Work is seriously kicking me in the nuts

With the wide away for a week visiting family, I thought it'd be a great time to catch up on tv, sleep, blogging, and video games. But noooooo...

There's a very very big highway bridge project that my company is doing down in the States¹. I wasn't assigned to this project originally, as I'm already swamped with other work. Then last week one of the engineers on the job enexpectantly headed back to China for a family emergency; he's probably not coming back. So I'm suddenly thrust into the fray.

The problem: a very rapidly approaching deadline (today, in fact). As in, I have had less than a week and a half to get up to speed and start delivering calculations for two bridges I'm completely unfamiliar with, ruled by design codes that I don't know, and using five new software packages that I've never seen in my life. Oh, and the lead engineer on the project, the guy who's supposed to be helping me catch up to all this, left yesterday on a three week vacation. And another one of the engineers on the project left for a three week vacation last week, so any hope for assistance was gone.

So I'm in the office working Saturday and Sunday, Wednesday night, and all of Thursday night through to Friday, taking a quick 20 minute nap under my desk. I drank a lot of Coke and ate way way too many chewy peach candies. It's pretty damn tricky learning completely new things under incredible time constraints and sleep deprived.

Fortunately, through perseverance, I can say that I got my work done on time (for this submission anyway), though I can't guarantee anything about the correctness of the calcs.

I honestly have no idea what's going on around me right now. I drove past my house today after work.

And it's only going to get worse in the coming weeks as the rest of the submissions come due and other jobs start up again. Maybe I'll have time for sleep in the summer.

Pessimism is a Winning Proposition

I won a 50/50 draw at the office this week! We had a guy running the New York marathon to fund raise for a charity in Africa. He organized a bunch of fundraising activities, such as mini putt, paper airplane competitions, and pizza days, and this draw was one of these activities. The objective was to guess his time, each guess was $1 with the winner getting half and the charity getting the other half.

Apparently he runs marathons frequently and he planned on doing a 4 hours 15 minutes. Me, being the pessimistic type, figured he would get a cramp or something. So I guessed 4 hours, 42 minutes, and 36 seconds. I was actually 26 seconds too optimistic, with our man running it in 4 hours, 43 minutes, 2 seconds.

Hooray for the powers of pessimism!

(ok, the prize wasn't all that it was cracked up to be - only $19 - but I generally don't win anything, so this is a huge deal for me.)

The Amazing Disappearing Geotechs

Obligatory preamble: long time no post, busy real life, kicking blog in nuts, etc.

The other day at work I sent some requests for quotes to three geotechnical consultants for a pedestrian bridge job we're doing. Sometimes we just send out the letters to the companies as a whole and start with "Dear Sir/Madam:" but that's always very unsatisfying and we hate doing that. So we went the extra mile and dug up our company contact lists and found the names of the person at each company who actually runs the geotechnical investigations (two men and a woman). Very nice job, I thought.

So I followed up with the contacts at the three geotech consultants two days later to make sure they received the letters and found that man #1 no longer works at his company. Great. So I have to track down the replacement new guy.

So I checked man #2 at the second consultant's office, and it turns out he's away from the office until the day before the quote is due. Fantastic timing, eh? So I have to pester some people until I find the name of the guy who'll be taking over for the job, some Bob guy (not his real name). So I send him an email saying, "Hey Bob, I hear you're taking over for man #2 while he's gone, etc..." I get a reply from him, and "Bob" is actually Dr. Bob, company president. Hmm, maybe a little more formal, respectful tone would have been helpful.

So on to woman #1 at the last consultant's office. Guess what: she's away from the office, too. Strangely, she's away also until exactly the day before the quote is due, just like man #2. Hmmm. I wonder, is there a secret cross-consultant illicit geotech affair going on? (Nah, probably just a geotech conference or coincidental vacations or something, but this is funnier.) Anyway, I had to track down yet another replacement person.

Geotech consultants aren't exactly making my life easy.

