nlbarber

The plan: Take 7:15 AM flight to Washington National, catch the Metro to Federal Triangle station, and meet up with Eric, a co-worker (well, he's in charge of a large program that I work on one piece of). The two of us would meet with a guy at EPA, then we'd catch some lunch, Eric would depart for New Jersey, and I'd retrace my steps and catch a 4:17 PM flight back to Atlanta, to arrive just after 6. Long day, but not extremely so.

The actuality: Morning flight and Metro trip went as planned, though if I'd only thought to check my work email via the iPad I could have caught Eric's message that he was ahead of me at the Metro station and waiting at Quizno's. Instead I hung around the upper plaza for 20 minutes while he sat in (air-conditioned) Quizno's, until the 10 AM rendevouz time when he came up and found me. 'S OK. We sat in the EPA lobby and planned our meeting strategy before meeting with the EPA at 11.

Meeting with EPA guys (ended up being 2 people on their side) went fairly well--we didn't get everything we'd really liked to have had (discussion was on sharing 'sensitive' data, and what we can do with it and how we have to protect it after they give it to us), and was over at noon when EPA Guy #1 had to go. Eric and I found a sandwich shop, grabbed one of the last 2 inside tables (A/C! It's July in Washington...) and discussed the meeting over lunch. Then it was back to the Metro, and Eric split off to go to the train station while I went to DCA.

It was shy of 2 PM even after I made the very long hike from where the Metro bridge comes in to the Airtran counter. (I turned the wrong way in the Metro station to make it the longest possible hike--last time I took the Metro to DCA I was flying out on the Delta shuttle, and Delta is right where the Metro comes in. AirTran is in the hinterland.) So, check the board, see an earlier flight (2:53, to arrive at 4:46), ask if my gov't fare ticket will change without a fee (yes), and even got an aisle seat. Excellent!

Better yet, when I complete the hinterland hike through Terminal C security and out to the actual gate, the plane is boarding and I can walk on. We push back on time and....go sit on the tarmac because a thunderstorm is in the area. Optimistic predictions relayed by the pilot are no good, and we sit on the plane while the rain pounds, the wind shakes the plane, and the thunder rolls overhead. Then the rain decreases a little, but the storm has moved south and no southbound traffic is being allowed to take off.

After an hour and a half or so (make it 4:30, or past the time for my original flight to depart) we go back to the gate for a potty break and maybe some refueling, then we quickly reload when it looks like we can take off. Push back, and....go sit on the tarmac while Traffic Control continues to study the line of thunderstorms. The potty break did let me strike up a conversation with someone in the gate area who informed me I was still better off on this flight than on my original, as it had mechanical problems in Atlanta and the plane still wasn't in Washington at that point.

We eventually took off at 5:35, and landed in Atlanta at 7:15. 12 hour gate-to-gate trip, just about on the dot.

Oh, and my original flight? Still hasn't landed in Atlanta--the status page says it left DCA at 8:20 and is due here at 10:20 PM. Guess I'm glad I caught the earlier plane despite the storms...

Three States (geographical States, let's not count the sometimes states of confusion, enlightenment, etc.) today: Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. Not many if you're trying to cover territory, but pretty good for a work day.

The excursion started yesterday, when I went to the office and collected a vehicle and drove to Chattanooga, TN, about 2 hours from Atlanta. ( visiting TVA, Chattanooga, and a thermoelectric power plant, all behind the cut )

In the usual fashion, I don't have time to make this shorter. An unfocused and un-edited ramble follows...

( Washington meetings, Moultrie furniture moving )

After that, it was a pretty relaxing day. The folks next door called from Cancun to wish me a happy birthday, and the kids bemoaned the weather Tropical Storm Alex was causing. I took a short nap, went to Home Depot for some garden stuff and to the grocery store, baked cake-of-the-week (not one I'd choose for my birthday cake), grilled a steak for dinner, and went to Brusters for a kids' hot fudge sundae for my real birthday treat.

Now, what I really need is a weekend. How come tomorrow's Monday?

I made it to Denver yesterday with the MacBook Pro, which is operational if not fully well. Friday (recall that I don't work on Fridays....) I was in the office until 8:30 pm, mostly spent wrestling with the computer.

