KirkKittell.com

Dear Mr. Lochhead,

Here are a few videos that I described in class on Monday. The real things are always better…

STS-123 Landing [YouTube] - You can start to see the APU plume in infrared at 5:05, a little bit in visible at 5:15, and very clearly near wheel stop at 6:05. The APU plume is normal, happens after every landing. It never looks this cool, though, usually it is invisible. For the flame to appear so clearly, there was a favorable combination of (1) a night landing and (2) very low wind. (The wind would blow the combustible gases away from the ignition source, sort of like trying to light a lighter in the wind.)

Boeing 777 Wing Load test [YouTube] - I was wrong about which aircraft I had seen the wing load test failure. I thought it was the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, but it was actually a Boeing 777. (In this case, think of failure as success — you want to break things in the lab, not in production or flight.)

Rolls Royce Trent 900 Bird Ingestion Test [YouTube] - The title says it all. Bird strike testing is required by the Federal Aviation for several components, including fan blades and windshields, so you can probably find more videos if you look for them.

Dear Ms. Franklin,

I got part of the story right about hydrazine combustion regarding ammonia, but I missed most of it. Now that I can cheat and use my notes, I can tell you that nitrogen and hydrogen products are also produced.

First off, I was wrong about one thing: the Auxiliary Power Unit [NASA] (APU) on the Space Shuttle Orbiter does not use monomethylhydrazine (CH₃NHNH₂) — it uses plain old liquid hydrazine, which is the composition I gave you, N₂H₄. (The Orbital Maneuvering System [NASA], another set of rocket engines on the Orbiter, uses monomethylhydrazine.)

Combustion of hydrazine in the APU occurs without oxygen In space, there is no atmosphere to provide oxygen; anyway, during launch in the atmosphere, combustion is isolated from the environment.

1. 3 N₂H₄ –> 4 NH₃ + N₂
2. N₂H₄ –> N₂ + 2 H₂
3. 4 NH₃ + N₂H₄ –> 3 N₂ + 8 H₂

I was wrong about the catalyst, as well. The catalyst is iridium on alumina, but it is called Shell 405, not Shell 104 — or if you want to be more specific, Shell Corporation stopped making this in 2002, so the new version produced by Aerojet is called S-405.

To both of you: thanks for letting me talk to your classes on Monday. It was fun. Engineers are good folks, but students are more interesting than engineers. I hope you found it useful. If you ever have any questions, email me at kirk.kittell@gmail.com. I can put you in touch with the smart folks that put their hands on this equipment, or can hook you up with more photos or videos, etc., which is even more interesting than listening to me describe it.

(To everyone else: My dad is a principal at Chester High School in southern Illinois. I was hanging out with a few of his teachers — Ms. Franklin and Mr. Lochhead — and students on Monday morning when I was in town.)

Finally, after a trip to Calgary and a hurricane, I finished editing the first three protochapters of a book I’m writing about my experiences at Ingersoll Scout Reservation called Above Cedar Creek.

I like editing better than writing. It feels more natural to move the pieces of this great puzzle around than to design the pieces. But editing is strenuous. It requires that you carve your creation into sometimes unrecognizeable pieces which, in this case, is entirely necessary because the original is junk. It was a first try sprint that needed to be tamed, beaten, managed, expanded, etc.

For posterity — or an obsession with noting every mundane detail — I scanned the copies of my first redlines:

• Liberating Chuck
• Friday Night MC
• Captain’s Skyline Trail

Tomorrow I have a long train ride from Longview, Texas to Springfield, IL for Dayvo’s party (posted on Dopplr). I like trains — they’re like offices on wheels. It means that I’ll be more or less confined to my seat. If planned well, this translates into several productive hours to transform the red ink into electronic text.

Since completing my M.S. at the University of Illinois in May 2006, and before that my B.S. in December 2003, I’ve been carrying a huge pile of binders filled with notes, homework, exams, quizzes, and other ballast from place to place, once from Illinois to Virginia, once within Virginia, and once from Virginia to Texas. They were heavy, required too much volume to store.

Now, I have only one more place to transport all of these papers: to the recycling bin.

