New Assignments and Home Sweet Home

We had our meeting today and it appears that shortly I will be the only mechanical engineer at the lab. As a result of that development and the meeting it appears I will be working on Lint Cleaners, Energy Efficiency, Energy Recovery and Cogeneration, and Length Distributions. This should at least get the ball rolling so I can dig into some work now.
In more important matters, this time tomorrow I will be home! Going to NO for the weekend and then back on Sunday and then hopefully back in NO on Tuesday evening until the following Sunday, if my boss lets me take the last part of next week off.
La has started a blog...lots of pretty pictures and since she is an artist I expect it to be much more creative then my ranting here, check it out Chez La.
Speaking of ranting, anyone else think the SBA (Small Business Administration) is more inept then FEMA? I believe my favorite statement from them is "What do you mean you are having problems getting insurance? Just call an insurance company and get it." Right, it is just that easy....morons! I have fire and wind and they want contents but so far that is not happening, I have a plan though. Once I get my contents coverage I should be able to get my last SBA disbursement I can make some major progress on my house!

Stress Management

Today was typical government employee fun. The headquarters building was hosting a presentation on Stress Management today. The government offers all employees to take advantage of the EAP - Employee Assistance Program; as part of this they wanted people to know about Stress Management. My boss had a conflict with the scheduled time of the presentation but he wanted one of the scientists to represent the unit at the meeting. Any guesses who got the "honor"? Yep! 90 minutes of my life I will never get back. I think the 2 highlights of the presentation were 1) the suggestion to write what is causing you stress on a piece of paper and draw a box around it and then cross it out with a big red "X" and 2) telling people to say "No" and not give any explanations. Yes, I want federal employees to be encouraged to say no to assignments and be told they do not need to explain the reason.

Ahhh the fun of being a federal employee!

On the Road Again

Headed out to Ruston right after work on Friday. And when I say right out, I mean the only stop I made was at Doe's Eat Place to grab 9 dozen (yep, 108!) tamales for my grandma to try. My grandpa's doctor raved about them and even flies up here to load them up and bring them home. The final conclusion....they are good but not great. Like so much of the food in the Delta it could use more seasoning. I prefer Manuel's in NO. I guess that is why they call them "tamales" and not "hot tamales" here. Manuel's is another casualty of Katrina. If you want a good, and very large, steak (and are willing to pay for it!) they have locations in Oxford, MS, a few places in AR, Tulsa, OK, and Lafayette. Baton Rouge will be getting a location at the end of July...check them out, it is good.

The trip to Ruston was good, but tiring. Somehow I managed to make it back in only 2 1/2 hours, and I swear I was not speeding...guess I just hit it right.

At least next week is a short week and after this Thursday I will know what I am working on for work. The good news is that it does look like I will get to do some energy conservation and alternative fuel research....helping the environment a wee bit would not be a bad thing.

Pea-Soup's Lott-A-Freeze

The title should have your attention. This is a burger joint in Indianola. We hit it up on Wednesday after working at the Holly Ridge Gin. I have no idea what is up with the name, but they make a pretty decent burger for just a couple of bucks. Good thick crinkle cut fries and free refills on your drinks....not a bad combination. A large burger with everything on it (or dressed as I prefer to say), large fries, and a sweet tea came out to around $6. they even have "Po-Boys" listed on the menu along with hot dogs and tater-tots. I appreciate any restaurant that serves tater-tots for some strange reason.

Off to Ruston to visit the grandparents this weekend. It should be a nice change of pace. Work has been very productive this week between the project at the big gin and the Holly Ridge gin and now I have 2 new project proposals to talk to my boss about when he returns.

Oh yeah, I found an interesting house for not much money....not sure if I will move on it or not.

Cotton Ginning Fun

Today was my first day of running a project at the new job. We ran a half dozen bales in the big gin, so Entergy made a killing off of Uncle Sam today. We are going to run another half dozen tomorrow. After we processed them we took them over to a commercial gin in Indianola, MS to do some testing on their equipment. I thought I would post a few pics to show the scale of this equipment, it is MASSIVE. The top picture is a full-size cotton gin. The bottom picture shows the bale press at the lab....it is a little bitty thing isn't it?

By the way....very cool website MapMyRun.com . If you want to know running, biking, or walking routes around your town or someplace you are visiting, this site is hard to beat. It also lets you map your runs so you can see how far you ran.