The saga: after the overnight effort, I had a disk image of the hard disk with the problem...and with all my data and applications. I did a system re-install but that didn't fix the problem--the startup process hung before getting to the login screen. I'd had consultations and hand-holding via IM with kd5mdk (thanks again!), but he was away at this point. I called the Apple enterprise support folks again and was told that the next thing to try was to erase the hard disk, then install a clean system. After that I could move stuff (i thought this guy told me both data and applications) from the disk image, and see what I had.

So, I erased the disk and installed a new system, then contemplated my situation. It was mid-afternoon, I had to leave for Denver Saturday, and I really needed the computer with some fairly complicated software pieces, not all of which I had to hand for new installations. I decided I really wanted to try to use Migration Assistant to move substantial parts of my old account over, and I made one more call to Apple and got a different support guy who felt I could only move documents from the damaged disk image--MA would be right out. kd5mdk (consulted for a third opinion) agreed that was the best procedure, but that if I wanted to try using Migration Assistant it *might* work, or I might go a step too far and have to repeat the disk erase and re-install.

I took a deep breath and did it--used MA to move Documents and Applications from my old account, and crossed my fingers as I re-started the computer. And it booted! Rather slowly, and shut downs are slow, so I desperately need to do a new set up properly when I'm home--clean install again, then do the software installs one at a time and discard the accumulated detritus from years of using the Powerbook G4. I still had to work on the VPN installation, and had to re-install AFS from scratch, but the rest of my critical applications are running.

I must mention the yeoman job the iPad did as my chat platform with kd5mdk. Office nannyware blocks all Web chats, the old IM installation I used to have on my Windows box got cleaned off a while back (and I wasn't using it anyway), and if there's a way to make Lotus Sametime talk to other chat systems through our firewalls I don't know about it. The iPad G3 connection avoids the nannyware nicely.

Lots of storms in Atlanta this morning, with flash-flood warnings out (though not as bad as Nashville....so far). I started this post at the airport waiting on my delayed flight to Columbus, OH, which was held up on its inbound leg. We finally took off, and arrived at 1:30 or so, not quite 2 hours late.

When I got to the local USGS office, though, I found I had it easy. This trip is for three of us working on a project to get together and look at the analysis to date. K., obviously, is based in Columbus. S. is based in Memphis, and was driving with her husband....via Nashville. They left Sunday morning expecting to get to Ohio that afternoon. Apparently they've spent a lot of time sitting in traffic going nowhere. When K. and I left for the day at 5, S. was still on the road but was clear of the flooding problem area.

Hopefully person 3 has arrived now, and we'll be able to work together tomorrow and Wednesday.

I'm the webmaster for a couple or three smallish areas on my agency's web pages. I've kept the default server setting to kick out an automatic email to me every time someone gets a 404 error--it's good practice, as you can see if the problem is in your page coding, or was just a user mistyping the URL.

But then there are the 'bots. Web crawlers, whatever. When they start working their way through your pages and use some wild card that your server doesn't understand, you may get an email for every page on your site. And thus tonight, when I thought I'd quickly pop into my work email to dig out a meeting time to put it on my calendar, I arrived in the midst of an email storm. There were only 10 messages when I started the email client, but in less than 20 minutes, about 700 total messages arrived.

Worse yet, it appeared to be an internal 'bot....I refrained from trying to figure out exactly whose workstation that was, lest I be tempted to call and scream at them.

When you work on a project that operates on a 5-year cycle, getting The Report out is a really big thing. So, ta-da! Released today!
Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2005
And the companion fact sheet
Summary of Estimated Water Use in the United States in 2005

Yes, I know it's 2009 and the report is for 2005. We don't start on the data collection process until the year after the target (so, 2006), trying to use as much reported data (as opposed to estimates) as possible. The 2000 report came out in early 2004, and we'd hoped to do better this time around. Alas, we're 6 months later. Lots of issues with various State datasets, a personal meltdown from a member of the team last year, and then more crises as we tried to wrap things up: my father's illness and death in June, Joan's father's death the next month, you get the idea.

But it's out. I was working on Web page updates until 1 am, after crunching on the downloadable datafiles over the weekend and doing last-minute photograph selection and edits the week before. The emails on the press release are still flying, as it went from being a USGS release to a DOI event--the Ass't Secretary for Water and Science will announce the report at a high-level conference on Thursday. The press release drafted at USGS also moved up, and is being re-written by the DOI Communications Office. The Ass't Secretary is asking questions so she understands what she'll be talking about. Oh, and Friday there's a Congressional briefing on water use, and again The Report will be highlighted.

