In Transit: Sioux Falls, SD
If you have to fly out of the A-Terminal of the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, be sure to buy any books, magazines, etc. outside security, because there's bugger all inside beyond a kiosk to take care of such things. Ye be warned. Make the connection in Cinci and I'm home at about 10:00 tonight.
[Update: I am a Sexy Shoeless God Of Tech Support, having fixed a problem by logging in remotely from the airport. Awesome I be.]
[Another Update: My flight has been delayed twice, now allegedly leaving at 9:55. Screwed I be.]
Today, Thursday the 1st of November, is my 8th day on the road this trip; I flew to Omaha on Wednesday last week, and I've been running ever since. The goal of this trip was to install some new equipment at a meat packing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So I flew into Omaha, visited one of the equipment providers the next day to do some pre-staging, then drove north.
Since then, I've been bruised, contused, frustrated, and nauseated. The plant in question was initially built in 1909, and parts of it appear to have not been cleaned since that time. That said, the building itself is fascinating; they have built eighteen additions onto it since the initial construction, and the place is literally a labyrinth; without a guide, you will get lost, quickly. All of the cool old elevators with the wooden gates and the levers to go up and down are still in use. There are plaques set in the brickwork on the outside of the building with years showing when the addition was built, along with Masonic sigils and the like. It's been upgraded, over time, to a rather up-to-date facility that processes upwards of 20,000 pigs per day, and yet there are still areas where they're still using old machinery from the 1930s; they've got a dedicated machine shop where new parts for old equipment can be fabricated as needed.
But most of the facility would make a fantastic horror movie set. At one point, I was helping move a vending machine, and as we dragged the pallet jack down the hallway, we passed an old metal door, from under which was trickling a small rivulet of blood. I was expecting zombies to come lurching out of the darkness at any point. Imagine the games you could run at a place like that! Heh.
The smell is startling. Outside, it's all pig shit, all the time. Inside, it's a pervasive smell of blood and raw meat. I can only be grateful that I did not visit in the summertime. I successfully avoiding visiting the worst areas, such as the killing floor, and Rendering. I'm profoundly grateful that there were no vending machines installed in those areas that required my attention. But I still kept hearing Agent Smith's voice in my head: "I hate this place. It's the smell!"
Over the course of a day, my nose got acclimated to the smell. But every day, I had to start over, and every day it took longer to get used to it. At the end, the revulsion was constant. But revulsion is not my job! Installing this stuff is.
Outside of the production areas, none of the rooms are in any respect clean. And I have to crawl behind, over, and under vending machines to sort through 10-year-old network cabling, cut loose that which does not work, sort the stuff that does, feed it through the machines to the readers mounted in the door, cut and crimp new terminators onto the ends, and pray that it works so I don't have to run new CAT5 all the way back to the switch. Fortunately, it almost never came to that, and the one time I had to, it was in one of only two rooms where the switch was actually in the same room as the machines. The rest of the time, I was either able to use existing cabling, or get creative with splicing things together.
(I have discovered the joy of crossover cables; if I can connect to a device with a network port without having to break out my four-port hub, my power supply, and the cables to hook everything together, well, that's a beautiful thing. For that matter, I've discovered that unbitten fingernails work just fine for stripping insulation off of twisted-pair wires. Hooray for beating bad habits; it helps that, for the past week, I haven't wanted my hands anywhere near my mouth.)
It's a rare trip where getting the software running and talking on the server is the easy part, but that was exactly the case here. The tough part was the staging; pre-programming and configuring 60 readers is time-consuming, for anyone, and that caused some delays. Also a factor was that vending was but one project among many, so getting all the machines moved in and placed slowed things down as well. On Monday, I changed my plans and arranged to come home on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I said "screw it", and changed plans to come home on Friday. At least it didn't come to that. There was still more I could have done, but the bulk of my time would have been spent sitting around waiting for things to get moving.
Sunday was the worst. A single room of nine machines took about six hours of my time. I managed to gouge my shoulder on a bolt sticking out of the wall, scratch my arm on an outlet box and, as the capstone to a bad day, stand directly up into a cup dispenser in the door of a coffee machine that happened to be open, knocking me silly for about quite a few seconds, and resulting in me laying on the brickwork floor of a top level of this porcine abattoir, swearing horribly and incomprehensibly at the ceiling. Fortunately, no one else was around to hear this.
