Author: Chris C.

pharaoh: a title used in many modern discussions of the ancient Egyptian rulers of all periods. The title originates in the term “pr-aa” which means “great house” and describes the royal palace. The title of Pharaoh started being used for the king during the New Kingdom, specifically during the middle of the eighteenth dynasty. (from Wikipedia)

Last Saturday was the annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), held at Manuel’s Tavern every year on the first Saturday after Valentine’s Day. This year’s first round was a bit easier — you could make a couple mistakes and still advance, but I made my annual stupid mistake with “pharaoh”.

Here’s a sampling of this year’s words:

Round 1: bulwark, apropos, apiary

Round 2: uxorious, involucre, coccygodynia

Round 3: smaragd, mirliton, zugzwang

Round 4: rijsttafel, mbaquanga, tchick

I’ve written about this annual event before — click to see the 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 writeups.

Note: I drafted this post in 2011 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved these posts to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2011) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something offensive that I would have edited out later). It looks like I only got through writing up my first three years at Eyedrum, when I was actually there for nearly a decade; being from 2011, this was meant to be a retrospective, as I’d officially left in December 2010. My later years at Eyedrum got more and more “interesting”, so perhaps it’s for the best that they aren’t documented, lest I say something regrettable. Ha, everything in this blog is regrettable 🙂 That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …

I got involved with Eyedrum in late 2001. Hormuz Minina, an old friend from Georgia Tech and WREK, was on the board of directors at Eyedrum and had been his usual extremely active self in getting things done at Eyedrum. They needed a bigger and better space, for art and performances, and Hormuz had found an old warehouse off Memorial Drive. They moved in in September 2001, and quickly found that the acoustics were pretty rotten for performances. Hormuz knew I was still pretty involved with WREK (that’s another long story), which naturally involves a lot of sound system engineering, and so he asked me if I knew anything about controlling room acoustics.

I started looking into acoustics and ended up getting pretty deep into it. I talked to a consultant, who provided some guidance, and within a couple months I had a proposed design for 16 panels that would hang from the ceiling as sound absorbing baffles. I built one of these panels and presented it at a board meeting, and everyone seemed happy with the idea, although they had no budget for doing it. Literally, zero dollars. So I scraped together the money and assembled and hung the 16 panels in the space in January 2002.

Hormuz invited me to join the board, but I was just about to start a new job, and told him I’d consider it after a few months. By May 2002 I was feeling comfortable with the new job and so decided to start putting some time into Eyedrum.

Starting with simply attending monthly board meetings and working events. Art shows and performance events are the core of Eyedrum activities, and everyone on the board needs to show up and “work” those events. That means opening up the place, stocking the bar, setting up the stage, collecting money at the door, cleaing up afterwards (well, sometimes) and locking up the place.

I found that nothing had been documented about how to do any of this. Coming from WREK and the long tradition there of documented procedures and references for future staff, I saw this as a huge hole that needed filling.

Shortly after I joined the board, Sunni McGarrity moved away from Atlanta. She had been the one person who had been taking care of keeping Eyedrum stocked with drinks and other supplies, and from my long experience at WREK I knew that when someone was leaving an organization, you needed to interview them and document what they knew about doing whatever job they had been responsible for. So I literally sat down with Sunni after a board meeting one day and interviewed her about how to stock Eyedrum. Where to go to buy bottled water (cheap!), where to get cups (cheap!), how much of each kind of drink to get, and on and on. There are always subtle things to be learned about any job, and I needed to write them down. That document became the very first procedure that I wrote for Eyedrum.

With my experience at WREK, I knew that this kind of information needed to be online — not just on paper, and certainly not in MS Word files that get emailed around. The internet was increasingly ubiquitous and I needed to get an Eyedrum documentation system going online somehow. The public website ( www.eyedrum.org ) wasn’t the right place for it, and anyway that site wouldn’t have allowed for easy remote editing (like a wiki, but this was before wikis existed). I did some research and found that “Zope” was a popular software system for doing this kind of online documentation, and then found a free Zope serving site called … FreeZope!

