July and still ERAM'min...

Well, we've gotten through 8 weeks of ERAM, the new air traffic control radar display system.  Is it workable?  Yes.  Is it good?  Bits and pieces of it.  Some of the features are an improvement over what we used to use, some are a step backwards in useability.  Overall, it's a wash.  Nice to know the gov't has spent multi-billion dollars on something that works almost as well as the system it's replacing...

Yes, eventually, when they get all the annoyances, glitches, and bugs out, it will be a good system.  However, my work load is increased, right smack in the middle of thunderstorm season, and in an effort to handle the extra workload the new system introduces, we're working more overtime than ever. 

(Insert grumpy old man noises here...)

And that's enough about ERAM...

Back to the original reason for this blog, writing.  As most of you have probably realized, my writing output this last year and a half has been pretty non-existent.  All the usual excuses pop up.  However, that doesn't mean I've forgotten about my ultimate goal, writing.  Waking up the creative process is underway, despite the challenges of extra time at work.  Little writing exercises with a cup of coffee in the morning, perhaps in conjunction with tossing the occasional bran muffin at those blasted squirrels who are starting to take interest in my apples and pears (which should be ripe soon...)  Find the right bran muffin, and I'll give a concussion to one of those tree rats...  ;-)

At any rate, where to start with writing exercises.  Oly the weatherman comes to mind, as does some pre-story for Imperfect Hope.  I'll let you know where I start, soon as I figure it out...

Clear skies,
Jim

She swallowed the cat...

... To catch the rat...

Eram's coming...  The new FAA en-route air traffic control center radar display is undergoing another 48 hour test, with a new patch to fix the problems they found last week...

Among the current problems, the patch they put in last week to try and fix some of the previously identified problems introduces us to a new bug, in which the altitude conflict probing (a tool used to predict a conflict when you "trial plan" an altitude change works in a way that nobody predicted.  Rather than predict a conflict based on the aircrafts real time position, ERAM backtracks the aircraft to it's previous fix (up to an hour in the past), then assigns the altitude and probes for conflicts from that point.  In otherwords, it's useless to us.  So today, when I get in for an overtime shift, I get a briefing on how to work around this "problem".  (Basically don't use conflict probe when trial planning an altitude). 

But this latest patch did fix the problem of aircraft creating a false conflict with itself in the middle of nowhere.  So, in an effort to fix this problem, they created a new one...

...She swallowed the rat to catch the mouse...

As a result, they're introducing a patch in the middle of next week that will un-fix the random conflict alert problem, but fix the conflict probe problem...

...She swallowed the mouse to catch the spider, that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her...

Who knows what the next patch will break.

...She swallowed the spider to catch the fly...

But we're still on track to launch this bottle rocket next weekend, bugs or no bugs...

... I don't know why she swallowed the fly.  Perhaps she'll die...

Next up?  Will the FAA try to keep london bridge from falling down... 

Clear skies,
Jim

Here we are, thunderstorm season already...

 I'd ask what happened to winter, but I already know. It melted...

So what's happening in the wide world of ATC and writing? Same story, different day. No writing done of late, the FAA has finally succeeded in destroying my creative efforts thru massive fatigue. The FAA continues to grind away, we're testing (read periodic live tests) a new computer/radar display system. Someday, it will be an improvement. Right now, it's... Less than ideal...

Reasons for my initial dislike of the new system: It's buggy. It's awkward. It's a change.

It's buggy...
Two years overdue, and they still find problems that sometime cause aircraft data blocks (the tags we use to identify aircraft) to disappear. We've been briefed on more than a dozen "work arounds" to known problems, issues that range from inconvenient to downright dangerous. However, the political football has been tossed, some highly placed bureaucrats in the department of transportation face embarrassment if the new system isn't implemented NOW! Guess what wins when you put safety against a bureaucrats career...

It's awkward...
The new system was designed by a bunch of bureaucrats and engineers. None of whom had any real experience with air traffic control. Oh, they observed us working, saw how the old system ran, and from that, they designed something essentially from the ground up. As a result, a lot of effort went into features that the bureaucrats thought would be useful, for example, Automatic forwarding of holding delays to the national flow control center for data recording. Old system: Supervisor with a piece of paper writing down delay information and having a flow controller enter a delay report twice a day. New system sounds nice, no? Except, in order for the system to work, the controller working the traffic is now responsible for at least a half dozen data entries per aircraft put into holding that he didn't have to worry about before. I know, six data entries doesn't sound like much, except that in a holding environment, the controller generally is full-on focused on keeping the aircraft away from each other. I really don't want to take my eyes off the scope for even a moment, but soon I'll have to enter holding pattern data that was handled quite nicely by a bored supervisor with a pen and paper... Many other examples exist...