After several months of slow work — that’s not months of hard work, but maybe an hour a week — I’ve scanned all of my useful notes and converted them to PDF files. See, I couldn’t just throw the things away. I spent so much time copying and re-copying the notes that I couldn’t toss them all. Plus, some of the notes still come in handy at work, especially the notes for combustion.

If you’re interested in stealing my old notes, I’ve posted them on my wiki. Maybe they could be useful for you.

• AAE 220, Aerospace Structures I
• AAE 221, Aerospace Structures II
• AAE 251, Aerospace Dynamic Systems II
• AAE 306, Orbital Mechanics
• AAE 333, Electric Propulsion
• AAE 350, Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics and Control
• AAE 404, Optimization of Aerospace Systems
• AAE 408, Optimal Spacecraft Trajectories
• AE 514, Boundary Layer Theory
• ASTR 210, General Astronomy
• ASTR 305, Solar System and Interstellar Medium
• MATH 280, Advanced Calculus
• MATH 285, Differential Equations
• MATH 385, Differential Equations II
• ME 501, Combustion

Now, the next time I move to a new place, I can count on having a lighter load to carry. This message brought you by the letter M, as in “My boring life.”

I returned to Nassau Bay on Wednesday morning. There is no damage at my building. However, here is no electricity here, though on the same block as us the hospital parking lot and the Lockheed Martin building are both teasing us with their electricity. So, it’s urban campout time.

Yesterday morning, I went for a bike ride with my camera around Clear Lake, which is only about 100 meters from my apartment. The lake has receded to its pre-Ike level, but not before flooding, smashing, or otherwise causing havoc around its shores.

I have posted all of my photos to Flickr: Hurricane Ike, September 2008.

I felt like a jerk riding through other people’s misery, so in most cases I shied away from taking personal photos. The folks in Kemah, on the coast of Galveston Bay at the mouth of Clear Lake, got hit hard. I know that people on the Gulf of Mexico coast were hit harder. The photos below, and the full set on Flickr, are just a small part of what I saw there. Tomorrow I’m going to see if the Red Cross can use a pair of hands — much more useful than snapping photos, though I wanted to share with you that aren’t here what it looks like in my neighborhood.

Now that the storm has passed, Clear Lake is serene again. It’s eerie to consider how different — how powerful — it can be when it is sitting there so silently.

Compare:

I’m still in College Station, staying here a little longer than expected. In Nassau Bay, according to the city’s web site, the sewer system is still down after Hurricane Ike. I don’t mind the electricity and water being out, but the sewer is another story. In the interim, I have plenty of downtime. I should use it to my advantage. It’s difficult. They have television and cable at Jackie’s place. It’s amazing. But I need to get things in order.

* * *

Here’s the deal. I’m in a rut. I want out. And I want to get moving. Now.

I want to understand how I got into this mess, then how to get into something that I like. That’s a vague order, sure. I think I could be something great, but since coming to Texas in March, I’m losing my confidence that this is possible. I hate that loss of confidence. It is difficult to get out of bed thinking like that.

I came to Houston because my girlfriend lived in San Antonio. Houston is a center of the space industry in the US, and I knew I could get a job here quickly, which I did. I’m money in the bank when it comes to a job interview. I’m not scared of them. I love talking in front of people, or in formal situations. I’m a performer. I can see the conversation as it happens from the other side of the table. As I’ve said before to people, if I can sing the “Banana Song” in front of 250 strangers at Boy Scout camp, making a real presentation is easy.

There’s a downside to “as soon as possible:” I didn’t put enough effort into thinking about life on the job. I thought of how great it would be so close in San Antonio and extrapolated that feeling. It was true during the first two months when she was here. I didn’t notice any potholes at work when I knew I’d be in San Antonio again by Friday. I was working so I could live there on the weekend, so work was good. Work only existed at work.

Fast forward a few months, and she’s in Canada. Work life starts to sneak out of its box, seeping into the hours outside of work. Work became the only thing, drafted into supporting the hours outside of work instead of the other way around. 