Now, understand that documenting processes is like heroin to me. I can’t stop it once I get started. I wrote about 200 pages of this stuff for WREK (still used today) and I could easily see a dozen or so processes at Eyedrum that needed that treatment pronto. How exactly do you open up the place for a show? What do we do with donations? How do we check the voicemail? Oh my freaking god, what are everybody’s phone numbers?! They didn’t even have a phone list. All of this stuff got wrriten up and documented by me within a couple months of my arrival at Eyedrum. Over time this then also evolved into a place to store files, like letterhead, high-res logo images, etc. Having this resource allowed people to work so much faster, because they could get what they needed right away, without waiting for a reply to an email or a phone call.

The next big thing was electrical stuff. I’m an electrical engineer and could easily take care any electrical needs. Gallery lighting, stage lighting, stage power, etc. Kevin Haller had been their lighting guy, and so I talked to him about what they had, designed some cheap but robust wiring solutions, and got to work. I spent about 2 months up at the top of a tall ladder, running electrical wiring all over the ceiling of that new space, creating proper circuits for stage lighting and creating “dimmer zones” for the gallery lighting. At some point we received a donation of some nice house speakers (JBL Eon 15’s) and I got those integrated into the stage area.

So, between big facility things like the above, little things like fixing doors and servicing air conditioning units, taking care of some organizational admin things like membership and mailing list management, and occasionally actually working a show, I stayed pretty damn busy with Eyedrum. We had a board of about a dozen people and everybody was running around doing their thing, although I was the only one who really dealt with the facility itself.

In late 2004, the Eyedrum board decided to take advantage of an offer from the landlord and expanded into the adjacent space. This doubled Eyedrum’s square footage, and gave us the luxury of being able to physically separate the visual art (e.g. static artwork) and performance art (e.g. stage events) parts of Eyedrum’s programming. However the new “back space” was completely raw: it was a big empty warehouse space, with no heat and little electricity.

So 2005 became the year that I plowed all of my free time into building out the back space. After a couple design meetings, we decided to frame out a big doorway to the back space, put a semicircular stage in the back corner, put a little hallway and a doorway along the wall to the left of the stage for equipment staging and staf access to the back area, and set up a smaller gallery space in the rear. The stage would be a major undertaking, and a big improvement from what we had in the front space, which was really just a big rug in the corner. I built nearly every inch of the new stage by hand, from the structure underneath, to the stage power circuits embedded in the floor, to the high-power lighting circuits overhead, to the neat finish trim along the front of the stage. The only parts I didn’t do myself was painting the walls behind the stage, done by a volunteer, and laying down the top layer of flooring oak, donated by a friend of Eyedrum (Sean McCormick) who ran a small flooring business. It took my nine months of constant work (weekenights, weekends) but by late September of that year we were able to have our first event back there and finally make proper use of all the space we were paying rent for.

board = just the volunteers. In 2000-2001, Eyedrum filed the papers to properly become a 501c3 non-profit, which has a variety of benefits including the ability to accept donations and not pay taxes on that “revenue”. One of the requirements of a 501c3 is that there be some minimum organizational structure, defined by the “bylaws”, and that defined a “board of directors”. Anybody who got significantly involved in Eyedrum activities was usually invited to “join the board” and usually accepted.

http://clatl.com/atlanta/back-pockets-brouhaha-at-eyedrum/Content?oid=2570315

http://clatl.com/cribnotes/archives/2011/01/01/end-of-an-era-eyedrum-closed-mlk-locale-with-an-epic-last-stand

The performance space had pretty much been stripped clean of everything a few days prior, so those videos aren’t really representative of what the space looked like for the 5 years that we operated in that back room.

click … dialtone …

I took delivery of my Chevy Volt (one of the first in the country!) on December 22nd, and it’s been performing beautifully ever since. It really is amazing that GM pulled this off and one of these is sitting in my driveway. I’m doing demo drives for friends and coworkers nearly every day, spreading the word and dispelling myths.

Since I got the Volt, I basically haven’t driven my old car at all (a decade-old Audi A4). I drove the Audi once during the ice storm, when I thought it was safe enough to drive but didn’t want to risk it with my brand new Volt. Otherwise the only time I’ve driven the Audi was on two days to take it to and from the repair shop, where I had a few things fixed to get it ready for sale.