It's a change...
I've had 25 years of working on the current system, even though it's gone through several computer upgrades, the previous improvements left the way I work traffic pretty much unchanged. I know where a weather report is going to appear when I call one up, I know where to look to find the hot button to identify a radar sort box when a problem comes up... (Etc...) The design techs arranged things the way they think it should be, not based on how we think it should be. I really don't need 5 different ways to do one thing, each involving 5 or 6 steps, I want one way to do it in 2 steps. Sure, the techies think it's cool. Controllers don't do cool. We do safe. Over and over. Period.

As you can see, I'm on a bit of a rant. Someday, the new system will be a helpful improvement, when they get all the bugs out, when we streamline our procedures to get back to keeping our eyes on the radar screen. Probably after I retire... In the meantime, with thunderstorms building, it's going to be an ugly summer, because like it or not, we're probably going 24/7 on the new system in one week. See the light in the tunnel? It's not the exit.....

Clear skies, regardless...
Jim

Somewhere, a snowy, wind-swept plain

Crow: "Is it dead?"
Squirrel: "I dunno, it ain't movin! Whaddya think?"
Crow: "Maybe... They're pretty tricky. Poke it, why doncha"
Squirrel: "I ain't touchin it, it smells terrible! You poke it!"
Crow: (Hops around to the other side of the body) "Uh-uh. They're pretty tricky, might just be playing dead. Why don't you throw your acorn at it?"
Squirrel: "And waste a perfectly good acorn? No way!"
(The hand twitches)
Squirrel: "Aieeeee! I'm out of here, it's alive!"
Crow: "Nah, that's just a reflex. Go ahead, poke it!"
Squirrel: (over his shoulder as he scampers off in search of a tree) "No chance. See ya!"
(The hand twitches again) Crow flies up to the fence post. "Guess I'll wait around and see what happens"

(To be continued...)

October

Writing continues to be on the back burner, the FAA has demanded far too much of my time and energy of late. However... Looks like the overtime trend is backing down as we enter the doldrums of travel season. Let's see what I can do to fire up the creativity, or at least crawl out from under the log...

I've actually joined the facebook world. Mostly to get in contact with long-lost relatives. It has been fun to see recent new pics uploaded from the other side of the world. Of late, while I've been trying to unwind after work, I'll share a pandora radio link to something new that's caught my interest. Otherwise, there's still a lot of junk that I can ignore...

Silly season approaches. IE, time for the loonies to come out and run for office. Ugh.

We've had a warmer than usual fall here in Colorado, averages more like the beginning of september rather than october. As a result, I'm still having to mow the lawn. Guess that's one good reason for the first snow of the year...

As I've mentioned, retirement looms. 12 or 18 months, depending on what happens with our retirement plan. Irma and I have talked about what we'll do with all the extra time. Consensus is, we're going to be busier than ever, but with good things. I know my writing attitude will improve, plus more time to just do what we want. Fly Fishing ranks high up on the to-do list. We've even talked about IFGS. I doubt I'll be bored.

Anyway... I always say, more to come. Perhaps I'll drag out some old D'oril tales to revisit, writing wise...

Clear skies,
Jim

Dog Days

August. Last post, (I know, I'm sorry) was last June. Perhaps I can claim that July doesn't exist, since there's no blogging proof... ;-)

It's been a weird and difficult thunderstorm season at work. I've done little writing as a result, though I will admit to some wool-gathering about storyline ideas for Imperfect Hope. I've not given up on it, just sidelined it for a time. Same with Ole the Weatherman, ran into time issues. September will be better. I promise myself...

I did get selected to appear for jury duty. Conventional wisdom here at denver center is that Air traffic controllers never get past the first round of questions, assuming you even get selected. I can't think of another controller here that has actually served on a jury. So, summons in hand, I showed up at the courthouse, expecting a "thanks, we don't need your type here".

Surprise.