I think my shortest day on-site was around 12 hours; most were 14-16 hours. This is why I did absolutely no sightseeing whatsoever; no pictures, no nothing. And I think that's regrettable, as there were some areas I really wanted to see, such as the actual Sioux Falls themselves. But this was really a grind from day one.
I'm off pork products for a while; the smell of it is likely to be less than welcoming to me for a while. As Jules Winfield said, "I just don't dig on swine, that's all." And there's a lot of things about that place that can really bother you if you let them. 20,000 pigs per day go into that place, and come out as bacon. They come in trailers, and these squealing mobs are herded off into an underground holding area. There, they are stunned, their throats are slit, and they are hung up by their hind legs to bleed out. A small, wheeled bulldozer trundled past at one point, with an injured pig laying limp in the scoop. But his eyes were open and he was grunting urgently as they carted him away to his fate. Poor bastard.
There will come a day (hopefully!) when meat can be grown artificially. They're already working on it, and it's really a matter of time. Once it becomes feasible to do such thing in mass quantities, what will happen to places like this plant? What about the jobs that it brings to that area? And what about the by-products of the plant? The stunning amount of blood gets used in all sort of ways; as plasma, as a component in pharmaceuticals (pill coating, particularly), and as fertilizer, thanks to the high nitrogen content. As they say at the plant, they use every part of the pig but the oink.
But if meat can be grown for consumption without requiring killing, this is overall a good thing. The pollution from pig farms is remarkable in its own right; a huge amount of waste product is released into the environment, in unnaturally high concentrations, and that causes problems. And would being a vegetarian still be in part a moral choice? Without that impetus, would people still bother? Would the alleged nutritional benefits still be enough?
Sheesh. Enough. I'm just glad to be coming home.
I've been listening to Warren Ellis' The 4AM Podcast a lot lately (it can be found here). It's an occasionally released compilation of music by unsigned bands that are recommended by readers. One band in particular, Lanterns On The Lake, has made it in there twice, and they're wonderful. I wouldn't mind making a trip to England to see them perform. Or see them perform while on a trip to England to do something else.
Since my last real blog post, I've taken a short vacation to Destin, FL, I've spent a weekend running around in the woods and hitting people with plumbing supplies, and I've taken a short trip to the Netherlands. I now present you with:
The Lost Blog Post
The book by William Gibson that I mentioned, Spook Country, is as excellent as one might expect. But it's very much a character-driven story, focusing on Interesting People doing Interesting Things, and the plot felt a bit thin. A theme in his past two books is an odd focus on distinctive accoutrements: Cayce, in Pattern Recognition, has her Rickson MA-1 replica bomber jacket (iconicly cool but very expensive); Tito, in Spook Country, wears Adidas GSG9 shoes. These are shoes/boots designed by Adidas for use by the German GSG9 anti-terrorist teams, and they're sweet; rather less expensive than Cayce's bomber jacket, and I want a pair.
[Update: I am a Sexy Shoeless God Of Tech Support, having fixed a problem by logging in remotely from the airport. Awesome I be.]
[Another Update: My flight has been delayed twice, now allegedly leaving at 9:55. Screwed I be.]
Today, Thursday the 1st of November, is my 8th day on the road this trip; I flew to Omaha on Wednesday last week, and I've been running ever since. The goal of this trip was to install some new equipment at a meat packing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So I flew into Omaha, visited one of the equipment providers the next day to do some pre-staging, then drove north.
Since then, I've been bruised, contused, frustrated, and nauseated. The plant in question was initially built in 1909, and parts of it appear to have not been cleaned since that time. That said, the building itself is fascinating; they have built eighteen additions onto it since the initial construction, and the place is literally a labyrinth; without a guide, you will get lost, quickly. All of the cool old elevators with the wooden gates and the levers to go up and down are still in use. There are plaques set in the brickwork on the outside of the building with years showing when the addition was built, along with Masonic sigils and the like. It's been upgraded, over time, to a rather up-to-date facility that processes upwards of 20,000 pigs per day, and yet there are still areas where they're still using old machinery from the 1930s; they've got a dedicated machine shop where new parts for old equipment can be fabricated as needed.
