Gerald, my father-in-law, passed away a little after noon today.

After re-reading my last post about him I realized that it wasn’t very flattering of him. The fact is, though, that it was fairly accurate. It just didn’t mention the good things about him. I know of very few people that actually disliked him. He was a charmer and could talk to anyone. Everyone, even those that had something against him liked the man. I also know that even though he didn’t know how to show it he loved my wife and my two sons dearly. I think the biggest problem he had in maintaining relationships is that he did love deeply. If he thought one of his kids was making a mistake he would let them know and try to do everything he could to protect them from themselves. Unfortunately while he was good at flattery he was very bad at diplomacy.

I’m going to miss the man. I truely am. I’ll miss his charm and his foolishness but most of all I’ll miss his passion.

Fly home, Gerald. I’m really going to miss you.

I received a phone call from my son Thursday afternoon. He was in Mississippi. This was very comforting. As I mentioned about a year ago he’s been in Iraq stationed at Camp Bucca. He’s a member of the Tennessee Army National Guard’s 1-181st Field Artillery Battalion but for the last year he’s been a prison guard.

He should be back home in Chattanooga either Monday evening or Tuesday morning. The down side of this is that I have to be in Newark on Tuesday afternoon. I’m just glad he’s home.

I spent the weekend working in the yard. After seven years of living here I’ve never had the time to do more than just the simplest maintenance and even some of that has fallen behind. With the change in jobs I’m looking at more time available at home and I’m also looking at two things that I really need to give more attention to, cooking and gardening.

So this weekend I’ve reworked the landscaping in the front of the house and created a planting bed at the side of the house and planted some tomatoes, peppers and herbs there. It’s been a long time since I’ve had my hands in soil like this and I find that I like it. Even the cussing I did was more of a relief of built up tensions than a display of frustration.

The landscaping at the front of the house consists of two areas on each side of the front door where some shrubs had been planted. Chinese privet was planted on both sides of the front door with a holly at the corner. All of this had grown so big that there was no way of trimming it back and it still look decent so I cut it all down last fall. As expected more of all of it has popped back up from the roots left in the ground. I dug up as much of the roots as I could this weekend, amended and turned the soil and then planted some periennials there.

While turning the soil I discovered what the guy that built the house did with all the left over bricks and trash from building the house. I found a pretty good sized pile of bricks buried just a few inches under the surface. I also found a drop cloth in surprisingly good shape for being buried for around fifteen years. Why do builders do stuff like this?

All the digging left me fairly tired but it felt good. This week after work I plan on tackling the mess at the back of the house. Blackberries are sprouting up everywhere. I’ve tried to keep them contained because I love fresh blackberries with pancakes and cereal but I don’t know that having the plants take over my yard is worth keeping this one patch for having fresh blackberries for three weeks out of the year.

It feels good knowing I don’t have to head to the airport any next week. I’ll be traveling the following week but this should only come up every four to six weeks. Let’s see if I continue enjoying this gardening through the summer and fall.

Up until 2002 I was a pretty stable employee. I left Picket, Tarpley and Associates after 15 years of service that year to follow my wife to Atlanta where she wanted to continue working for her company that had closed their Chattanooga office. The job I came to in Atlanta was with Hampton-Tilley Associates. The job lasted for six months and then the office closed down. I went out on my own then for nine months and discovered why Hampton-Tilley had closed, there was not enough business during that time to keep me fed.

My next job was with Polytron and it lasted for three years. Half of that time was on my last project. That project broke me. It had me out of town way too much. That job was followed by three more over a years time. The first one I just wasn’t the right guy for and that was followed by another that just ran out of work and the third was a personality clash between me and my manager.

My current job I’ve been at since August of 2007. It sounded like a dream job and except for too much time on the road it has been. I say has because I’m changing jobs again.

 A couple of weeks ago a head hunter that I had previously tried placing me called me up to see how I was doing and what my current employment status was. There was a company looking for someone like me and he wanted to submit my resume to them. Now, my resume had been submitted to them  at least twice in the past without any result at all. I told him I was skeptical of there being any result this time either and that I really wasn’t looking for a job right now. He gave me one last pitch though and I told him to go ahead and send it to them.