Now I notice that my position is intellectually underwhelming. I wish I was getting pummeled by work, struggling to keep up instead of struggling to stay interested. I’m worried about the effect that having little to do now will affect the height that I can reach later. I have very high aspirations. I want to work on difficult technical programs now, when I’m young and indestructible and can invest my freetime to get ahead, and then move into management — not just mid-level management, but way up the chain. Lead a division. Lead a company. I prefer difficult challenges. It’s just like basketball for me. When I play against inferior or equal players, I play down to their level; there is no challenge. When I play against superior players, I play up to their level; these are my best games.

Job criterion number one: My position must be challenging, difficult.

I love to organize complex situations. It fits into the way I see things spatially. This is difficult to explain because it is innate. I can organize pieces of an environment, of a situation, of a problem, by seeing the different components in my head and how they fit together. Time, relationships, components of a problem, they all have a three-dimensional quality in my imagination. It’s not multitasking, working on the different pieces at once. It’s being able to see the relationships between them. Without many pieces this is a useless trait.

Job criterion number two: My position must be complex, multifaceted.

The greatest quality I have as an engineer — or at least most unique quality — is my ability to communicate, to talk, to write, to turn complex issues into linear, understandable pieces. I’m not getting that now, either. I used to be able to do that at my previous position. Meetings or documents for our customers were natural for me. I think this is a remnant of working in student organizations at the University of Illinois. Having seen the tendency for people to bandy words and obfuscate problems — intentionally or not — I don’t have as much tolerance for it. It’s easier to cut the bull when you’ve seen it before. In my short experience in the workforce, this is a rare skill for engineers. And now I’m sitting at a desk where I don’t get to do any of that.

Job criterion number three: My position must require me to speak and write regularly.

* * *

That’s my first go at this. I feel apprehensive about focusing on a specific point in the future. I like to adapt to new situations, to things I don’t know. I’ve always done that. I’ve played in a band, on club sports teams, traveled, studied aerospace engineering, worked in service groups. I’ve never wanted to focus on anything because I have broad skills and broader interests. Reading my three initial criteria, I haven’t pointed in any specific direction. These are raw qualities that should be refined, but I demand them nonetheless. It’s time, for the first time that I’ve known, to stop being afraid of ambitious goals and push for something great instead of just talking about it.

If you’re interested:

• my resume
• my LinkedIn profile

Well, I changed my mind about staying in Nassau Bay for the hurricane. An old friend from University of Illinois lives in College Station, so I’m up here, hanging out. Hurricane Ike will probably be a Category 1 hurricane when it gets here, but at least the water isn’t coming up to meet me.

I’ve posted a few more photos on Flickr: Hurricane Ike, September 2008. My favorites are the progression of rising Clear Lake photos:

11 September 18:32

12 September 7:53

12 September 12:23

Parting thought: Twitter has been an interesting, sometimes even useful, source of information during the hurricane approach. Know what’s not useful? The folks who make assertive claims about conditions in the storm or city, without links or citations, and make them from hundreds of kilometers away without any knowledge of what’s going on. If you don’t know what’s really happening and you can’t share your source of information, shut up.

A few photos from the day before the hurricane on Flickr: Hurricane Ike, September 2008.

I’m sitting here in my apartment in Nassau Bay, waiting for Hurricane Ike to arrive. It shouldn’t be long, maybe 24 hours from now. My ZIP code, 77058, got the call for a mandatory evacuation today, but I’m staying. It has less to do with bravado, more to do with my placement relative to the other folks in 77058. The folks in houses need to worry about how high they are above sea level and what comes in or smashes into their front door.

In the event of flooding, for me, the worst I expect from my apartment — 14 feet above sea level at the base — is to see the water below me from my window. I’ll be looking, believe me. I feel safe where I am. Not only am I elevated above the ground, none of my windows face an open area. My largest set of windows face the opposing building in my complex, 20 feet away.

Preparation… this is something I don’t understand. What I expected, as a neophyte in the Houston area, is that the residents were ready for hurricanes. I expected that this was old news for them and that they knew how to pick up and move. Maybe I was just too accustomed to the Texas way of self sufficiency and getting things done. Reading the news — something that should be done with a grain of salt, unless hysterics is your favorite form of information — has been a comedy of empty gas stations and crowded stores. I didn’t expect that.

