I chose the small group of fabrics that have a flow rate of 5 to 10 gallons per minute per square foot, or the small group of fabrics that discharge at 100 to 150 gpm/sf? Which is the better basis for silt fence design? I don’t know, but I need to in order to write the spec properly.

Or, should we be specifying two types of silt fence: low flow capacity to maximize sedimentation, and high flow capacity to minimize upstream side ponding area? Perhaps there’s room for both in our specs. And maybe that would give us one more tool in our sediment control toolbox. Of course, our engineers would then have to make intelligent decisions rather than mindlessly put symbols on drawings and ignoring specifications. Wouldn’t that be terrible.

So, that means we have at least four types of silt fence:

  1. Low flow capacity i.e. maximum sedimentation silt fence
  2. High flow capacity i.e. filtration only silt fence
  3. Wire backed silt fence, which I suppose could be either of the two
  4. Belted silt retention fence, which has a different type of fabric and which I’ve never used; it’s on the list to research tomorrow.

I haven’t yet thought of how to integrate all four of those in the specification I’m writing. I suppose I will before long. I want to thing about this low flow/high flow situation. Surely I’m not the first person in the world to have looked at these fabrics and thought of how their properties affects their performance on the job site, am I? Someone out there has done some work on this silt fencing, and has made a decision on these different fabrics. It wasn’t our highway department, obviously, but someone must have.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m breaking some new ground here. I can see reasons to apply both types of silt fence. Of course, until I sit down tomorrow and do those calculations and figure how these flow rates apply to the situation on the ground, I may be worrying about nothing. Somehow, though, I don’t think I am. I think I’ve stumbled upon something important, and will do something that will improve the industry. Or at least CEI’s part of this.

Well, for having nothing to write about when I started, I wrote quite a bit. Not of much interest for those readers who tune in ever day to see what I’ve written about my writing career, but it’s something of interest to me at the moment, and that’s what this blog’s all about. Carlyle and Emerson can wait for other posts.

Engineering, freelance writing, poetry

A Freelance Success

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Good evening, all you faithful readers. I’m just back from writers guild, where I shared my long poem “A Woodland Acre” from my poetry book Father Daughter Day. I’m going through that book four pages at a time (four pages is our limit). Last week this stopped me in the middle of the poem. This week, however, two of our members were gone, and two who were there were not there last week. So they had me read it all from the beginning. Good reviews.

Tonight I had an e-mail from the editor at BiblioBuffet, and on-line magazine featuring reading and books. One of my February freelance submittals was an article titled, “When the Vehicle Will Be Worthy of the Spirit,” about the beginning of Carlyle and Emerson’s correspondence. They are going to publish it in their guest column section, probably a month or so from now. The pay is small, but there is pay. I don’t know what the exposure will be, but it can’t hurt. It’s possible that, after a few guest columns, I could become a regular columnist at an increased pay. Once the article goes up I’ll post a link on Arrow. I worked hard on that article, and to have it accepted is gratifying.

Every small writing success puts me on the upward track of the roller coaster. Or is it the downward track (the metaphor being reversed of the real life experience)? The one that is more pleasurable. There are enough rejections in writing to cause misery and despair that you need to latch on to the few successes and ride the wind with them. Hmmm, was that enough metaphors to mix?

So I’m happy tonight. I’ll probably read twenty pages in the Coulson book, four pages in an alumni mag, and who knows what else. A couple of articles for Suite 101 are turning over in the gray cells.

Oh, today was also good because I finished my paper for my March 31st presentation, only one day behind the deadline. Also I finished a work related article on erosion and sediment control at construction sites that I’ll probably submit tomorrow. It’s not a bad article, somewhat of a rebuttal of an article a year ago in that mag. I suspect there’s no pay involved, but it’s another credit. Oh, and I had a lunch meeting with a woman I met at the Dallas conference. She is with a business right here in the area, and it looks as if she’ll have some work for CEI. Not right away, but it would be nice to get enough business to justify the cost of the trip.

So, all in all a good day. I’ll take ’em any chance I can.

Engineering, Writing

My Mind is Still Full

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As often happens after a long conference, the realities of work and life don’t allow for as much translation of mind fullness to practical results. As I wrote last Sunday, I returned from the IECA conference with a full mind. So many things to do at work about erosion control. And, from my continued reading in Chuck Colson’s How Now Shall We Live with many things to do and think about with my spiritual life.

But the after-conference realities of work hit me this week. I began by organizing the stuff I brought back from the conference: business cards, magazines, copies of technical papers, manufacturer’s materials. That lasted 15 minutes before I was summoned to a meeting involving possible warranty work on two subdivisions, one I worked on and one I didn’t. That lasted 90 minutes and required follow-ups with e-mails and several long discussions. It culminated in a 2 1/2 hour meeting today with the City of Rogers. They claim we did some things wrong in the design, but we don’t think so. The meeting went well.

Then on Tuesday there as an hour usurped to attend a webinar about the new MUTCD manual and regulations (traffic signage, striping, and signalization). Then there was the project in Lone Tree, CO that one of our young engineers designed, which was given to me to review because the City’s stormwater regulations were tricky and others who might have been able to review it were unavailable. That took close to eight hours between a detailed review of the drainage report and then understanding some difficult City standard details (items that go on construction drawings). Oh, yes, also the third review of a flood study in Rogers, of a lake dammed up on a creek.