I was surprised when he called me back a few days later and told me they wanted to talk to me. I met with them this past Monday and discovered that I had worked previously with two other employees there and one contractor. The director of Technology had been employed by the company that I hooked up with when I came to Atlanta, Hampton-Tilley, and we knew a lot of the same people. I learned that the past couple of times I had sent them my resume it had never made it to the electrical managers desk.

Anyway, I received a call from the HR manager on Tuesday afternoon with an offer. It was a very good offer and travel would be a lot less. I told him I needed to sleep on it and I would call him back in the morning. I discussed the offer with my wife and we decided that I would accept the offer but would make a counter offer first. I’m getting too old to wait around to accrue extra vacation time. I wanted a week after six months and three weeks after a year.

I begin work on May 12, 2008 with Clyde Bergemann, with the vacation I asked for, in the position of Senior Controls Project Engineer.

In spite of the long hours and constant travel I will miss working with Matrix Scientific. There are good people working there and my customers were some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. This was just too good of an offer to refuse. Hopefully I will only have one W2 form to worry about on my 2009 taxes.

I managed to find my way to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles this past Thursday. I finished the job I was working on by 10:00AM and my flight home wasn’t until 11:10PM. In keeping with my resolution to take advantage of my travels more for personal enrichment I took off exploring. The trails surrounding the observatory could not be ignored. Crows and hawks entertained me as I walked.

I looked down from a trail and saw a little cave or what could have been a fox’s den. I looked again and could swear I saw an old man peering back at me with one eye from the hillside. Can you see him?

The area truly is beautiful. My previous trips to LA had left me thinking that Los Angeles was lacking in something…. a place I wouldn’t care to live. This trip, with finding these trails has me believing that maybe I could see my self living there.

I have no problem with people who claim to be agnostic. Lord knows I’ve been there and still find myself wondering at times. Still I consider myself a devout Christian who can recite the Apostle’s Creed with conviction.

Atheists, however, are another matter. I don’t dislike them I just can not fathom how anyone can say, “There is no God,” with any certainty. I don’t understand them and I can’t help but view their certainty of there being no god as a bit of arrogance.

I know it may seem hypocritical of me to view an atheists certainty of there being no god and not some believers certainty that there is but I don’t see it that way. To me I can understand someone taking even the flimsiest bit of evidence of a god and having it become a certainty but just because to another there is a lack of evidence can not lead to a certainty that there is no God.

Look at it this way, we really have no universal definition of what a supreme being might be. On top of that we really have no consensus that a god has to be a supreme being or that just any supreme being is a god. Since we really don’t know what a god or a supreme being might be how can we say it doesn’t exist?

To look at it another way we live in a complex universe. The more we find out about it the more we find that we don’t know. Some look at the universe as being boundless, without limits or as constantly expanding. We understand the basic laws of physics and how they work but when we go beyond the basics we continue to find things to be just a little more complex than what we fully understand. We get a grasp on that complexity and that opens up even more complexity.

The complexities are proving to be more and more enormous the more we look. So are we so arrogant then as to think that we are looking at something that the human mind is fully capable of completely understanding? I’m not saying that it is useless and that we should stop looking and theorizing but what I am saying is that I don’t expect us to ever be able to comprehend the laws of physics completely, at least not in our current form.

So where am I going with this? If we can’t fully understand our universe, and by that we I’m also including the physicist who is so intelligent he can comprehend 26 different dimensions in a theory that has merit throughout the scientific community, if we can’t come to an agreement on what a supreme being might be or what a god is, how can we be so arrogant as to make the bold statement that there is no Creator God? How can anyone possibly state with any confidence at all that it all just happened?

Now, with that said I can fully understand someone telling me they can’t believe in a Sky Wizard or some invisible Magic Man. I find those terms offensive to me but I can understand someone not being able to believe in the God of the Bible or the Koran or any of the pagan gods out there. I just can’t understand how anyone can say with any certainty that there is no God, period.

I’m on the west coast this week and next. I drove down to San Diego last night from Los Angeles. Things didn’t go all that well in Los Angeles. I managed to break a robot pretty bad. I’m taking today off before starting an install at a customers site in the morning. I’ll probably be back in LA for a few days next week and then back down here in San Diego again.

This is an extended trip.

This morning I had breakfast, wrote up a short report of what happened yesterday and sent pictures of the destruction to a couple of people. I can’t share those here. However, I did drive up to Mt. Soledad after finishing the report and took some pictures I could share.