I went to HEB — that’s Texan for “really awesome grocery store” — on Tuesday evening to get a few items that I might need in case of total post-hurricane apocalypse. I didn’t even have to wait in line to checkout. Today: you might be lucky to get a parking spot at Wal-Mart or the grocery store. After HEB, I went to the gas station a few blocks away, figuring I ought to make sure I had a full tank of gas in case of evacuation. Only one of the twelve pumps was occupied. Today: gas stations were running out of gas because the sixth largest metro area in the US collectively exclaimed, “Oh, crap!” and rushed to the gas stations. It turns out that Texans are just like any other people; they have the same tendency to procrastinate and then break into hysterics under pressure.

Now, if I had a family here, or if I owned a house, I’d probably board up and move out. I would have been gone a day ago. I’m staying here as a bachelor for this hurricane, which is much, much simpler than having to care for a family. I have no envy for those folks. Good luck to you.

The upside of this hurricane, so far, is meeting people in the neighborhood, something I have not done since moving here in early April. Something about staying behind for the hurricane creates a common bond between people; either that, or I don’t look dangerous enough to be a looter. I spent some time on the Nassau Bay side of Clear Lake today, taking photos from the boardwalk, talking to people who didn’t evacuate. I met a guy and his wife who bought their house from the last man on the moon, Eugene Cernan. I met a guy whose primary fixation with the hurricane was a desire to go fishing. I met my next door neighbor. In my hopefully-short-term stint in Houston — no offense, Houston or Houstonians, but my job is devoid of any character and I’m going to leave it as soon as possible — these are the first four people I’ve met here in the neighborhood.

So, wish me luck. And if you have some free time on Friday, keep me company on Twitter or Facebook; I expect the power to be out on Saturday and Sunday, but on Friday I’ll be here and bored. I’d say that I hope the trend of the hurricane track (see: Stormpulse) keeps moving to the northeast, but I’d say it only half heartedly. Someone will get hit by this hurricane no matter where it strikes, and it’s a big one. Why not here?

[Photos from the trip to Banff posted to Flickr: Banff National Park, 29 August 2008.]

First of all, despite any indications below that might seem like I had an entirely cruddy time in Alberta over the weekend, let me before I dive in say that it was an excellent weekend. This past weekend was the first time I had seen Megha since May, thereby giving this weekend a grade of “excellent” in spite of the weather’s attempts to dampen everything.

Disclaimer done, let me whine that I waited three years to get to Banff National Park and now that I finally got the chance, it rained nearly the entire time that I was there. Bloody weather…

The first time I thought about going to Banff was on my return trip from Mojave to Illinois in spring 2005. My ultimate road trip home, i.e., what didn’t happen, was a 30-day trip from Mojave via Portland, Missoula, and Bismarck, with one leg of the trip through some of the Canadian Rockies national parks: Banff; Jasper; Mount Revelstoke, Yoho; Kootenay; Glacier — especially Banff and Jasper. In the end I scaled it back to a 19-day trip, minus the Canadian portion.

Well, you can’t choose the weather. It was 10C and rainy most of the time that Megha and I were in Banff. She was tough, not at all complaining about our fortunes, but the following photo captures the essence of the trip: soggy and huddled for warmth. She’s almost smiling here. +10 for her. If I were her, I might have tossed me in the lake.

It was still excellent to see Megha and good to be in the mountains. Sure, the mountains were often hidden behind the clouds — and if you want to get really deep, Megha is Sanskrit for cloud — but now I’m back in Houston and have neither mountains nor Megha. So it goes. Here are my photos from the trip. They’re not my best — often hurried due to the rain — but they’re nice memories, nonetheless.

This photo of Lake Minnewonka is my favorite photo from the set. It’s mysterious, feels like a gateway to a someplace hidden and guarded further.

Overlooking the Bow River

Lake Louise

Lake Minnewanka and Two Jack Lake

There’s one nice thing about nobody reading my blog: I can post things without much fear of anyone reading. And judging. Obscurity is a conference builder of sorts. So, I’ll point out something that’s been right and written under your nose. The chances that you, unlikely reader, are going to notice it are small. That gives me false confidence. Good enough.