We could all use some protection

Occasionally in the office we have external suppliers come in and give lunch and learn presentations so that we'd hopefully specify their products in our designs. I love these lunch and learns; the content and quality of the presentations vary wildly but I'm a sucker for free food, so I always go.

On Monday, we're having a presentation on Cathodic Protection of Concrete Structures:

For those who don't know, the big problem with concrete, especially near road surfaces in places where snow and ice is a problem, is the corrosion of the steel reinforcing bars (rebars) inside. Concrete is permiable, so dissolved chlorides come in and cause the steel to corrode. Concrete is also really strong in compression but really weak in tension. There are two main problems with this: 1) that rebar is there to give the concrete strength in tension, and if you remove some steel, then your concrete structure isn't as strong anymore, and 2) rust takes up more space than the original steel, so this results in tensile stresses within the concrete as the rust tries to expand, which will cause the outer cover of concrete to spall off. Very bad stuff.

Now there are a few ways to combat this. The main thing we do now that we didn't do in decades past is use much more concrete cover (thickness of concrete between the exposed surface and the rebar). This will greatly delay the ingress of chlorides. Other options are coating the rebar with epoxy so that the chlorides can't get to it or using stainless steel.

Cathodic protection is another method. In an electrochemical cell, the anode corrodes and the cathode doesn't. So if you connect a block of metal to your steel that has a higher electrochemical potential than steel, this will act as a sacrificial anode, itself rusting while pushing more electrons into the steel and preventing it from rusting. You can also used impressed current cathodic protection, which uses a power source.

However, the email notice for the lunch and learn said Catholic Protection.

With recent news out of Ireland, I guess it would be a good idea to have protection from Catholics.

Yes, I work with concrete

A friend on my floor hockey team was talking with my wife about their respective crappy job situations. He'd been temporarily laid-off for a week and was really hoping to get into a government job for which he had been turned down once already. My wife is just starting a 3 month contract job, but long term prospects are weak.

I'm not paying attention to the conversation too much, but my friend turns to me and says, "What about your job? Is it concrete?"

"Yes," I say, "I work with concrete. Also structural steel a lot, but mainly concrete."

"Um, what I meant was 'In this current poor economic climate, is your job stable?'"

"Oh. Ummm. Yes, very stable and busy, thank you."

Happy Groundhog Day

Note that I have nothing interesting at all to say about groundhogs. All I know is that regardless of the groundhog outcome, this is Canada, and it will be damn cold for a long time yet.

I've still been way too busy to finish my Alpha Course posts or even read my favourite blogs. Too much work. Too much extracurricular activities.

I did, however, wear a tie to work (for a client meeting) for the very first time in my professional career, so that's got to count for something. Or not.

That is all.

It’s Almost Moving Day

Since getting back from Greece, I’ve been ludicrously busy at work¹ and at home getting ready for the big move. It still hasn’t struck me yet that tomorrow my wife and I will be moving into our very own house.

It’s hard to believe: me, a home owner (though not really; the mortgage company is the one ponying up the dough – give us about 7-8 years to pay it off). It wasn’t too long ago that I was living in a slum of an apartment in grad school.

I often miss grad school, with its relative lack of responsibility, flexible work hours, etc, and part of my brain would love to go back to it if I could. The other part says, “Dude, you can afford to buy a house!” So, understandably, brain part #2 wins, and thus I stay at my relatively well paying job.

Speaking of the house itself, we really lucked out and got a house exactly in our price range, well-built, and in a location we wanted. My wife, of course, thanks her prayers to God for it. Actually, it was the same thing with her job and with my job – we both had requirements for the jobs we wanted to get when we left school and we both found jobs that satisfied those requirements. She thanked God. She didn’t thank the fact that we’re both properly educated and experienced for these jobs and searched until we found something suitable (she actually spent 3 months after we left school searching for her job). Again, with the house we got ourselves a good realtor, told him exactly what we wanted, and eventually something came up. It’s no miracle.