This is a beautiful mountain top. I just wish haze hadn’t been so bad.

As of right now I only see three candidates that I believe are capable of holding the office of President of the United States. This has nothing to do with ideology, I’m not ready to pick on that yet, this is based purely on credentials and integrity. Two are Republicans and one is a Democrat.

 I like Bill Richardson. I disagree with him on many of the issues but I believe his life experiences have left him most qualified of any of the candidates to be president. I’m really surprised he is running behind Edwards, Obama and Clinton in the polls. None of these Democratic frontrunners have anywhere near the experience in running a government as he does. None of them have the diplomatic experience he does and none of them have the policy making experience he does. Bill Richardson is a remarkable man. He also strikes me as a man of integrity.

Of the Republicans you have Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee who both have demonstrated skills in running government and both man appear to be men of integrity. Out of the Republicans, who more has experience running government than these two men? Gulliani may come close but running city government, even a city government as large as New York City does not fully prepare one for running a country.

I like Huckabee a little better than Romney, though and if I was voting in the Republican Primary today I think I’d choose Huckabee. He’s a FairTax supporter, you know. I think I like Richardson the best of the three, though. I worry a little about a Dominionist bent with Huckabee.

This is possibly the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I know y’all have seen these people jumping out of airplanes in these wingsuits and the camera shows them flying around with no close background to use to really judge what they are doing or how fast they are traveling. The guys are base jumping off some mountain in Norway with these suits and you do have very close background to judge how fast they are going and what stunts they are actually performing.

<sigh> I was born about thirty years too late.

Okay, I just told you about the problems I’m having with a job in NYC. This problem is kicking my tail something awful and it shouldn’t be that hard. Of course you can always make it hard on yourself when you assume things and then don’t revise your assumptions as new facts come in.

This application uses a 15kw regenerative vacuum pump to create the motive force to move a lightweight granular solid about thirty yards. A 15kw motor equates to about 20hp. My first impression was the the company we used to build this system for us had skimped on materials and sized the overload and starter as small as they thought they could get by with. Maybe that assumption was wrong.

In the US we use horsepower (hp) to measure power. In Europe, where this pump was made, they use kilowatts (kw) to measure power. The overload and starter are perfectly sized for a 15hp motor. In this brand of regenerative vacuum pump a 15hp (11kw) pump is a stock, off the shelf item. Their 20hp (15kw) pump is a long lead time item. Are things starting to add up?

I’m thinking that the original designer of my system called up the distributor for this pump to order the pump. The distributor asked what size and my designer said “15″ meaning 15hp. The distributor then sold him a a 15kw pump thinking that was what he was talking about. Everything got put together and it ran…. for a time. I believe that a month ago this time ran out.

I’m ordering a positive displacement pump to replace this regen pump first thing Monday morning. It will be the proper horsepower.

Most of what I do these days isn’t that difficult. I’m not working with cutting edge components or elaborate electrical circuits or even complex control schemes. It’s all pretty basic.

 Why then am I having so much trouble getting a vacuum pump to run at a customer’s site?

On October 23^rd I arrived at my customer’s location to find that a 20hp vacuum pump used in a pnuematic conveying system was down with two legs of its windings shorted out. This is a regenerative pump with the motor made into the pump housing. I wasn’t going to pick up a motor at the local electrical supply house to replace it. A replacement pump has a five week lead time so the only alternative I had was to have the motor and pump rebuilt.

This meant my customer would be down one week. He really wasn’t happy about this. I can’t say I blame him.

I hired a local pump and compressor specialist company to take care of removing the pump and rebuilding it for me and reinstalling the pump. I’m fairly satisfied with the work they did but I’m a little disappointed I couldn’t lean a little heavier on them for support with the electrical. Along with a bad pump I had a bad 60A rotating disconnect that was shooting sparks out whenever the motor started and an overload protector that was tripping out that hadn’t been tripping out before.

The overload was replaced with the same size overload that came with the system but I was a little concerned about the vendor we bought it from sizing it too small from the beginning. It had been holding, though. The contractor I was using did not want to change out the disconnect. I hired the same electrical contractor that installed the power wiring for the system when we first installed it to replace the rotating disconnect.