Now I need to clear the last few months' detritus from my desk, catch up on at least a few of the many other overdue tasks put aside for the final push on The Report, start on a new project for the current FY, and then....I'm going to Disney World. Yes, really--a repeat of last year's trip, just in mid-November instead of early December. I'm ready for the break.

The Groundwater Users Group meeting started Tuesday and went through today, meeting at the local USGS office on the campus of Portland State University. The meeting was pretty productive, but I was less so than usual as Tuesday I came down with a cold. As colds go it's not too severe, but I'm coughing, sniffing, and wheezing, and my voice is threatening to go. Made it rather hard today when I was presenting a topic and the discussion went long--I ended up taking a coughing fit out in the hall towards the end. But I survived, and I hope I managed to keep my germs to myself.

I skipped dinner on Tuesday for an early evening, and skipped the excursion to Multnomah Falls yesterday to spare everyone else my germs in the 15-passenger van. As they left at about 3:30 for that trip, I took the streetcar to a Safeway for cold medicines, then on to Pioneer Square to a Moonstruck Chocolates store for truffles. This evening everyone went separate ways, so I found a good hamburger at a local chain called Stanfords--there was one three blocks from my hotel.

Tomorrow I catch a van to the airport at 9, and am armed with *real* Pseudophed for the flight courtesy of Dorrie. I discovered to my horror that Pseudophed requires a prescription in Oregon, instead of just being a 'behind the counter' medication as it is in Georgia. Funny thing about colds--everyone wants to give you their remedy for it. I took the Emergen-C (vitamin C plus some other stuff) from Eve, declined Greg's Zicam, and as I said fell on the offer of Pseudophed from Dorrie. Hopefully the ears will stay unblocked so the flight won't be to unpleasant. I'll be trying hard to keep my cold germs away from my fellow passengers.

Between two trips, that is. And two committee meetings, the purpose of the trips. Chicago was the water-use user group (database users, that is), and I'm en route to Portland, OR for the groundwater user group. I'm on both of these because the two disciplines share a lot of issues and a lot of database functionailty.

( Odd training, and other stuff )

So I'm on the way to Portland--I used a chunk of the 5 hour flight time for working on my part of the upcoming meeting, but of course found I need an Internet connection to do it all. Tonight and tomorrow I'll be getting together with a friend who retired last year and his wife. Dinner tonight, and tomorrow they offered to take me on an excursion to the Oregon coast. Tuesday the groundwater user group meeting starts, and Tuesday night I'll have a mini-Pifflefest with Kay/oregon_katy. Wednesday evening the GW group will compress our work day and take off in mid-afternoon to drive to Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River gorge. Thursday evening is open--I will probably try to include a visit to Moonstruck Chocolates as part of my evening. Should be a nice combination of work and fun.

Last week I finally started feeling like I was back in my routine, getting organized for all the various tasks that I'm supposed to be working on, and beginning to make progress. Which is good, because the 2005 water-use compilation still isn't done, and here it is mid-2009. (OK, the 2000 report didn't come out until 2004, but it was early 2004.) I'm supposed to be shepherding the entire 2005 effort, but Joan, another member of the national team, is the lead on the actual report and will be first author.

So, I was starting to make progress, did I say? And then yesterday Joan sent an email to say her father had died, of heart failure. At least I had a couple of months of mental preparation...although her father was 90, I don't think this was expected. The upshot is that she will have other priorities for a while and her schedule will be erratic. I'm tackling several of her tasks, trying to get the report off for final approval before my Chicago trip week after next.

But then I have 2 project reviews to attend this week (only one of 'em mine), a conference call, lots of work on the agenda and materials for Chicago as the committee chair is new this year and not skilled at putting together a meeting, a long deferred review of a database tool that will have to be done via a chat client, a database cleanup task that has to be completed soon, and some Web page work I'm in the middle of. And unfortunately most of this can't wait...so I'm thinking the report revision for Joan is going to have to happen over the weekend, or maybe over a couple of evenings. We'll see how it all goes...