I’ve been driving the Volt for a month now, so I was eager to see how my old Audi felt in comparison. Fortunately I didn’t forget how to drive a manual transmission. I’ve already written at length about how I was going to miss driving a manual ttransmission car, but here are some more observations about the Volt vs. the Audi:

1. The Audi is definitely a quicker car. Of course, it’s a 2.8 liter V6, with 190 peak horsepower, but I still expected the Volt to keep up with it due to the electric motor’s full torque availability. But I think the Audi is way it out in front on this, especially in first or second gear when it just leaps off the line. Now, the tradeoff is that I do have to shift the Audi (and even if it had an automatic transmission it would still have to shift) whereas the Volt just keeps pulling continuously up to 100 MPH. It’s actually a little boring that I don’t have to shift gears in the Volt.

2. I do miss that blast of hot air that you can get in the cabin (if you want it) once the gas engine has warmed up. Gas engines produce enormous amounts of waste heat (due to basic thermodynamics) and so they have plenty of cabin heat ready whenever you want it. Electric cars don’t have waste heat (a side effect of their phenomenal efficiency) and so need to heat the cabin with electric heaters. And no electric heater is going to be able to produce the monster heat you can get from a gas engine. In the winter cold, the Volt never seems to really heat up the cabin, rather just seems to take the edge off. Of course, that’s why they offer electrically heated seats in the Volt, because it’s much more efficient to warm you up that way.

3. The Audi is a bit roomier, both up front and in the back. I didn’t really notice the Volt’s cockpit being smaller, but it actually is — the Audi’s dash is just a bit further out in front of me. And the Volt’s back seats are definitely more cramped, especially if you have a tall person (cough) sitting in front of you. The Volt is fundamentally a smaller car than the sports sedan that I’ve been driving for 10 years, and certainly smaller than just about any car you’d get for $41,000. There’s your bleeding edge technology for you …

4. The steering feel of the Audi is sooo much better than the Volt. It just feels like I’m really connected to the road. I can’t put my finger on the problem when I’m driving the Volt — I just know that when I’m in the Audi it’s different. Like I can really feel the car on the pavement, in a good way.

It’s possible that the Audi also feels more agile, although I don’t think I can really judge that yet. I haven’t been really throwing the Volt into turns like I would the Audi, for several reasons, including the fact that it’s a new car and I don’t want to crash it just yet.

If you are in Atlanta and haven’t heard from me yet about going out for a lunchtime drive, and want to, get in touch with me! I’m working my way down the list of coworkers and friends and will likely be able to meet up with you soon. Let’s do it!

Dr. W. Marshall Leach died last weekend.

Dr. Leach was a beloved professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. He specialized in analog electronics, which happens to be the area of electronics that is well suited for audio systems, and so he taught a course on audio systems design. Of course sound systems are of great interest to college students of all stripes (matched only by the subject of cars), so that was a very popular course. His Leach Speaker design and Leach Amp design have taken on their own lives on the internet, and countless people have built their own. Seriously, talk to any audio electronics engineer in the country and they not only know who Dr. Leach is, they revere him.

I first met him through my involvement at WREK. I was an aerospace engineering student (at first) so didn’t have any classes with him; I probably met him at the station during one of his occasional visit to check out his gear. He had designed an audio compressor to be used in the WREK air chain (an absolutely critical component) and would come by to tweak it occasionally if he’d heard something offensive in our signal (no, not the programming, the actual quality of the audio signal).

When I returned to Georgia Tech to get my second degree, in electrical engineering, I pretty much made a beeline for Dr. Leach and signed up for his course. I did take the famed audio systems course, which actually spends most of the class time on speaker cabinet dynamics, because that’s where the rubber meets the road in audio systems and where systems usually squander their quality. But I also decided to make analog electronics my specialty (we had to pick one such specialty from a palette of about a dozen), mostly because it seemed like the “classic” EE field but also likely inspired by Dr. Leach.

I ended up taking a few courses taught by Dr. Leach, and I just loved his style. By this time I’d learned how to be a student (it only took me 3 years), meaning A) always show up for class, B) pay attention and C) ask questions if you don’t understand (which you can really only get away with if you do A and B). Dr. Leach was patient and always well-tempered, but I could see him quietly bristle when some idiot student would ask a stupid question. Or worse, a student trying to talk his way out of poor performance on an exam. He simply did not suffer fools when it came to exam time, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you’d get eviscerated on the exam scoring. But the thing is, if you did A/B/C above, the exams were easy! I remember turning one exam in after 30 minutes (in a 50 minute exam) and quietly asking him “this seems too easy, am I misunderstanding?” and he grinned and assured me that it was in fact an easy set of problems.