More Code Monkey and Food too

Another code monkey day, but I am pretty much finished and not a moment too soon. After putting off the coding to automate data handling for almost 3 years it is in usable form. I got a phone call this morning from my old boss asking if I had code to automate the data handling. The project we began in NO is continuing in Clemson and the grad student doing the work needed help. As luck would have it, I got it to the basic point of usability about 15 minutes before the phone call. I needed to tweak it more for my purposes, but it was in a good place to send it to Clemson to help them out.
My version worked great on the first batch of approximately 1,400 files. My computer did not like it though. I left my computer to crunch a second batch of over 5,000 files. After the first 20 minutes I left and the computer was still contemplating the hard part of the process. If I am lucky when I get to work tomorrow the first stage (and most computation intensive) will be finished. I can run the second phase while we run the gin.

On a more interesting note, unless you like computer programming, is this very interesting article on the life of a steer. For the uninformed, a steer is a male cow that is castrated at a young age. The castration causes them to be more docile, but more importantly they can a ton of weight especially in the all important meat eating areas. The article is fairly unbiased and an interesting insight on the economics of cattle farming. The cow in the article is a Black Angus that has a bit of Hereford mixed in. My grandfather raised mostly Herefords and Santa Gertrudis. The Santa Gertrudis are your stereotypical red/brown cows, whereas the Herefords have a white face on a red/brown body. There were a few others over the years as well.

Code Monkey

Today was a code monkey day. With my boss out of town most of this week things should be quiet. I was planning on running some gin trials Tuesday and Wednesday, but I need to calibrate a sensor and the guy with the calibration materials was out today....so it is pushed back a day. Instead I spent the morning trying to figure out the calibration process, this necessitated a couple of phone calls to the manufacturer who was not sure how to do it either. Luckily, the manufacturer did call me back and give me a little bit of information.
I spent the rest of my dad alternating between reading the history of cotton dryers (woohoo!) and trying to write some code to automate data handling. I have a few thousand (ok, well over 10,000) semi-colon delimited files that need to be imported into Excel and have a certain range of data formated and put into Excel while the rest is dumped. I spent a few hours plugging away at it. I now have a section of code that will import all of the files automatically, but each file gets put on its own worksheet in the same workbook. This is close but not quite what I want. Now, I need to cut the range of cells I want from each worksheet and put them each in their own column on the same worksheet. I did manage to create a second bit of code that will open the file and only enter the one range of cells I want, however it can't do both. I really need it to do both.
This is something I have wanted done for a long time, but never had time for in NO. If this works out I have an idea for a paper or two utilizing the crap pile of data we gathered over the last few years.

Food and other ruminations

Another week has passed in Greenville. I have now been on the job for 3 weeks and this weekend is the first one I will actually be in Greenville. My boss recommended a place to grab a burger called "Gino's Hamburgers". Very good call. They have an odd menu, in the vein of Bud's Broiler in NO. It is not quite the same, so no char-broiled burgers and dogs nor any Barq's Rootbeer over crushed ice, but it is order by the numbers and preset dressings on burgers and dogs. I tried a #1 with cheese, which is a dressed cheese burger, a #7, which is a hot dog with relish, and an order of fries. The quantities are good, it was a bit too much food, but tasty nonetheless. They also offer what appears to be a southern staple, outside of NO, of a #2 which is a burger with coleslaw. That was common in SC. The fries are good, thick but not steak cut. The fries are better then most fast food. The best part, besides the taste was the price. It came in cheaper then a fast food joint.

I tried one of the handful of Mexican places for lunch today. The good news is they have Dos Equis on tap (Lager not Amber). The bad news is it was not that great. The lunch combo I had, a #11 I think, was a decent amount of food. The cheese quesadilla was good. The enchilada was decent. The tamale sucked. The free chips and salsa were ok, not great but not the worst I have had either.