I leave with a quote from The Simpsons:

Homer: So, Mr. Malloy, it seems that the cat has been caught by the very person who was trying to catch him.
Skinner: How ironic.

¹'Work' being a bridge that was due for tender on May 16, wasn't actually tendered until May 22, and we're sending an addendum out tomorrow to fix all the little errors and omissions that we missed originally.

Mmmm, souvlaki

After three weeks of living hell while my supervisor was away ("I'm going to New Zealand for 3 weeks; have these two bridges and this bridge rehab database completed by the time I get back. By the way, I haven't left you any of the background info that will allow you to do these things and all the other people working on these projects, regardless of whether they work for our company or for the owners, take forever to get anything done.") things are finally winding down. My supervisor is back, so all the crap I tried (unsuccessfully) to finish while he was away now gets dumped on him.

I can guarantee that it will still be waiting for me when I get back from my vacation to Greece in two weeks.

No that I no longer care about work (I'm just waiting out the clock now), and I finished taking care of all the mortgage/lawyer stuff for our new house, and the trip planning has been finished, I can finally start to look forward to Greece. I'm a history nerd, so this is going to be really cool. I may have to drag my bored wife around several museums and ruins, but I'll be happy.

We'll be taking a bus tour from Athens to Meteora, Delphi, Olympia, Napflion, Corinth, Mycenae, and finally back to Athens. After that, we get a more leisurely 2 days in Mykonos, 3 days in Santorini, and 3 days in Crete. We'll be taking lots of pictures, eating lots of gyros, and probably spending way too much money for people who have just bought a house.

Fortunately, my company just gave its staff a $1000 bonus. Yay! Let me open this here cheque and - hey! damn government took $418 out of my bonus.

My office is getting kicked in the nuts

I have a crappy little grey cubicle at the office. This crappy grey cubicle sits in a pale grey room. I am far away from any source of natural light. The very loud PA speaker, which services a tributary area of about 8m x 10 m, is directly over my head.

I am being moved to a new cube.

You’d think I’d be happy about it, but I am not. You see, my new cube will be even worse. Even smaller. Even greyer. The room it’s in is small and prison-like, dark and with cinderblock walls on all sides. It also happens to be on the far side of the building through several additional security doors and past the garbage room in a part of the building that I had never been to before in my life.

I heard from the previous occupants that they called this room "The Morgue."

My current cube has the benefit of being near the rest of my department but far enough away that no one can conveniently bother me or walk by – the best of both worlds, really. The new cube will be the worst of both, as half the department will move with me to the new prison room and the other half will stay put. Now I’ll have to call ahead if I want to see someone from the staying half, and then walk all the way across the building to see them; however, the other half will be so close so as to be practically breathing over my shoulder.

The only improvement will be that I’m closer to the window, though I still can’t see it directly. I forgot to check if the PA speaker is directly overhead again and, since it would take me about 5 minutes to walk there, I don’t think I’ll bother checking now (even if I could find the place again – seriously, I didn’t even know this area of the building existed).

I must look on the bright side of life, though, for the situation is even worse for other people. My supervisor is losing his big office with a window and moving into a much smaller new office featuring zero windows in the walls, zero windows in the dark grey metal door, block walls on all four sides, a low ceiling, poor lighting, door frames and window sills from the previous incarnation of the room that have since been filled-in with masonry, and, inexplicably, a lightswitch that is on the opposite side of the room from the door (knowing my supervisor's predisposition towards clutter, I predict many injuries). Close the door and it really is like being in a storage closet.

The War on Christmas ... Parties?

This year, my company spent a goodly amount of money on a holiday party for the staff. We booked a large banquet facility, they gave us a few free drinks, and all was good. Except...

Why do some people feel the need to angrily yell "Christmas!" whenever someone mentions "Holiday?" Seriously: the company president makes a speech and says the terms "Holiday Party" and "Holiday Season" a few times and each time there are a few people who scream "Christmas!" in retaliation. Seriously, wtf? In any other situation if you yell something in retaliation to the company president, you'd be on the express train to unemploymentville.