His handwritten lecture notes have to be worth their weight in gold. Having visited his office many times, I had seen the carefully assembled looseleaf notebooks that he had honed over decades of teaching his courses. And if you hung out long enough, he’d let you wander into his huge audio lab, reached exclusively via a side door in his office. Amazing.

But the best reason to visit Dr. Leach (and the door to his corner office was usually wide open) was his sense of humor. He was constantly chuckling at something, often Institute or ECE bureacratic nonsense. And who is going to poke fun at Dr. Brewer now?

I graduated with my EE degree in 1996, but I stayed in Atlanta, and whenever I visited the Georgia Tech campus and was passing near the EE building, I’d climb the stairs to the 3rd floor and stop by his office for a chat. Always the same mischievous grin, that flushed red face, the white shirt or sweater, the relaxed lean back in his desk chair.

Be sure to take a look at the guest book at Dr. Leach’s funeral home to get an idea of how beloved this man was. I recognize some of those names — they were WREK students in the 1960s and 1970s, and are now wildly successful electrical engineers, VPs, CEOs, entrepeneurs.

A couple years ago I wrote here on the passing of Bill Sayle, another EE prof. To be fair, I barely knew Dr. Sayle, although he did make a decision that had a critical effect on my life. Dr. Leach I knew far better, and I’m glad I did.

I will miss those campus detours to his office so much. RIP, Dr. Leach.

I asked a student once why he spent so much time with Dr. Leach and he told me he just felt better after talking to him. So did I.

– Tom Brewer

—-

A few links worth checking out:

Georgia Tech press release on the passing of Dr. Leach

details on the memorial event scheduled for December 16th

Dr. Leach’s collection of links on his home page at Georgia Tech, including the impossibly thorough and entertaining page of “audio related things“. See also the speaker and amp design pages linked above. His attention to detail yet easygoing manner courses through these documents.

When I get my new electric car next month, for the first time in my life I will not be driving a car with a manual transmission.

There are a lot of things I will miss about driving a stick shift. Most importantly, with a manual transmission you have more control over the car and your right foot is connected more closely to the torque of the engine. Whenever I’ve had to drive an automatic (rentals, usually) it’s been a thoroughly disgusting experience. Fortunately with the electric car I won’t really be giving that fundamental control, because electric motors have impossibly wide torque curves, far better than internal combustion engines, meaning they don’t need transmissions at all and thus react perfectly to your right foot. Plus you don’t have the oddities of different valve timings and such coming it at different RPMs and making the engine surge.

I remember first learning to drive in my parents’ cars. We had a Volvo station wagon that I think I did most of my learning on. I clearly remember the first time I pulled away from a stop light, turning left, and managed to execute the first-to-second shift at the same time as I was doing the turn. I told my Dad “look what I did!” and he said “you’re supposed to do that.” That was my Dad’s way of saying that I’d done it the way an adult was supposed to and I was on my way to acquiring the skill. That kind of thing is second nature to me now, but then it was quite a thrill to pull off without putting the car over the opposing curb — or grinding the gears.

The hardest thing to do in a manual is launching forward from a stop while pointed uphill. There are three pedals involved and you only have two feet. So you let off the brake and try to quickly dance over to the clutch and gas with the right timing such that you A) do get moving forward without B) goofing up the pedal timing and stalling the engine or worse C) rolling back into the car behind you. If you manage to stall the car, you get another chance, but now you’re probably a couple feet further back and closer to the car behind you. Growing up in Martinsville, the real test for this was the intersection of Vosseler Avenue and Washington Valley Road. Vosseler climbed up to met WVR in a T-intersection, and you’d really have to jump on the pedals to get the car launched up onto WVR. I think my parents let me suffer through that a few times (it’s pretty much impossible for a greenhorn to pull it off) before showing me the handbrake tactic, where you use the handbrake to replace the footbrake function (holding the car from rolling back), thus freeing up your two feet for the clutch and the accelerator.

Things I will miss about driving a manual:

– The roar of the engine when you are driving agressively and using the higher RPMs. God that V6 sounds great.

– Dropping the clutch and smoking the tires! With my current Audi I can even chirp the tires in second gear. Maaaan I will miss that. The electric cars have more torque, but they have launch control feature that prevents you from spinning the wheels when taking off. Bah!