But most of the facility would make a fantastic horror movie set. At one point, I was helping move a vending machine, and as we dragged the pallet jack down the hallway, we passed an old metal door, from under which was trickling a small rivulet of blood. I was expecting zombies to come lurching out of the darkness at any point. Imagine the games you could run at a place like that! Heh.
The smell is startling. Outside, it's all pig shit, all the time. Inside, it's a pervasive smell of blood and raw meat. I can only be grateful that I did not visit in the summertime. I successfully avoiding visiting the worst areas, such as the killing floor, and Rendering. I'm profoundly grateful that there were no vending machines installed in those areas that required my attention. But I still kept hearing Agent Smith's voice in my head: "I hate this place. It's the smell!"
Over the course of a day, my nose got acclimated to the smell. But every day, I had to start over, and every day it took longer to get used to it. At the end, the revulsion was constant. But revulsion is not my job! Installing this stuff is.
Outside of the production areas, none of the rooms are in any respect clean. And I have to crawl behind, over, and under vending machines to sort through 10-year-old network cabling, cut loose that which does not work, sort the stuff that does, feed it through the machines to the readers mounted in the door, cut and crimp new terminators onto the ends, and pray that it works so I don't have to run new CAT5 all the way back to the switch. Fortunately, it almost never came to that, and the one time I had to, it was in one of only two rooms where the switch was actually in the same room as the machines. The rest of the time, I was either able to use existing cabling, or get creative with splicing things together.
(I have discovered the joy of crossover cables; if I can connect to a device with a network port without having to break out my four-port hub, my power supply, and the cables to hook everything together, well, that's a beautiful thing. For that matter, I've discovered that unbitten fingernails work just fine for stripping insulation off of twisted-pair wires. Hooray for beating bad habits; it helps that, for the past week, I haven't wanted my hands anywhere near my mouth.)
It's a rare trip where getting the software running and talking on the server is the easy part, but that was exactly the case here. The tough part was the staging; pre-programming and configuring 60 readers is time-consuming, for anyone, and that caused some delays. Also a factor was that vending was but one project among many, so getting all the machines moved in and placed slowed things down as well. On Monday, I changed my plans and arranged to come home on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I said "screw it", and changed plans to come home on Friday. At least it didn't come to that. There was still more I could have done, but the bulk of my time would have been spent sitting around waiting for things to get moving.
Sunday was the worst. A single room of nine machines took about six hours of my time. I managed to gouge my shoulder on a bolt sticking out of the wall, scratch my arm on an outlet box and, as the capstone to a bad day, stand directly up into a cup dispenser in the door of a coffee machine that happened to be open, knocking me silly for about quite a few seconds, and resulting in me laying on the brickwork floor of a top level of this porcine abattoir, swearing horribly and incomprehensibly at the ceiling. Fortunately, no one else was around to hear this.
I think my shortest day on-site was around 12 hours; most were 14-16 hours. This is why I did absolutely no sightseeing whatsoever; no pictures, no nothing. And I think that's regrettable, as there were some areas I really wanted to see, such as the actual Sioux Falls themselves. But this was really a grind from day one.
I'm off pork products for a while; the smell of it is likely to be less than welcoming to me for a while. As Jules Winfield said, "I just don't dig on swine, that's all." And there's a lot of things about that place that can really bother you if you let them. 20,000 pigs per day go into that place, and come out as bacon. They come in trailers, and these squealing mobs are herded off into an underground holding area. There, they are stunned, their throats are slit, and they are hung up by their hind legs to bleed out. A small, wheeled bulldozer trundled past at one point, with an injured pig laying limp in the scoop. But his eyes were open and he was grunting urgently as they carted him away to his fate. Poor bastard.
There will come a day (hopefully!) when meat can be grown artificially. They're already working on it, and it's really a matter of time. Once it becomes feasible to do such thing in mass quantities, what will happen to places like this plant? What about the jobs that it brings to that area? And what about the by-products of the plant? The stunning amount of blood gets used in all sort of ways; as plasma, as a component in pharmaceuticals (pill coating, particularly), and as fertilizer, thanks to the high nitrogen content. As they say at the plant, they use every part of the pig but the oink.
