Está lloviendo a cántaros en Houston — cats and dogs, baby, cats and dogs;

It is a 1km walk each way to work;

I keep my USB drive attached to my key chain;

My apartment keys are on my key chain;

I used my USB drive at work today, i.e., I plugged it into the computer;

THEREFORE

I had a hilarious 3km walk in the rain after work today because someone – I’m not pointing any fingers — left their apartment keys dangling from their office computer.

Without you, I’m nothing but broken pieces of a complete self. I miss you.

Love,
Kirk

P.S.: The chips did not go to waste.

Less abstractly: while doing some maintenance a few weeks ago, I had to go to wordpress.com to acquire my API key in order to use the comment spam protection on this blog. I started to register an account on wordpress.com, then rememembered, “Hey, I already have an account here.” I logged in and unexpectedly found my blog from my summer in Europe at the International Space University: Road Trip to Space. (It’s empty there, but keep reading…)

I’ve spent a fair amount of time already in 2008 archiving bits and pieces of the past. I’m not stuck there, unwilling to move on. I welcome the future. I want the past to be the past. I’m filing things away so that the past can be a story shared with the characters who were a part of it instead of a private clutter in boxes and folders — the past as a trail that can be followed instead of the past as a jungle that grasps, impedes.

Here are the posts from that old blog in their new home on this site: tag: SSP 2006. It’s all the same, except that instead of hosting the photos on site, I’ve added them to Flickr and linked to them there. This is not groundbreaking stuff by any means, just a piece of the Kittell Legend. Sure, sure, it’s not as interesting as any Duluoz Legend, but it’s close to my heart nonetheless.

I’ve posted three sets of photos to Flickr from summer 2006. There are more — quite a lot more, actually, and I’ll get to them in due time. It takes some time to properly archive them due to my obsession with mundane details like tags, latitude and longitude, etc.

Tour de France 2006, Strasbourg, France

Martigny - Chamonix, July 2006

Nürnberg - Plzen - Praha, August 2006

In the meantime, I wanted to show a few photos that I took in Trona, California. I tell people that I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Fulton County, Illinois. Trona is… maybe at the end of nowhere — the end of the world, right before you fall off into the abyss. In other words, it’s a pretty cool place.

It’s hard to describe the Mojave Desert in photos in the same way that it is hard to describe central Illinois in photos: the place is wide open, expansive. If you focus your camera on the so-interesting horizon, you often end up with a so-disappointing photo. It’s maddening. That squarish rectangle that your camera captures does not capture what it feels like to be in the wider landscape.

The way around this is to capture a panoramic view of the landscape. I have been taking panoramic photos since I got my first digital camera in 2004, but I have never tried in earnest to stitch them together. Finally, with this batch, I mustered the impetus to try it.

So, I picked up a copy of hugin 0.7.0 from SourceForge to create the panoramas.

It was fairly easy to use. There is a feature to create the panoramas automatically, but I set the control points — the points common to multiple photos that would be stitched together — manually. It looked better like that because I could do some quality control on each point, plus I did a more thorough job picking control points in the common areas.

Click each photo for a link to its page on Flickr. Welcome to the desert. Let me know what you think.

Trona Pinnacles:

Trona Pinnacles, from on top of a pinnacle:

Panamint Valley, from CA-178:

If you’re impatient, you can see all of the photos from this trip on Flickr before I write about it: California, October 2008

Trona Pinnacles: blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/ridgecrest/trona.html

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.)

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.

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.”

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:

* * *

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

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.