Personally, I really don't mind if people say "Christmas" when referring to the holiday season or their parties or whatever. That said, for a lot of people out there, it isn't Christmas. We're a big company, and we have hundreds of employees, many of whom are Middle Eastern, Indian, Asian, or whatever who are not Christian. What's the company to do? Alienate a sizeable portion of their employees for the sake of some stubbornly backward thumpers?

Actually, in the past, that's exactly what my company did: the Holiday party was called a Christmas party, a senior executive lead us in saying grace, it was held in a freakin' Shriner's club. And it was 99% old people. Hardly any non-Christians showed up.

This year, they were striving to make improvements. And, to a certain extent, it worked. The venue was better, more younger employees showed up, and they tried to be more inclusive. Still, sadly, very few non-Christians were there.

Hopefully, the reason for the no-shows is that the non-Christians (who are predominently non-Westerners) just aren't party people. However, I doubt it would help that there are still insensitive people vocally letting them know that they are an inconsequential minority.

I'm Old

It's my birthday today and I feel old. Mind you, I'm not actually old but I feel geriatric. (Actually, I've had chronic leg/knee injuries since grade 9, so in that way I am old. It's not the age, it's the mileage). I would feel positively ancient except my supervisor at work just turned the big 5-0 a week and a half ago (and he looks it). As it is, that makes me feel a whole lot better about my measly age.

Age is a funny thing that way: for such an absolute number, it's all relative. Normally, I feel like a baby since almost all my coworkers and friends seem to be older than me. I guess that's what happens when you leave school and join the workforce.

But at school, things were very different. I remember the tail end of the second year of my masters. I was finishing up my thesis over the summer and planning on defending in August. Meanwhile, many of my friends from my own year had either defended in May or had vacated their cubicles, preferring to start new jobs and finish their grad work at home. Filling the void were brand new MSc candidates a clear two years younger than me: too young for me to have ever socialized with them during undergrad. They looked like highschool kids. And to them, I was just some old has-been taking up valuable office space and refusing to leave. A relic. A dinosaur. A fossil. And I felt it.

Anyway, that's enough moping. Afterall, if my ancient supervisor can celebrate, so can I. I've managed to visit most of my family and get some great Indian food (mmm, lamb dhansak), and the presents so far (cash and a bookshelf) are exactly what I need, so all is well.

So really all is good. Except that I learned (the hard way) that my trusty black dress shoes have sprung a leak. Now my left foot is very soggy and will remain as such for the rest of the afternoon. That kind of puts a damper on things.

Return to Blogging link dump and update

Well I haven't posted in a while, so I guess I need an explanation. Ready?

I'm lazy.

Ok, now that that's out of the way, here are some interesting things I've had sent my way the past couple of days:

1) Symphony Mario! I'm sure some of you have seen this before.

2) Viva Caligula! An ultraviolent cartoony flash game from Adult Swim. The most thorough review I've found is here.

In other news, my hole is done, and it looks good. Hooray! I didn't kill anybody. Also, the arena in Kingston where I designed the temporary support tower didn't collapse during construction, so double hooray! Now a new project is starting up, which is another shit tank. Hooray! (Umm, hooray? Upon further consideration, another shit tank probably isn't "hooray" worthy.)

6:00am + 1 Thunderstorm + 14m Deep Pit = 1 Crappy Morning

This morning I went to visit my hole. It is currently less than 3m away from its final depth of 14m. It's getting big and scary and, miraculously, it hasn't fallen down yet. I was required to go observe the stressing of the last level of soil anchors. This was problem #1 - the stressing was supposed to start at 7:30am, meaning I would have to leave at 6:30am to get there, further meaning that I would have to get up at 6:00am. As I am not a morning person, this was excruciatingly painful. Excruciatingly. However, I appear to be getting smarter: unlike last time, I remembered my safety boots and hardhat so I didn't have to drive all the way home again.