I ended up serving on a 4 day criminal trial. It was an eye-opener. At first (and probably like every other person on the jury) I felt like "Oh, great, what a burden. Lets get this over with"... Opening statements painted the defendant in a very bad light, and at first, it seemed like it was going to be easy. After all, the prosecution had numerous witnesses, a 911 call, police reports, and cell phone tapes to back up their claims. However, I was careful to not prejudge (even though the defendant "looked" like a thug...

My optimism for an easy verdict fell to pieces as the prosecutions first, "star" witness began to open her mouth.

In a nutshell, she contradicted herself several times in the first few minutes. She contradicted her statements to police minutes after the crime, she contradicted her later statements to investigators months later, and she even began disparaging the next upcoming prosecution witness before she even got to the stand.

There followed witness after witness whose statements the day of the "event" matched statements made to investigators over the next few months only rarely. The most believable testimony came from a 16 year old girl, who basically said to police the day of the event, and on the stand last week, "I didn't see a bat, there was a lot of chaos". She did tell investigators about a bat 6 months back, which backed up her mom's (Star witness #1) claims.

The 911 call was odd, in that for the first 30 seconds of the recording, the witness was calling everything out in real time... "He's chasing us with a bat... He just ran his car into a house... He's attacking my husband with his car..." The next 2 and a half minutes were a past-tense narrative. There was no vocal transition between the two stages of the call. Initial police reports, told of the witness claiming she made the call from the dead end street where the assault was taking place. She told investigators she made the call when the defendant first pulled out a bat. On the stand, her husband contradicted her statement by stating that "they made the call from the house".

There were many other discrepencies.

Defense witnesses, amusingly enough, consisted of police officers called to the scene.

Unfortunately, the DA (or ADA) was very articulate, and the public defender was much less so. When we the jury got the case, there were only two of us who had "reasonable doubt" about the prosecutions version of events that night.

Two days of logic presentation, argument, and discussion later, we found the defendant not guilty of the 5 most serious charges (including 3 felonious assault), and guilty of one count of "reckless endangerment" (Police found tire tracks of his car cutting across a lawn at high speed).

The "thug" began to cry when the 4th not-guilty verdict was read.

During the pre-trial brief, the judge defined reasonable doubt for us. Among the legal descriptions, she included the observation. "You can be assured that reasonable doubt exists when, two days after the trial, you wonder to yourself what really happened, or you have a bad "feeling" about your decision. (odd commentary from a judge at the time)".

I feel good about our decision. And, interestingly, I came away with a sense of accomplishment.

I won't discuss my feelings about the legal system in general, however. I'm still a cynic. Most of the time...

Clear skies,
Jim

June's bugs

Another month almost gone. I'll not bore you with more tales of FAA madness, suffice it to say that it's still an ugly summer thunderstorm season. Writing wise, however, I feel like it's time to get back to the future job. I suspect a week off from work last week has a lot to do with the improved morale.

We did go on a vacation last week, 8 days in Alaska, as well as attended our nieces wedding while we were up there.. Not Irma or my first trip, but we brought along Claudia, Gerardo, and our 6 year old Granddaughter for their first Alaska experience. Tatiana (the granddaughter) was one Meghan's (the bride) flowergirls. It was both a wonderful wedding (though more than a little odd to be at the reception, nearing midnight, and still bright daylight (though the shadows were quite long)), and a great relaxing vacation. We stayed at a condo in Girdwood, beautiful, restful, with a mountain stream burbling outside our balcony. I'll post some pictures in the near future.

Among the highlights (beside the wedding), we took a day cruise out of Seward into the Kenai Fjords national Park. Even with a little drizzle, it was a great day, saw sea otter within 5 minutes of leaving the dock, Orca, Porpoise, Humpback Whales, innumerable sea birds, including Puffins too stuffed with fish to get airborne, and house sized hunks of ice falling off the Holgate Glacier. It was exhilarating.

Of course, we ate far too much (even cooking in the condo a couple of times), but hey, that's what vacation is for. If any of you are ever in Anchorage, and crave pizza, however, I'll strongly recommend Moose Tooth, probably the best pizza I've eaten. It didn't hurt that he brews his own microbrews and sells (half-gallon?) sized growlers to take home with you. Yummm. Wonder if they deliver to Longmont...

Anyway, as always more to come.

Clear skies,
Jim