I’ll be back at work on Monday. I decided this today after talking with co-workers who wanted to check up on me. I would’ve figured our program reviews had happened this week, but they’re happening next week, and jumping into that is a great way to get my feet back wet. Next week is a short week, so I’ll be good with that.
I start therapy on Wednesday. I may need it after the PMR, heh.
I wrote on Monday that I was auditioning for the Huntsville Master Chorale. My audition was this afternoon, and I was told that I had “a perfect choral sound” and that “I would love to have you in our group”. I mean, that’s not, “You’re in,” but it’s pretty close. Needless to say, I’m happy with it, even though I thought my sight-reading stunk on ice. [She demurred and argued that it was a challenging piece to sight read, which I grant you that it was, but still ... I missed notes! I don't like missing notes!] I was nervous, mainly because the last time I tried out for anything was ACDA All-State my senior year at MSMS.
Also, things continue to be good. I had a dream last night that I went back to work today, where I got yelled at by everyone involved for coming back early. :chuckle: Today was actually the first day I was eligible to go back, as the leave I’m on requires that you be gone at least two weeks. Admittedly, I am tempted, but there are some things I want to get done around the house and with myself before I start back to work. I meet with my shrink again tomorrow, and I think she’ll be happy with my results. I know that I am.
I didn’t make it this morning; I’d gotten there too early and let myself work up into a crazy panic attack. Rick feels bad [and came by to apologize, even though he totally didn't have to do that ... one reason he's such a great friend and has been for years], but it’s okay. Stephen and I have a different plan for next Sunday, and then the next weekend I’ll be in Austin with Lara and we’ll find someplace to go, I bet. [Maybe with Jeff Miller?]
That pretty much does it. Thanks to Kari for this one. 
[I went to work at GEOFCON 2, then went all the way down to GEOFCON 4 by the end of a completely wacky day.]
Lots of things, really. I’m the king of unfinished projects, and Andy Osenga has nailed why:
My hit: I started running to try and do a 5k last year. I actually did it and have lost weight and will lose to Jill Phillips handily in another 5k this Saturday. (3pm at the Nashville Zoo, if you want to watch. Gabe Scott will also be there and will run a marathon in the same amount of time.)
My miss: I’ve never written a novel. Barely even a short story. And why? What’s stopping me?
Well, there are good excuses: I have two kids and a career that takes a lot of time.
And there are bad excuses: I’m tired, I don’t really want to do it anyway.
And then, THEN, there are the reasons: I’m scared and I’m lazy. (Lazy, of course, just means I’m scared again, but of hard work.) I want it to be fun, but when I try it’s not fun. It’s hard. Because I don’t know how to do it.
Practicing guitar was not fun. Playing guitar well is some of the most fun you can have on Earth. Why can’t I take that knowledge and move it to another medium? The Reason.
Hell, I’ve been scared of posting this for nearly two weeks. Why? Well, I’m lazy, plus I’m scared to admit it…
I’ve been thinking about this post for a bit over the last few weeks, because a lot of people—including many friends!—don’t know what it is that I do for a living. Bryan wrote yesterday about elevator pitches, and that gives me the framework for this discussion. As such: my job description as an elevator pitch.
I am a project manager for a medium-sized aerospace company. We build unpressurized cargo carriers that NASA uses to fly replacement units like storage batters for the solar panels and the gyroscopes that keep the International Space Station aligned up to orbit in the Space Shuttle. These carriers have to protect the cargo from the structural loads of launch and landing as well as provide active heating and passive cooling on-orbit for up to ten years.
Admittedly, there are a lot of technical terms in there, but in those three sentences, you’re either 1) interested to know more, 2) writing me off as a nerdy rocket scientist, or 3) glazing over and hoping that your floor comes up soon. But hey, let’s pretend that you’re #1 …
I’m a project manager. What does that mean? Well, it means I’m frickin’ crazy. Okay, that’s really not that funny; my depression pre-dates my job. And presuming that you read my Twitter stream, you probably worry a little bit for my sanity. I do, too. This week’s been long—I’ve worked my forty hours, and I was in my bed today at 3:00 p.m. for what I think was a well-deserved and know was a much-needed nap—but it’s been good in many ways. Things are coming forward.