The reason I’m hiring this stuff to be done is that I am in Atlanta and the job is in NYC. I made the original visit and diagnosis and I was there this past Friday to determine that the disconnect had to be changed. Rather than fly back to install the disconnect I figured I could hire it done locally. I hired a licensed, union electrician thinking that if there was another problem he could take care of it for me. The other problem arose but it wasn’t taken care of.

The overload I was concerned about was a problem. Even though it was the same size, even the same manufacturer and model, it wouldn’t hold with the newly rewound motor. Evidently we were right on the hairy edge of tripping with the inrush current from the old windings and the slight difference in the new windings was enough to cause the motor to trip.

I asked the electrician if he could replace it for me. He said he would have to talk to his boss. The next I heard was from my customer saying the electrician had left mumbling something about being expected to be an engineer.

The new overload is in my bag. My flight is at 8:10AM in the morning.

I’m really not a hard guy to please and I need to build contacts in cities across the country so I can have names of people who can do what I do to get my customer back up and running. Living in Atlanta I can be anywhere in the US in 24 hours but sometimes even that is too long of a time and occasionally weather conditions delay flying.

If you are a controls technician and you live in the NYC, Cambridge, New Haven, CT or Gainesville, FL area I’d like to get contact information from you. I can’t promise you any work but I’d like to know someone in these areas to call if I have problems. I basically need people who can diagnose and repair electrical problems in control systems who live near medical research facilities.

 Like I said I can’t promise anything, I just need contact information just in case. Click on the contact button above and drop me a line if you fit what I need.

I’m still kicking around and traveling way too much. For several reasons I just haven’t had much to say. I keep having ideas for an essay but I can’t seem to bring those ideas into anything I would find interesting to read so I keep those ideas to myself hoping that I can find a way outside of an abstract to express them.

I find most of those ideas coming about while I’m driving. Maybe a voice recorder could help me there.

Los Angeles was interesting.

This was my first time there. The job involved three pick and place robots. I managed to crash all three. Two were violent enough to tear things up. There are some talks going on now between my boss and the owner of the company that built the robots for us over the crashes.

It wasn’t all work, though. I visited Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach. Not much to mention in Santa Monica but there was plenty of weirdness in Venice. Street performers, artists, ladies on skates and muscle men were all around.
The strangest sight of all, though, occurred right outside of UCLA Medical Center at a bus stop on the corner of Tiverton Avenue and Le Conte Boulevard. About 7:30a.m. Pacific Time I was driving into UCLA Medical Center to begin the day’s work. I glanced over and saw a dirty, grungy bearded, older man drop his trousers and defecate on the sidewalk. There were people on the sidewalk jumping back in horror as this occurred. As I drove on into work I couldn’t help but think, “Who’s going to have to clean that up?”

Beep

Mr. Burton, this is Dr. K’s office. Please call our office in regards to a foot x-ray we received for you from Dekalb Medical Center.

Beep

Larry, this is Dr. K. I need to talk to fairly urgently. Would you please call my office when you get this message

Beep

These are the messages I had on my answering machine Yesterday morning. Dr. K had just performed knee surgery on me this past Tuesday and I thought I was recovering well. What did a foot xray have to do with anything. I hadn’t had a foot x-ray in about three years.

I gave Dr. K’s office a call but he hadn’t arrived at the office yet. It was still before 9:00am. I went about my business and pretty much forgot about the call. Around 9:15am Dr. K returned my call.

“Larry, are you okay?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Things are going great with my knee. All I have is a little muscle soreness now but the joint itself feels great.”

“Good, good, but listen, I received an x-ray of a leg where the foot had been amputated with all sorts of pins in the leg and it had your name on it with me as the doctor. I was worried you had been in an accident on the way home from your surgery. Everything is alright, right?”

Dr. K was fairly upset with the mix up but I was a little amused. It seems I’m the victim of mistaken identity on a fairly regular basis.

I had my knee surgery this past Tuesday and so far everything is going well with it. The doctor found a torn meniscus rather than a cyst causing the problems. The muscles around the knee are sore but the joint its self already feels better.

My wife left for a week to spend some time with her mother vacationing in Florida. I was suppose to go but….

I start my new job in the morning so I’m off to Albion, NY for a couple of days. With my wife and son gone to Florida that meant boarding the dogs for a few days. I had to drop them off yesterday (Saturday) and I’ll pick them back up Wednesday morning when I get back.

I’ve not known what to do with myself the since I dropped them off. This house seems awfully empty.