Ok, one other thing. We had a group of visitors from China at work on Friday. The visit was only for a few hours and they were late by about an hour. I thought it was a bit odd though, in the middle of a meeting, to tell the visitors we were going to stop the formal talks and go have lunch. The lunch was a cook out at the office for a guy who was leaving after 11 years. The visitors came along to lunch, but it was really odd, to me at least.

iPod Rocks

I have begun attempting to get back into running since moving to Greenville. This has not been too easy as there is a dearth of sidewalks here. Also, running gets boring solo. So I have broken down and joined the iPod nation. I just went with the iPod shuffle in plain old silver/white. This is a little tiny thing if you have not seen it before. I like the clip and small size, it is perfect for running. I will have to post some pictures to show it in scale, it really is smaller then a matchbook.

I think this will also come in handy at work. We are allowed to listen to music, and most people, including my boss have music playing all day. My door is open and I don't want to disrupt others, so a little iPod might be very handy. I also will be doing a bit of travelling with work, and the iPod does not take up too much room....really none at all.

Hurricane Season

As many of you know it is hurricane season once again. It is time to download your tracking maps. I received one via email today and thought I would post it to make it easier for you all.

Gin School wrapped up today. It was educational but long! Now we have visitors from China tomorrow, I can't wait for the end of the work week. This will also be the first weekend that I actually spend the whole time in MS. Stay tuned for fun and adventure.....

Two More Things

Congratualtions, IT'S A BOY!
First off, I meant to announce that my friend Leslie has given birth to a baby boy as of 1:36 Sunday morning. Gregory Bruce Ghoorahoo welcome to the world! Congratulations Leslie and Rash.


Secondly, where I work. Thanks to Google, this is my office US Cotton Ginning Lab . To the north is deer creek, which is the supposed inspiration for Kermit and Emmett Otter, etc. All around are fields for soybean, corn, and cotton. Further north of Deer Creek is the Mid-South Area headquarters for the ARS. Some of the buildings around there are owned by Mississippi State University.

Food

Food is important. So far, I have found a very tasty fried catfish sandwich at a bar and grill down near the river and some good barbeque. That is good, but it does not make a full complement of food. Tonight I had to do a work dinner and was exposed to a new restaurant. Ostensibly Sherman's is an Italian restaurant. The catfish (SURPRISE!) was the recommended dish, however it is also what we are having for dinner tomorrow night for work. So in the end, it was a steak. What I have learned so far in the Delta, is that I can get really good catfish, good barbeque (not as good as Rudy's), and a pretty decent steak. So, the quest for food continues. The options are better then Clemson, but not nearly what NO has to offer.

Can someone explain this to me?

I was at the grocery this afternoon picking up some Abita Amber and Abita Wheat to take back to the Delta with me. I saw this sign on the grocery. I have seen it on other grocery stores, can someone explain this to me? It seems like a very poor choice of words and a scary proposition at that.

Who needs consistency?

Ok, so I have a new job, but it is with the same agency, same management area, same general research area. You would think I would know better then to expect consistent policy and procedures, but nope. I finally wrapped up a paper that began before Katrina and assumed that the procedure for reviewing a paper would be the same at the new job as the old job....wrong. Believe it or not it is actually more beaucratic.
You see, at the old position you wrote a paper and had 3 colleagues review it, 2 of the colleagues should work for the agency and the third should be from outside the agency. Turn in the paper, with the reviews and any revisions they suggested, to the unit secretary and it gets approved by the Research Leader....done. The new job is to turn in to the Research Leader formatted according to the journal's requirements, yet it should be double spaced even if the journal does not want that. Oh yeah, this should be a hard copy, not electronic (beats me why). Three reviewers are suggested, but two are all that is needed. They should all be from outside the lab but at least one within the agency and one outside the agency. I don't send the papers out for review, the secretary will send them out with a cover letter from the research leader who must pre-approve the reviewers. A formal response to each reviewer's comments must be written up. Then it is all submitted, again in print, to the Research Leader again. Only then will it be approved to be sent out.

This should be fun.....I love beaucracy!

Home Sweet Home

Back in NO for the weekend. As I hit the Spillway, in record time, I called Melissa. My sister and brother-in-law had just got back from Paris last Sunday night. They were leaving Elio's with a fresh keg. I met them at their house and we had a beer and then headed to the recently re-opened Lakeview Harbor. Lakeview Harbor has some of the best burgers in town, along with cold draft beer and rocking sweet-potatoe (potato) fries. So 5 hours after leaving work I had a cold beer in hand, within another 2 hours I had a frosty Abita Amber. Life is good.

I will be loading up the truck with more stuff and some essentials (good beer) and heading back to Greenville tomorrow.