That said, none of that describes what a project manager is being like, in my sense. It boils down to this, in my role: managing technical issues with engineering drawings, materials and process specifications, and aerospace quality standards while keeping the customer happy and reasonably well-informed … while working to maintain cost and schedule. I work both cost-plus-fee and fixed-price contracts, and I’ve got a good reputation for managing both [or so I tell myself at 0445 when I'm not really wanting to get going that day]. Simply put, like many engineers, I solve problems—but my problems go outside the standard, “How strong can we make this beam while keeping it under twenty pounds?” decisions that aerospace engineers are forever making.
I work for Teledyne Brown Engineering, which is a systems engineering company with a manufacturing background. [The Brown is from Brown Tool and Die.] I never, ever presume to speak for my employer, although I believe that I try to represent them well. I’m part of a small team that does this for the company, and we have a pretty solid reputation with our NASA customer.
Unpressurized cargo carriers are as weird as they sound. I started off in pressurized, rack-stored payloads—what you think of in your mind’s eye when you think of astronauts floating around inside the Shuttle or Station, in front of a floor-to-ceiling assortment of drawers, bins, and lockers. This lasted a couple years, and then we got busy working for NASA in building these carriers. I was a co-op then, and they needed someone detail-oriented who could figure out scheduling. My boss handed me the task to keep busy, and I got good at it. Too good, actually—I know am fairly intuitive with scheduling [to the point that I don't put in as much time with Microsoft Project as I should], and once I showed an interest in the business side of this job, I was done for. Heh.
We’ve built carriers for: the big ISS batteries that store electrical energy captured by the solar arrays; the Control Moment Gyroscopes that the ISS uses to align itself without firing rockets all the time, various electrical boxes that do battery charge/discharge and current switching, and a bunch of other things that are harder to describe. Most all of these units are in the size range of “not really small enough to fit in a compact station wagon”, and weigh between 100-400lbs. They’ve got odd shapes and are delicate [especially the batteries], so you have to coddle them. For us, that means stiff, strong metal components that provide structural integrity while not weighing very much. [When Apple made big news about their unibody laptops, I was thinking, "Um, wow. Hogging out aluminum. Do that every damn day, y'all."] And when it comes to active heating and passive cooling, these are the visible, non-structural things: black-anodized heating plates with thermofoil heaters glued to the back side, with big, thick, bright-white blankets around everything. [Ever notice that everything on orbit seems to be painted white? You gotta reject that heat when you're in the sun, or you'll cook.]
That’s my job, in a nutshell, as of early 2009. I’ve been doing the project management gig since late 2006 and the cargo carrier stuff since early 2002. I’ve touched countless items that have later flown in space: just today, I held a thermostat that probably cost the government more than my company pays me in a year. [Yes, it was in an ESD bag, and yes, I had a wrist strap on.] My job is fun, crazy, and maddening … and I love it most every day. [AND WHEN I DON'T MY FRIENDS HEAR ABOUT IT ON TWITTER BECAUSE OH MY GOD I HAVE TO VENT OR I WILL KILL SOMEONE.]
Every autumn at my house, there are two great days for me:
Today is that second day. In case you’re wondering, yes, I do eventually turn on the heat pump, but only when it gets below 5C outside or so. My house holds heat pretty well, and so do I; it’s only when pipes are ready to freeze that I’ll fire up the heat, and even then I only keep it around 15C downstairs; it’ll be near enough to 20C upstairs to be comfortable. It helps that my neighbors on both sides really like to run their heat up high, as I get some of their residual heat through the common walls between our townhouses.
Fastmail rocks. I sing their praises. But the primary datacenter is down for the count this morning, which means they’re offline despite the fact that FM’s failover and replication procedures are excellent. [And honestly, I foresee them addressing the single-point-of-failure datacenter in the future; they're awesome like that.]