Things started well when I got there. Then the rains came. It started as a sprinkle, then died. The contractors said that if it rained too much, they'd have to take their trucks out of the pit and stop construction because the pit would be impossible to leave if it got too muddy. Well, it started to sprinkle again, then we saw some lightning and heard a thunderclap somewhere in the distance. Then another, closer. Then the deluge started. The contractors hustled to their trucks, desperate to get them out of the pit before the access slope got too muddy, stopping only for essentials, like lighting up a cigarette.

The first truck made it up okay. The second truck required 3 runs at the slope and all of it's 300+ horsepower to make it up, sending up huge plumes of mud in its wake. Man, did it get muddy in a hurry; my boots were so heavy I could barely walk. Those of us not in trucks hid under a steel beam protruding from the wall, that is, until the thunderstorm came closer overhead and the potential for electrocution outweighed the certainty of getting very wet. As we abandoned our refuge, we realized that the rain was decreasing in intensity, and, within about 15 minutes or so, it was actually getting a little sunny. It was too late, though; the deluge had turned the entry slope into a big, muddy Slip 'n' Slide, and we could see in the horizon that more rain would be on the way eventually. There would be no stressing of anchors today.

So the result? I woke up freakishly early (by my admittedly nocturnal standards), drove about an hour through frustrating construction, got rained on, found my clothes (and myself) to be covered in mud, and we didn't even accomplish any of what we set out to do; all this while I should have been in the office doing design work on stuff that's already running behind.

However, the morning wasn't a total loss. For instance, I learned that the two most popular words among construction workers these days are "fucker" and "cocksucker," which they use to address each other (jovially) and to refer to consultants (this includes me, while I'm within earshot - decidedly not jovially).

Stressing has been postponed to Friday and Monday, and someone still needs to observe on our behalf. It won't be me, though. I'm going on vacation until Tuesday. So long, Suckas!

Implications of the Minneapolis bridge collapse

By now, everyone has heard of the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed, and some of you are probably wondering if I have any special insights because of my having a masters in structural engineering.

Answer: no, not really. We've been talking about it at the office, sure, but we really don't have access to any of the structural reports, better photos, etc, so we have no idea specifically why the bridge collapsed.

In more general terms, the big story is the massive infrastructure deficit - the gap between needed and actual infrastructure investment - in North America right now. That's right, it's a serious problem in Canada, too. According to Canadian experts, Canada faces an infrastructure deficit of $74 billion, with $10 billion of that due to bridges. That's a significant amount of coin. Of course, it's much much worse in the States right now, so it's amazing that more structures haven't fallen.

That's part of the reason why I did my masters research in the field that I did. My research was under the umbrella of the ISIS Canada (Intelligent Sensing for Innovative Structures) Research Network. Their goal is to make our structures more sustainable and durable by incorporating lightweight, non-corrodible synthetic structural materials into buildings, either for new construction or for repair and refit(the "Innovative Structures" part), as well as using fibre-optic sensing systems and other high-tech computerized monitoring methods to ensure that our structures are performing as desired (the "Intelligent Sensing" part).

As for what the collapse means for us, as my boss put it, it means we'll be very busy with bridge inspections for the next little while. In typical political knee-jerk fashion, my boss got a call almost immediately after the collapse from the local municipality asking him how long until their bridges collapse and if we can inspect stuff for them. It's a good time for us business-wise, but it's sad that it takes a tragedy like this to get politicians on the move when the underlying problem is already so well known.

Monday Rant: People taking stuff and not telling me

I'm in the structural department but right now I'm designing the structural components of a job from the mechanical department. It's pipeline support system and part of my job requires me to put together a specifications document (specs) relating to all the materials that will be used to construct the damn thing. In this case, we have sections for cast-in-place concrete, structural steel, concrete formwork, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, but still I have to tailor our general specs to fit the job.