In the two reviews, I found much needing to be changed. I struggled with the reviews, for fear that the large number of comments I had to give would crush the spirit of these two young engineers. But both took it well, and seemed pleased with the time I took to explain to them what the basis of my comments was. For the Lone Tree project, the misinterpretation of the City’s details might have been disastrous if I hadn’t reviewed it.

All this work, including bringing some things home tonight, is cutting into my writing time. Even tonight I brought some papers home, and an erosion magazine, to finish re-reading an important article and begin crafting a rebuttal for it. I may never turn the rebuttal into a publishable article, but I’ll enjoy writing it. I also made some more notes for the paper I’m going to give March 31 at the Muddy Waters Blues conference in Bentonville. I’m supposed to have my PowerPoint presentation turned in on Monday, but no way will I be ready. I might–I say might–have the paper written by then, but I can’t pull a PowerPoint together until I know what I’m going to say.

Plus, at work they have blocked blogspot, so I can’t even access An Arrow Through the Air from there. Nor can I access many of the writing blogs I read. So I’ll have to do almost all my blog work at home now, in crowded evenings and on weekends. That has put a cramp in my writing other things. I intended to work an hour or so on an article for Suite101, preparing to post it tomorrow. But after cooking supper and doing some dishes and adding the checkbook and working on that work stuff, it’s already 10:10 and I’m exhausted. Yet the end is not yet. I wanted to read twenty pages tonight in Colson, and I have a stack of junk mail to go through. So Suite will have to wait till tomorrow, if then.

Engineering, freelance writing, Writing

Hobnobbing Over – Now on Information Overload

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I arrived back in Bella Vista about 10:30 PM Friday night. Grandson Ephraim (visiting us with our daughter, the young business woman) was in bed and daughter Sara was out. I unpacked quickly and went to my reading chair beside Lynda’s reading chair. It was as if I never left.

Except my mind was, and still is, full of things to do at work as a result of the conference. I attended a full schedule of technical sessions. Most of them were good, though, as with any conference, a few did not live up to the publicized expectations. I ducked one technical session to attend a meeting of the Professional Development Committee. As I told them, if I were a member of the organization, and if I were active at the committee level, this is the committee I would gravitate towards. It was quite interesting to see them at work. I learned they have a program to review abstracts and papers for the next conference (Feb 2011), and it appears I can join this program, even as a non-member, and get free conference registration next year.

My mind is full of things CEI needs to do better with our designs to prevent erosion and control sediment. We do some things well, but have large areas for improvements. This is especially true in our construction specifications. We have very poor construction specs as far as erosion and sediment control are concerned. We rely on the State construction general permit, which is not a construction spec. It hasn’t bitten us so far, but that is probably because enforcement is so lax.

My mind is full of papers I would like to write and present at the next conference. I began, evenings in the hotel, making some notes. I’m up to four papers I think I could write, although two of those probably need to be combined into one. Three abstracts to submit would be enough, I think. If they were all accepted, that would almost be too much to present at one conference. Still, I should probably pursue that many and see if I could spread them out over a couple of conferences.

My mind is also full of articles I would like to write about some of this stuff. So much of it is of general interest that I think I could translate the knowledge I have and expanded during the conference and crank out ten to fifteen articles in three weeks. Whether they’d be money-making articles I don’t know, but they would at least fulfill dual roles as writing credits and professional credits. Among the exhibitors at the conference were five magazines or publishers. I was able to speak to four of them. None of them pay freelancers, relying instead on the writers’ desires to obtain professional credits to submit work. Bummer; I don’t know if I want to pursue professional credits like that.

Well, on to other things for the evening. Coulson’s book awaits me, as do the Carlyle-Emerson letters and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. If I can’t make any money writing at least I can enjoy reading.

Engineering, miscellaneous

Limited First Day Hob-nobbing

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Well, I made it to the conference fine. Driving down yesterday afternoon and evening I must have been daydreaming, for I missed my preferred exit from I-40. Went to another one, and it was an inferior road. Probably delayed me 10 to 15 minutes. Then, when I got close to downtown Dallas, I missed the road I wanted to take. So I wound up on downtown streets. Fortunately I had studied the map just enough, and have a good enough sense of direction, that I made all the right turns and ended up where I wanted to go.

I turned on to Elm Street, which I thought was one of the streets that went through Dealy Plaza. Sure enough it was, and shortly I bust on to the JFK assassination site, the grassy knoll to my right. It was dark, and I was in traffic, so couldn’t really slow down to see much. But to just be there was enough. I’ve read so much on the assassination, and formed opinions on it. This is my eighth trip to Dallas (not including plane changes at DFW) but it’s the first time I’ve gotten to Dealy Plaza. Friday, after the conference, I hope to get there and maybe park and walk around.

I got the error in my class registration worked out today, and sat through a well-taught class on LID: Low Impact Development (or Design, I keep forgetting). This was exactly the right class for me and for CEI. I’ll take this info back and teach our folks five or six classes on it the rest of the year. Now I have to head up to my room and prepare for tomorrow, figure out which of the concurrent sessions I’ll go to.

And I hope to get 30 pages read in How Now Shall We Live?