red muck mess

I was watching the news at dinner last night, and I caught something about a red muck disaster. I was at a bar, and I only caught it from one of the far TV screens (on mute). It also intrigued some other folks at the bar.

I looked it up online, and there was hardly any mention of it. Hello?! A photogenic (look at all that bright red muck destroying those towns!) catastrophe involving a caustic material that caused massive environmental damage. Burns on contact! Wiped out four villages! Killed small children!

The NY Times does have something a little more in-depth now, two days later. In a quest for more info, I tried googling "red sludge Hungary" and got almost nothing.

A few commentators have drawn parallels between this and problems we have in the US, such as mine tailings. What do you do with vast quantities of nasty stuff, some of which accumulated over decades? Hide it behind berms and hope for the best? Spend $$$$$ to stabilize it? Whose pockets will that come out of?

We used to have the Superfund tax on the most heavily polluting industries to take care of the really messy orphaned sites. Too bad the funding for it hasn't been authorized in 15 years and the program's out of money. So instead of having the worst-polluting industries pay, now all the taxpayers do. If the cleanups are done all, that is.

long break

I think I'm marking about 1 year that my posting has been decidedly irregular. This time, illness, a tough time at work, and getting out of the habit of posting have done me in. It's (somewhat) near the start of a new month, and I'm trying to start up again.

I'm in a motel room now, nursing a minor burn on my knee. I made the mistake of testing the water in the shower, then jumping right in. Within the 10 seconds after I'd checked it, the temperature spiked to scalding - and it wasn't remotely at the maximum temperature. Isn't that a safety issue?

A few months ago, I jumped into a shower and found the opposite - that the lukewarm water in the tap was a remnant of being in the walls or something, and that I actually had no hot water whatsoever.

After a long, cold (and when did that happen), wet day, my first impulse is to peel everything off and hop right into a shower. By now, you'd think I would know to check such thing.

end of summer

On one hand, I'm really, really happy that it's not over 90 degrees every day.

On the other hand, I'm having a hard time getting used to waking up and going to work in the dark.

daily schedules

I seem to on a scheduling kick in my recent posts, but I just read Isis' post about working hours for grad students and it reminded me of my own experiences.

My grad advisor was extremely laid-back. I pretty much ran the show for my thesis project, independently checking in once or twice a week when he was around and going without when he was traveling (about 25 percent of the time). Needless to say, he didn't dictate working hours.

Then again, unlike Isis, my research focus was fieldwork, not labwork. And most of my fieldwork was solitary - a single helper if I was lucky. So my advisor didn't really expect me to be around all the time.

When I was not actively doing fieldwork, I tended to have a pretty set schedule. I'm a morning person and my natural schedule is to sleep from 11-7. So I was one of the first grad students to arrive in the morning (around 7:30), and I would screw around online/get distracted by my friends during the day, and work until 5 or so. I would end up working in my office at school about every other weekend, rewarding myself with takeout for lunch from one of the multitude of cheap restaurants within walking distance.

I miss that schedule. I didn't have a sweetie distracting me, and I lived a 15-minute walk (or a 3 minute drive, if I wanted to illegally park) from my office, and it felt like I had all the time in the world. Now, I spend 2 hours driving to/from work (if I'm working from the office) and we have the tremendous time-suck that is cable, and my sweetie likes having actual dinner, and so the time available for myself just keeps shrinking.

chucking samples

I've spent years collecting field data of various types. Most of it gets distilled into field logsheets or logbooks and reports. The physical stuff (other than what was shipped to the lab) mostly gets shipped off-site for disposal.

But when you're collecting rock core samples as part of an environmental investigation, usually what you do is put it in a core box, labeled all nicely. And then the core boxes get piled in a storage building (if lucky) or under a tarp (if not so lucky) and get infested with bugs and forgotten about.

Rock cores are not taken for every environmental investigation, and they're generally a significant investment. They're handy because you can always go back to them, even years later, and find new details you didn't know were important before you did all your analysis.

So when I heard that the rock cores I spent seven months collecting just got thrown out, it was...deflating.

oddball schedules

I've touched on the topic of field schedules in the past, but Silver Fox's recent post reminded me of one of my problems with a common "odd" (i.e. not 5 on, 2 off) schedule.

The standard non 5-and-2 schedule I've worked is a ten-four. That is, work 10 days and have a four day weekend. The problem is trying to preserve those four weekend days. It's awful easy for the schedule to slip and for the project manager to suggest that you give up a day or two. After all, it's mid-week for everyone else.

The last time I worked a 10-4, I had to travel to the hotel the night before (stretching the shift to 11 days), then I was persuaded to work "just one more day to finish up" (ok, now it's 12 days), and then I got the stink eye when I ran into an upper management type and she found out that I was "taking a day off" for the final day.

So if you work a 10-4, or any other oddball schedule that has you working through a weekend and gives you additional time off during the traditional weekday, be wary. And avoid returning to the office during normal office hours if you can help it.

contract expansion

When I was working in consulting, we put a lot of emphasis on getting the right contractors (drillers) and getting a contract in place. Some of the contract was our standard legalese, but most of the language was based on a combination of corporate technical requirements and lessons learned ("gee, why is the data for this well always so weird?"). And the technical specification always got looked at by a couple pairs of eyes to make sure it would work.

And then we would go out into the field, and everything would change. Something would get all screwed up (torrential rain flooding the site, a large rodent would chew through something important) and we'd have to re-work things. We'd end up with a little bit of extra space in the budget and take on a whole 'nother bunch of work.

So then what?

Since we had the drillers already out there, we weren't going to bother re-bidding work or writing the spec. Need something totally different? Just call the drilling contact, ask the guy for an estimate, spend 10 minutes discussing what may work, formalize it in an e-mail, and keep the fieldwork going.

It's a pretty good racket for a drilling company. Get your foot in the door with a picky, low-margin contract, and live high off the hog with the change orders.

Of course, this works pretty well for a consultant, too. The client ponied up some money for some unexpected work? Time to add something extra to cover the little shortfall elsewhere in the budget.

The extra work is nice, for both a driller and the consultant...as long as you don't depend on potential work to cover your ass financially.