So if you need to email me, well, hit me at work or GMail. And if you don’t have either, well, tough for you—not putting those here on the site.
Update, 0747: And we’re back.
Update, 2032: Indeed, now they’re going to work on redundant uplinks, as that was the issue. This is why I spend my money with them.
So, let’s see … the ear infection killed my Friday, so I didn’t go to visit my parents over the weekend as expected. Presumably, I was going to work. But no. I felt like crap all weekend. I went in to the office to get my work laptop around 0630 yesterday, came home, went back to sleep, got up in time to go to Hooters for my boss’s birthday lunch [it's his wife's idea; honest], came home, went back to sleep [for as much as I hate to sleep, I love to sleep when on vacation], and when I considered working last night, my ear got to acting up again. Gah.
I haven’t done diddly crap today, other than canceling my reservations for the chalet. I figured it was 50-50 that I’d still feel like dogmeat, and I didn’t want to be spending $200+ to feel like dogmeat in Guntersville when I could feel like dogmeat in Madison.
At some point, I still have to do some work. Oh, and my count for work phone calls this week is already at five. I have probably three or four hours’ worth of work to do, and then I can forget about work [yeah, right] for the rest of the week.
So what am I doing? Finalizing plans for the long-overdue desk-building in the loft [ready to be doing layout later this week ... am probably putting the chalet money towards prototyping], sleeping, and generally not saying a word. This probably surprises some people who know the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted me, but when I’m alone, I go into complete hermit mode. [This surprises exactly none of the people that have ever lived with me, however.] Also, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about random things, and that’s good. This is, functionally, a week-long passive soak. Intuitively, companies understand this, and that’s why I’m getting paid to sit on my ass right now.
I should’ve known better than to make any damn plans for my vacation. My plans never survive contact with the enemy. :casts an eye towards the motto of this Weblog’s jokey name:
I think I need to refine the Equation of Motivation for that pre-vacation period when you don’t feel like doing diddly-crap. I would, but I’m too apathetic [and have too much to do before I leave here tomorrow as it is].
I should try to do this week-away vacation thing more than once a year, given that I get three weeks’ vacation now. [I take a day or two here and there, sometimes to go to shows, sometimes to go to concerts, sometimes to just visit the fam.] Sure, I went to Ohio in May, but I drove way too damn much for that to be something I’d call a vacation.
Last week of the month, I’ll be off from work for a week [glorious!], without anyone calling me or me calling them [even better! I was in touch with the office all during my week out in May], spending part of the time with my parents and the rest of the time by my own damn self. I’m even going to Lake Guntersville for a couple days. But I won’t tell you when, Internet, so you don’t try to break in my house and steal my stuff.
[Besides, I boobytrap the place.]
Hey hey hey, we shipped some flight hardware … on Leap Day. This has been a possibility for a solid six weeks, and I’m giddy that it happened. Mostly, I’m just tired and want to sleep for about six weeks. But I’ve still got four programs and two proposals to manage [a third ships out this afternoon, huzzah]. I don’t know that life is gonna slow down much for me until March ends, but … I sure hope so. I kinda miss having the energy and passion to write.
Yeah, so … right there at the end of the year, I was finishing moving IJSM.org and all the other sites I administrate for myself and friends to a new server, which not three days later started exhibiting failures of both hard drives. If you start at that second link and go forward, well, you’ll see me slowly begin to lose my mind. :chuckle:
I think that everything is restored now, and I got a halfway decent night’s sleep last night, so I’m off to Tennessee today and some of tomorrow, since, you know, I got the flu for Christmas and didn’t get to see any of my family.
Just gotta roll with the punches. Plan B? I’m still working on Plan A.
So, let’s see …
It’s gonna be a fun week. I’m ready to get started.
There comes a day in the not-too-distant future when I will use all the comp time that I’m banking up and will retreat somewhere. I’ll take my phone with me, but … yeah, that’s about it. Because, you see, I’m as worried for my sanity at this point as any of you are.
It's all just a stream of consciousness for me, folks.