– Doing speed matching gear shifts, where you try to shift gears without using the clutch. This was totally easy to do with my Honda’s gearbox — you could feel the beat frequency in the stick. But I hardly ever can pull it off with the Audi.

– Slowing the car to a crawl while still in gear, watching the revs go down below 750 and causing the engine to strain at the leash, until you finally relieve it with the clutch.

– Starting off in second because you know the loser in the Camry in front of you is going to be slow to start anyway so who needs the torque of first?

– Downshifting in preparation for a pass, or just staying in a lower gear to run the revs higher and have a bushel more power available at a mere flinch of your right foot.

– Watching the tachometer in my peripheral vision while driving. I can see the needle rotating around past the top of the dial (4000 RPM) without actually looking at it. Also, the Audi has an elegant design feature where the literal position of both the tach and speedometer line up (point in the same direction) only when in fourth gear. When in third the tach is higher than the speedo, and in fifth it’s lower; at fourth they match. So I can glance at the dash to remind myself what gear I’m in, without looking at or feeling for the gear shifter.

What I won’t miss:

– Smoking the clutch when A) trying to pull another car out of the backyard or B) when impressing a friend by revving up a launch. Done both.

A lot of people say they don’t want a manual because of stop-and-go traffic, but I’ve never had much of a problem with it. Of course, I don’t actually sit in stop-and-go traffic much (that’s a suburban problem), and to be fair, the times that I have sit in it for a long time I have started to get tired with all the clutching in and out.

This seems as good a time as any to inventory the cars I’ve owned:

1986-1988: a used 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel, bright yellow. Bought from Dad (yes I paid $1000 for it). Four gears, 0-60 in about 30 seconds, typically tested on that straight stretch of Brookside Drive just off King George road, just before the twisty part HIT THE BRAKES! The front end would start to float at speeds over 75 MPH. 49 horsepower. Do you know how hard it is to drive at a decent speed through the rolling hills of the Carolinas when you only have 49 horsepower?

1988-2000: a new 1989 Honda Civic DX Hatchback. Bought new with help from Grandma, the biggest leg up on life I ever got besides my four years of college education from Mom and Dad. Five gears, great fun to drive, I loved to rev it up to the redline and I pretty much did so for every shift for twelve years. However, by 2000 the lack of airbags, cruise control and ABS was starting to bother me …

2000-2011: a new 2000 Audi A4 2.8. Finally got to splurge on a nice car. Bought the fastest A4 you could get, meaning the one with the 2.8 liter V6 engine but without the Quattro four wheel drive feature, because that would add 500 pounds. Sometime I wish I had the Quattro, but in addition to the weight it was an expensive option. Not as all-out fun to throw around like the Honda, heavier and more muscular. Certainly the engine feels different — more low end torque, but less willing to rev high. Longitudinally mounted so you could twist the car a bit by reving the engine.

So long, clutch, I’ll miss you.

[see the bottom of this post for links to previous entries in my EV series]

Since I decided in late July to throw in with the Chevy Volt and placed my order with the DC-area dealer, it’s basically been a waiting game. There’s been a bit of drama here and there over the last 2-3 months, but in general the order has chugged along through the GM process. A couple weeks ago I got word from The Powers That Be that my car would be produced in mid-November, and so I’m hoping to have it in hand well before Christmas. December 1st seems to be the likely date that I get it and is what I’m telling everyone.

Meanwhile, on Sunday October 10th, GM lifted their press embargo on Volt test drive reports and there was a sudden crush of press coverage. A lot of it (on the internet, at least) focused on the “new” news, which had to do with how the mechanical transmission in the car actually works (which turned out was slightly different from how everyone thought it would work) and everyone went ballistic over that for about 48 hours. Eventually cooler heads prevailed, and everyone realizes now that we’re still talking about a fundamentally groundbreaking car, but to an extent some damage has been done because some terribly misleading headlines went out in the press during those 48 hours. I’ll say this: I know a hell of a lot more now about what a planetary gearset is and how it works.

Since that dust-up, though, the actual driving reviews have started to get published, and they are glowing. To tell the truth, I know what I know and poor reviews were not going to change my mind about this, but it’s nice to see my decision endorsed by the automotive press.

Here is a good overview of them — overwhelmingly positive.