But if meat can be grown for consumption without requiring killing, this is overall a good thing. The pollution from pig farms is remarkable in its own right; a huge amount of waste product is released into the environment, in unnaturally high concentrations, and that causes problems. And would being a vegetarian still be in part a moral choice? Without that impetus, would people still bother? Would the alleged nutritional benefits still be enough?
Sheesh. Enough. I'm just glad to be coming home.
I've been listening to Warren Ellis' The 4AM Podcast a lot lately (it can be found here). It's an occasionally released compilation of music by unsigned bands that are recommended by readers. One band in particular, Lanterns On The Lake, has made it in there twice, and they're wonderful. I wouldn't mind making a trip to England to see them perform. Or see them perform while on a trip to England to do something else.
Since my last real blog post, I've taken a short vacation to Destin, FL, I've spent a weekend running around in the woods and hitting people with plumbing supplies, and I've taken a short trip to the Netherlands. I now present you with:
The Lost Blog Post
[Clearly, I'm getting out of the habit of posting. A bad precedent.]Literally: planes, trains, and automobiles. I hope to have better news soon about an upcoming install, at a little company out in California called Blizzard Entertainment...
I'm on the train from Groningen to Schiphol, near Amsterdam. The past two (two? three?) days have been spent up at Eemshaven, on the now-completed Norwegian Gem, the new flagship of Norwegian Cruise Lines. The install didn't go as well as it should have, though I'm content that we did everything that we could. The rest, the networking, will have to be finished by the IT personnel on-site.
The weather hasn't been conducive to taking many pictures. This morning, in fact, was the first time I've actually seen blue skies at all since I arrived in the Netherlands. I've tried to make up for it. If I can actually get into Amsterdam this evening (and I'd better!), I'll take more pictures. My instincts for navigating are still good, it would seem. Equally consistent is my peculiar incompetance with foreign languages.
Between Eemshaven and Amsterdam are a great number of farms, primarily populated by cows and sheep. There's the occasional unmoving windmill as well. The sky, predictably, has gone grey again.
Last weekend, I was running around in the woods, "monstering" for Kings Gate. The weekend before that, I was in Destin, FL. The week before that, I was in Pennsylvania. The weekend before that, I was at Dragon*Con. The month before that, I was in Chattanooga / Pennsylvania / Chattanooga / Pennsylvania / Chattanooga / Pennsylvania...you get the picture. Two months of getting just enough of a break to catch my breath, not enough of a break to actually rest. I haven't been to two aikido classes in a row for two months, now, and the lack is obvious. My back hurts more, I'm more prone to being moody, less endurance in general.
(The train's about to stop at Zwolle. There are bike paths everywhere. I'm about 140 pages into Spook Country, by William Gibson; the book is very interesting, but it's a slow build. And we're off again.)
One of the best things about sitting in a train station in the Netherlands is watching the pretty girls go by. There never seems to be as many of them at home. Am I not looking, or are they just not there?
[Time passes]
The cabin on the ship was surprisingly comfortable: two single beds, a good shower, quiet climate control, relatively soundproof. And if you close the porthole cover, utterly pitch-black, which is great for sleeping. In stark contrast, my room at the Hotel Ibis Schiphol is less than adequate, especially for 99 euro per night. The bed isn't bad; getting to sleep has not been a problem for me on this trip. But I can hear everything in the rooms around me and the hallway outside. The TV is tiny, and the bathroom is sub-par (there's hair in the sink drain, for God's sake, and it isn't mine). And there's this huge fly buzzing around (update: condition of fly downgraded to black smear; problem solved).
Spent a couple of hours in Amsterdam this evening, accompanied by my manager. This, as one may guess, is kind of a buzz-kill. Literally, in this case, as everyone around us seems to be in an altered state of some kind.
The book by William Gibson that I mentioned, Spook Country, is as excellent as one might expect. But it's very much a character-driven story, focusing on Interesting People doing Interesting Things, and the plot felt a bit thin. A theme in his past two books is an odd focus on distinctive accoutrements: Cayce, in Pattern Recognition, has her Rickson MA-1 replica bomber jacket (iconicly cool but very expensive); Tito, in Spook Country, wears Adidas GSG9 shoes. These are shoes/boots designed by Adidas for use by the German GSG9 anti-terrorist teams, and they're sweet; rather less expensive than Cayce's bomber jacket, and I want a pair.
posted by Matt at
9:31 PM
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