So I'm marking up these specs by hand last week and I'm just about done. Friday rolls around and all of a sudden the specs have disappeared from my desk. I search everywhere, bother my supervisor to see if I accidentally left it on his desk, turn my office upside-down and inside-out, completely spazzing looking for it. I finally gave up and went home. This morning I come in and have a meeting with the mechanical department people. They inform me that they've printed up the specs I gave them. Oh? How'd they do that? Some damn mech person pinched the document from my desk without telling me. They didn't so much as leave me a freakin' post-it note. How thoughtful. I spazzed out for two hours plus worried for most of the weekend over this damned thing and all they had to do was leave a note. Nothing much, just "I've taken the spec - mech" would do. Is that too much to ask?

It's not even just the waste of my time (actually, my supervisor wasted a little time searching his desk, too); it's also bad business. Turns out I wasn't even done doing the markups yet. I could have told them that much on Friday if they had informed me they were taking it. Instead, it wastes more time because I have to have them redo it again with the additional changes. Now imagine what happens if they believe this is final copy and ready to send out? If they steal a half-done document off my desk and send it out, then what? We're screwed, that's what.

I am a gigantic idiot

In that my recent idiocy is quite spectacular, rather than me being an idiot and also being very large. I assure you that I am of reasonable height and weight.

So why am I a gigantic idiot? Probably because yesterday was one long stream of stupid actions by me. You see, yesterday I had to visit a job site - actually a giant excavation where the shoring system was designed by me. Shoring in this case comprises steel piles with timber lagging in between forming a wall. The wall stays upright because each pile is held to the backill via a very long soil anchor. The soil anchor itself is a steel tendon with a cast-in-place concrete end. Here's a picture of a shoring system. Mine isn't quite so large. When I went yesterday, mine was about 1/4 the height of this one; when done, it will be about 3/4. Note also that this was the first time I had ever been in/on/otherwise endangered by a structure that I had designed. It was frightening. VERY frightening.


The project leader wanted me to go out to the site as the contractor was stressing the soil anchors a) because I designed them and could make sure they were doing things right, and b) because I've never seen such things before in real life and could learn a thing or two about the industry. Fair enough.

I had to get to the job site by 8:30, and given the traffic in the greater Toronto area in the morning, I had to leave by 7:30 - very early by my standards. So I go straight from home to the job site, barely making it on time, walking into the construction supervisor's trailer and immediately realizing that I forgot my safety boots, vest, and hardhat in my cubicle at work. I said "hello" and promptly turned around and drove back to the office. An hour and a half later, I finally returned to the job site and installation could proceed.

By this time, the contractor and the geotechnical consultant were at each other's throats regarding testing procedures for stressing the soil anchors. This was not my fault directly; turns out we did not send the installation specifications to the contractor but that was the project manager's responsibility. Unfortunately, he wasn't there; I was. So the result was much heated discussion directed at me.

Additionally, there was more confusion about the anchor installation that due to me. The most recent set of drawings based on my designs had certain anchor stress levels shown. However, the contractor's team was referring to a shop drawing produced by their supervisors to determine the anchor stresses. My company had reviewed and okayed their shop drawing several weeks ago; however, in the meantime the design had changed somewhat and the stress values were now different. For some reason, these changes, which were communicated to everyone else, did not reach the anchor contractors. So there I am, the designer of the structure, holding an official stamped drawing saying what the stresses should be, and the contractor is arguing back saying that the stresses should be something else, using as evidence a different drawing that is signed by me. So I'm basically conflicting with myself. In short order it's decided that present me is correct and past me is wrong and we go with the proper stresses. Nonetheless, it reflects really poorly on me that I couldn't keep track of my own design stresses.

I eventually solved the testing procedures thing by sacrificing my lunch, using the hour to contact other people at my company, eventually getting the project manager to send me an email with the new procedure on it. This enabled the now happy geotech consultant and the contractor to get down to work at 1:00. Regardless, it still meant a critical two morning hours down the toilet.