I want to write a book. I want to write three — or at least two-and-a-half because one feels more like a short story — and they’re all memoirs. That makes me really apprehensive. I’m 27. I’ve done nothing of note in 27 years, so it feels presumptuous to think about writing about me and my experiences. But I’m nagged by the idea, and I have a huge ego hidden inside me.

The three books go like this: (1) about working at Ingersoll Scout Reservation, a Boy Scout summer camp in midwest nowhere, titled Above Cedar Creek; (2) about my spring in the Mojave Desert in 2005, plus the trip to and from, titled Mojave Road in the Sky; (3) about my trip to India in Winter 2005/2006, titled Train Cancellation Party.

I put a few thousand words into Train Cancellation Party back in spring 2006, but it began to feel goofy and condescending. Then I went to Europe for a few months. I have barely touched it since then. It’s close to my heart. It’s radioactive. If I touch it, it might blow up. I’m afraid of it. I’m going to cut it off at the knees and make it a short story, or maybe fictionalize it.

I’ve been working on Above Cedar Creek more intently over the past two months. In June, I clenched my fists and decided that it was time to stop thinking about writing a book and start writing a book. I heard that’s how books get finished. Over the weekend, I passed the 20,000 word mark. I have no idea if this is a lot to a “real” writer. It’s a hell of a lot of words to me, especially since they’re about one of my least favorite subjects: me.

Here’s the punchline. You could have been reading every single word that I’ve written. Let me pull back the curtain: Above Cedar Creek, in progress. Several times a week, I sit down for 30 minutes and try to write a book. It’s embryonic now. Each of the 30 minutes sessions has been a forced sprint, something to hack my athletic sensibilities to beat my apprehension of writing. For me to sit down and write a chapter is difficult because I worry about the beginning and the end and how much, etc. I worry about some expectations that aren’t my own. I get wound up about the the full text before a single paragraph is written. Blasting for 30 minutes gets me past that fear. It’s go, go, go, no time to worry about anything. I don’t stop and edit anything except spelling errors; I hate those. Editing will come later.

In about three hours, I’m boarding a plane to Calgary, and I’m taking a few printed pages of the book with me, double spaced, ready to be smeared in red ink. I’ve done some very light editing on the “Liberating Chuck” chapter, but otherwise, it’s a few pieces of stream-of-consciousness linked together.

I’m making apologies already. I hate that. What I mean to say is: I wrote, now it’s time to unwrite and rewrite. It’s not perfect, but I’ll make it perfect. Eventually. I prefer editing to writing. I find it’s much more comfortable to arrange… and rearrange… and manipulate… and modify… and identify cracks… and repair them. I’m looking forward to putting down the first 80,000 or 100,000 words and then taking a hammer to all of them.

So, here are the first three chapters of Above Cedar Creek, in order of completeness, not necessarily in order they’ll be in the full piece. When completed, this will detail my time as a Boy Scout camp counselor and what I learned. Maybe it will be like Desert Solitaire, without the chainsawed billboards, or Walden, without the pompousness of Thoreau. I’m looking forward to the end of it, to see how it goes.

1. “Liberating Chuck“
2. “Friday Night MC“
3. “Captain’s Skyline Trail“

So, that’s that. I’m writing my first book. You can see it. That’s scary. If you read it, drop a note. I don’t expect much in the way of style or content yet, but if you’ve embarked on a similar journey, I’d be interested to hear how you made it through without incinerating yourself or the manuscript.

By the way: The title, Above Cedar Creek, is related to the flooding of 1993 — and other years, such as 1998 — where it’s all you can do at camp to stay above Cedar Creek. This title beat out Mosquitos, Raccoons, and Other Things That Still Cause Me to Wake Up Sweating Ten Years Later.

Now, a plane to catch to Calgary…

This comment wouldn’t fit on Twitter, and I liked this note during his presentation:

Getting started w/ visual and creative thinking: encourage actual play and fun; create an open environment; start a school; practice, practice, practice; look beyond the obvious.

BarcampHouston3 is going well — interesting, fun (aside from this morning’s lockdown SAVE YOUR QUESTIONS FOR THE END presentation).

And now Ed Schipul is tearing up the stage, giving some good natured flack to those most deserving. More later.