Back.......Home?

Ok, so Greenville is not exactly home. It is good to be back and off the road, though. All told it took about 9 hours of travel time for each direction of this little trip. I could drive it in that time or less. I guess the advantage of the flight was that I could sleep on the way.
Tomorrow is the day that I finally get cable and my own high speed internet connection, hopefully all will go well.

One nice thing about the trip was the ability to consume some decent beer. In this case it was the very good Thomas Creek, a local South Carolina beverage. They carry it at the Ruby Tuesday's in Clemson. Keep your comments to yourself about that one, Clemson has only slightly better food options then Greenville. Oh yes, and anyone who has heard me whine about the best food in Clemson (the only Thai place for 50 miles) burning down, they are rebuilding it. Yeah!

Networking

The last two days have been filled with networking. One more day and I am home free of being "on" for hours on end. Networking gets old, but beer does help. Last night's dinner was not too bad, no one new at the table with me and it was fairly laid back. After dinner was a chunk of networking as was all day today.
This afternoon had an open house at the Cotton Quality Research Station in Clemson. This is the same lab I was stationed at post-Katrina. It was good to see the folks at the lab again, I can't say enough just how great they are. After the open house, my boss, and 2 other cotton program folks went to have a few drinks and dinner. It was pretty much all networking, which is quite exhausting.
Tomorrow from 8 until 1 will be more networking, but after that it is just the ride back to Charlotte and then the flight back to Memphis followed by the drive back to Greenville....simple enough I guess.

Oh yeah, anyone else find it funny that someone asked me where I was this afternoon and I got the name of the city wrong. I also had an issue at the airport in Charlotte when we were looking at the monitor to see which luggage carousel would have our luggage. I was looking for flights from New Orleans and of course I had flown out of Memphis so that was bit pointless.

Greenville to Greenville?

Yep! I am in Greenville, but SC not MS tonight. My boss and I drove up to Memphis yesterday afternoon and then flew to Charlotte, NC and then drove to Greenville, SC. We are attending a conference known as the EFS System Conference. It actually has been a good opportunity to do some schmoozing for the new job. They also feed us well.
Tomorrow afternoon we head down the Clemson, SC for an open house and then spend the night there and attend a planning session at Clemson on Wednesday morning. We head back to Charlotte-Memphis-Greenville Wednesday afternoon.
The real fun begins when I return to Greenville, MS and try to file a travel claim for a trip from Greenville to Greenville. Let's see if the government can handle that without screwing it up too badly.
I guess one good thing is that this conference has focused a fair amount on sustainability and responsible production practices. Score 1 for the environment and common sense.

Where do goldfish come from?

That's right, most goldfish sold in the US come from Arkansas. So why does this matter?
I went down to Monroe, LA to meet a buddy who is teaching in Shreveport since Katrina. Monroe is sort of halfway between the two places.
Mapquest
As I am driving through the middle of nowehere I am wondering why all of these fish farms with ponds and tanks looks so familiar. I finally realized that when my old boss and I drove from the cotton classing office in Rayville to Stoneville we passed some of these same farms. Arkansas has a huge aquaculture economy, unlike Louisiana. The fishing industry is not in favor of LA getting more into farming fish.
Interesting thing about driving through the middle of nowhere is the fact that Arkansas has few towns, Louisiana has a bunch of really small towns. Although these towns are small and poor, a couple of huge antibellum style houses are present in almost all of them...pictures next time I make the drive.
Monroe was interesting, it was good to see my buddy, but the options for meeting were slim, so wings at Hooter's it was. From there we went over to the family farm in Ruston and got to see my grandpa, who is out the hospital, and my mom who was out of town when I left to begin this adventure. Oh yeah, Mike got to indulge in one of his favorite beverages: the Old Fashioned.

Old Fashioned Recipe
3 oz Bourbon
2 teaspoons (iced tea spoons work well) of Simple Syrup (sugar water)
2 dashes of Peychaud Bitters
4 dashes of Angostura Bitters
twist of lemon peel, you must twist to get the oils out
Stir, add ice, and garnish with a cherry.

I may have the amount of the 2 bitters inverted. Good luck finding Peychaud Bitters outside New Orleans, but I recommend Dorignac's or Martin's Wine Cellar to find them.