Here are a few of my favorite specific reviews and quotes:

Seth Fletcher in Popular Science: “The car is so pleasant to drive that I can’t imagine finding early adopters to be a problem. But after that, I’d like to see the Volt become available to the rest of us. Which is why we should hope for a kind of EV arms race, for a significant drop in battery prices and a rapid expansion of plug-in infrastructure. Because after putting a couple dozen highway miles on a vehicle like the Volt, plenty of people simply won’t want to go back to a conventional car.”

Jonny Lieberman in Motor Trend: “At the end of the journey, we’d covered more than 120 miles. City, hard-core mountain roads and freeway — we even took the Volt up to its limited top speed of 101 mph. … Factoring in the mountainous part of our romp, where Frank and I acted like utter hooligans and neglected (on purpose) to put the Volt in Mountain Mode, we still averaged 74.6 miles per gallon over 122 miles. Sure, that’s less than the 126.7 mpg we got driving the car from the office to home, but it’s still pretty dang good. Also, remember that if we had simply stopped driving when the battery went dry, our mileage was infinity.”

Dan Neil in the Wall Street Journal: “I get it. A lot of people don’t like GM because: 1) the bailout, or 1a) Obama; or 2) the United Auto Workers; or 3) because some Monte Carlo or Cutlass Sierra or deuce-and-a-quarter left them walking a long time ago. That’s understandable. These are sour times. But for the moment, we should suspend our rancor and savor a little American pride. A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet. And they did it in 29 months while the company they worked for was falling apart around them. That was downright heroic. Somebody ought to make a movie.”

——————–

Coming up, I will have a test drive of the car on November 1st. That’s right, I put down money to buy the car before I had laid my own eyes on it, much less actually driven it. That’s how compelling this technology is, based on my exhaustive research and a few drives in electric vehicles over the last two years. That said, I do want to sit in the car and feel how it drives as soon as possible, before I travel to DC to receive my own car (I just wish it had been more than just a month prior). At the very least, it will calm my nerves a bit and ultimately ease the stress of the day when I go get my car.

In the meantime, I’m also still paying attention to the rest of the EV market. I’m only going to have the Volt for 3 years, you know,and then I’ll move on to another EV folly! IEEE Spectrum magazine (for us electrical engineering professionals) had an article recently about the coming wave of electric supercars. We’re talking nearly a thousand horsepower and a thousand foot-pounds of torque — obscenely high performance, and yet they are still far more efficient than even an econobox hybrid since they can be plugged in. Of course, these are still six-figure cars, and 2-3 years away, but it’s indicative of where the market is heading.

Exciting times. My one-man tech evangelism tour starts December 1st!

(I’ll update this post with info about the test drive after November 1st)

See also my previous entries about Electric Vehicles, as I have studied this technology for the last two years:

part 1 from Sept 2008: my first thoughts on EVs (though rather dated by now)

part 2 from April 2009: I test drive a Tesla Roadster!

part 3 from Jan 2010: the Nissan Leaf roadshow comes to Atlanta

part 4 from Mar 2010: grab bag of news and analysis

part 5: why I am buying a Volt

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s official — I’m buying a Chevrolet Volt. The deposit is down, the order is in GM’s system, and come November or December, I’m getting one of the first Volts in the country.

Two weeks ago, GM finally announced the sticker price of the Volt: $41,000. That’s a high number, even after the $7,500 federal tax credit, and it sent the fanboys into a tailspin of despair and vicious criticism of GM. There are lots of reasons why GM might have set that price point, which I won’t go into here. But what was really interesting was the second part of the announcement: the leasing terms. GM will lease the car for $350/month for 36 months, with $2500 down. Those are lease terms that you’d see for a much cheaper car, more like $20K-$25K, and show that GM is actually subsidizing and encouraging the lease. So that really got my attention, and within days I decided it was time to start contacting Chevy dealers.

Why I am buying a Volt

1. I’m uniquely qualified to get the word out on the electric car revolution. I am an electrical engineer, I’ve been into automotive technology since I was a kid, and I care about energy policy and the environment. It appears that it’s my job to get out in front on this one.