Anyway, after a good half-day's work for them and many hours standing in a dusty hole for me, I start to leave at 3:00. When I got to my car, I realized that my keys are gone. In a panic, I ran back to the hole and got all the contractor and geotech people to help me look for my keys. Nada. I then retraced my steps and realized that it's highly likely that I was really, really stupid and locked my keys in the trunk of my car. I ended up calling CAA and one of their service guys came and broke into my car for me (impressively and frighteningly able to do so within 5-10 seconds); however, this did not have the desired effect, at least not right away. The plan was that he'd open the door to the car, then I could us the internal mounted trunk switch located on the driver's door to open the trunk get and my keys. In reality, my car's alarm system went off, not only producing an incredible honking, but disabling the internal trunk switch as well. I still could not get in. The one saving grace here was that my car has pass-through rear seats, which I fortunately never bother to lock. I was able to crawl into the trunk that way and use the emergency interior latch to open the trunk. And behold! my keys were there and not at the bottom of a dirty pit. Huzzah!

Very Busy

I've been ridiculously busy at the office recently, meaning blogging has all but vanished over the past week. I'm so far behind and I still have a meme or two that I've been neglecting. Today I had a three hour long meeting that I probably only needed to attend for the 20 minutes that it pertained to me, but I had to sit through the whole thing anyway. I need to learn how to sleep with my eyes open.

So in the spirit of work, today I'll quickly touch on two structural engineering items:

1) The elevated highway collapse in LA Oakland - The interesting thing of note here is that the fuel from the gas tanker actually caused temperatures to reach the melting point of steel ~1510ºC (note that the temperature isn't exact as it depends on the proportion of the elements in the alloy), though this temperature is unnecessary to cause a structural collapse. Here's what happens to the strength of structural steel as it is heated.As you can see, even at half the melting temperature, the steel gets very weak indeed; though still a solid, the steel may no longer be able to support the applied loads and the structure will collapse. This is what researchers believed happened in the World Trade Center.(Image cred here)

2) I've been working as a structural engineer-in-training for almost 2 years but it's only now that I've finally seen something large that I've designed (I've seen some barrier walls I designed but they aren't very impressive). The sad thing is, it's only a temporary structure, so once it's done its job, it's coming down. The sadder thing, I haven't actually seen it in person. It's on a webcam. Aww, crap, they've changed the direction of the webcam since yesterday so you can't see it. Good thing I took a screenshot when I had the chance. So what is it? It's a support tower for the large roof trusses of an arena in Kingston, Ontario. I've circled it on the screenshot. The roof trusses are too large to be assembled on the ground so they assemble each one in two parts. One part is installed with one end sitting on the tower, then the other part is installed and the two parts are connected together. Move the tower to the location of the next truss and repeat.

So now you know: if the arena collapses during construction, I'm probably to blame.

Earth Day

April 22 is Earth Day.

I remember back in university when I was on the solar vehicle team (big nerd, I know) and we were invited to bring the car to an Earth Day conference in Ottawa hosted by David Suzuki. I'd never been to one of these conference things before and I was in for a bit of a culture shock. Everything was so rude and artificial: the expensive yet still cheap backdrops, the introductions to people you don't care about (which I have since learned is important networking for those not in 1st year university), and especially the press conference. The press conference was David Suzuki and a bunch of colleagues sitting at the front and a small horde of "journalists" trying to get the right photo, the right sound bite, the right hook for a story. All the while, they didn't pay attention to what was being said, they talked (quite loudly) amongst themselves, had cell phones going off all over the place, etc. It was all very discouraging.

As for us, we set up our car next to the first model years of the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius available in Canada.

The cool thing is, I got to actually meet David Suzuki. Not only that, we got him to sit down in the solar car then closed the top shell on top of him, confining him in the car against his will. I can attest that he's not too comfortable in confined spaces.

The bad thing is, I had my physics final the next day. To get to the conference on time with the car, we had to leave at 5:00 am; we didn't get back until 1:00am. My exam was at 9:00am the next day. So David Suzuki is responsible for my physics mark dropping from about a 90 to an 82.

So where was I going with this? Oh yeah:

There are way too many cigarette butts at the waterfront park near where I work.

As an Earth Day initiative, my company instituted an initiative to clean up the waterfront. For once, the weather was good: nice and sunny and not too windy. Even though I wasn't late, they ran out of the company promotional t-shirts they were giving out. Crappy, that. They also gave us latex gloves and giant garbage bags. At the waterfront, the garbage is 99% cigarette butts. People park there and smoke, then chuck their butts out the window as they leave. It's revolting. A group of us worked a small area for an hour and it was very depressing; we'd go over the area, look back, and it was as if the cigarette butts were regrowing faster than we could pick them up.

Other people walking the sides of road picked up much more interesting stuff, like old rotted-out car parts and degraded pool covers. They had to wear safety vests and look like fools though.

I'd like to think we did our part for the environment, but probably the impact of our garbage bags offset the impact of the stuff we cleaned up; however, the waterfront looks a lot nicer now, and that's good too.

So is anyone else doing something for Earth Day?

So cold

In the engineering program at my old university, there is a mandatory course on engineering drawing. Of course there's a CAD component, but mainly it teaches 3-D visualizing, and mostly we drew stuff by hand. Not only that, but they taught us how to draw straight lines freehand; no rulers were allowed. At the time, I was so good that I was accused of using a straight edge when really I hadn't.

Of course, none of that is doable when it's 3 degrees Celsius with powerful gusting winds, you're up 80 ft in the air on a steel tower, your hands are frozen, and, not only is your paper blowing all over the place, but your paper is soaked all the way through because it's snowing. In the middle of April.

On Monday, me and our company's senior steel engineer went to this aggregate processing plant (aggregate in this case meaning the sand and gravel that help make up concrete), an example of which is shown to the right (but this is not the one we went to). Of course, we weren't expecting the weather to be that bad. Also making matters worse, I wasn't exactly told where we were going and was under the impression that we were going to someplace indoors, rather than 80 ft up in the air on an exposed tower.

So after almost getting hypothermia and being left with near illegible notes, it is now Thursday and the weather is great. It's warm (relatively), sunny, and not very windy. The lesson here? No more outdoor site visits with that steel engineer.

A chance meeting at a meeting

I've been crazy busy the past week or so at work and at home so have had absolutely no time to blog for a while. You have no deadlines for a month or so, then all of a sudden they drop a half a dozen jobs on you that need to be done by the end of the day all at once. Bastards.

Last night I went to a small conference, held in Toronto, with some of the other engineers at the office to meet with structural steel fabricators, engineers, erectors (no jokes please), and researchers. The purpose was to discuss measures to streamline design codes and make the relationship between consultant engineers and steel contractors friendlier. Looking around, I saw all the engineer stereotypes abounded: all men, save one woman who's an engineer but currently working for the steel construction institute organizing events such as these; almost exclusively middle aged; mostly white guys, but some asian and middle eastern thrown in for good measure; and ample beer. Just as I thought to myself that I was going to be the youngest one there, by a lot, I heard some young, incoherent voices across the room. Further, it was the alcoholic/druggy sounding loud voice of one of my university friends who I hadn't seen in almost a year. Relieved at no longer a) not knowing anybody there at all, and b) being the youngest person there (not only is my friend a year younger than me, he was there with a colleague that looked even younger), I immediately bounded over to them, shook his hand, and bellowed, "What the hell are you doing here?!" - for I knew he hadn't graduated yet.

Anyway, he's here because his lease ran out so he moved back home to finish writing his thesis, but got a job instead. So the last month's worth of work on his thesis will now take him another 3 years to write. News from home is that my prof's cheap ways are rubbing off on the other profs, resulting in a whole crop of grad students whose master's degrees are taking longer than they should to complete and who don't get any help from the technicians.