2. I want a choice. Pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which the Volt is not, have only an electric drivetrain and consume no gas ever. I do think think that they are the long-term future, but for the next few years they aren’t good enough to be your sole car, since they only go so far before you have to charge for many hours. Three years from now, public charging infrastructure (think fast charging stands at gas stations and shopping centers) will be far more widespread and that’s when a BEV will start to make sense as my sole car. But for now I still have to rely on that gas engine backup. The Volt gives me the flexibility of fueling either via gas station or plugging in at home. I’m paranoid about gas price shocks (and gas shortages, panic-induced or not), and the engineer in me wants desperately to protect against that single point of failure, and wants some redundancy via the two different energy ingest modes.

3. Performance. Electric vehicles go faster! This is less true for a more modest car like the Volt, but even this little car is going to change some minds simply by me stomping on the accelerator. A poor man’s Tesla! Wheeee!

4. Reduced maintenance. Electric motors aren’t just far more efficient than gas engines, they are far simpler and more reliable. The gas engine is simply not going to get used that much, except for long trips, and that translates to less maintenance requirements.

5. I’m buying American for the first time in my life. Heck, this is the first American car for anyone in my entire extended family (lots of VWs, some other Japanese and Germans cars). GM, this is your one chance to show me that you’re not still a bunch of knuckle-dragging scammers. And indeed GM has been doing far better in quality ratings in recent years, and they appear to be doing a stellar job engineering the Volt. Also note that the Volt is really being built in the US (at the Detroit Hamtramck plant), not an overseas rebadge (like the Pontiac G6) or a Chinese import (as they are rumored to be doing soon for another model).

6. GM made it an easy decision with their cheap lease terms. Now, I’m the last person you’d expect to see leasing a car. I’ve always bought my cars,and kept them for a decade minimum, long after they were paid off. Leases are stupid, right? But in this case, GM has decided to make the Volt lease a huge bargain. The $350/month rate got my attention, and made me realize that a three year lease is perfect for me right now. That’s because unlike my previous car purchases, I have no plans to keep this car for a decade. It’s just a short term (3 year) solution until there’s more electric cars on the market. And yes, all of the car makes are furiously working on them.

7. After the pricing announcement two weeks ago, I quickly realized that this car was going to sell out. And in fact, today, there are rumors that not only has the Volt’s 2011 model run sold out (before a single unit reaches any dealer showroom!), but now dealers are starting to take sales on the 2012 model run. My 10-year clock has run out on my current car and I don’t want to wait beyond the end of this year or early next year. So committing now puts me with the earliest of the early adopters, but ensures that I won’t be stuck waiting until late 2012.

8. This hedges my bet on the future electric car market. All of the manufacturers are working on their models, but it’s going to be another year or two (or three), and in some cases (like the Tesla Model S sedan) it might cost $75,000 and have extremely limited availability. This isn’t my ideal car, but this gives me some breathing room to let the market mature for three years.

9. I’m not made of money, but I’m doing well enough. The car I drive is pretty much the one thing I splurge on (as I did in 2000), and otherwise I’m pretty frugal. So let me spend some money on a new toy 🙂

And here come the political intangibles …

10. For a change the US is actually leading the world in technology policy when it comes to electric vehicles. We are ahead of Europe and Asia in encouraging the shift to electric cars, and I want to be on the front of that wave.

11. Energy independence, both national and personal.

12. Pollution and global warming. Only a fool still believes that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is still a debatable matter in science. The data is in, it’s fact, move on, and you might want to start thinking critically about the “news” sources that are telling you it’s still a debate. Actually, I do think it’s too late (1992 and Kyoto was our last chance) and we’re well past the tipping point, but I’m going to hope and do what I can anyway.

13. Geopolitics. We need to stop sending tankers full of cash to oppressive governments of the Middle East. And where do you think the Taliban and Al Qaeda get their funding from?

Those are all the reasons why I am buying a Volt. However, there are also reasons …

Why I shouldn’t be buying a Volt

1. Atlanta is not one of the launch markets, and so I’m actually buying the car from a dealer in northern Virginia (Washington DC is a launch market) and taking it home. Yeah, a 9 hour drive. I am frankly taking a big risk in doing this, because for a long time yet there won’t be any Volt dealers in Atlanta that can service the car if anything goes wrong. That’s actually not strictly true, because GM says they will have dealers around the nation (not just in launch markets) that will be trained in Volt servicing. But, really, until they actually start selling the car in Atlanta, I’m jut not going to get decent service. I can look forward to a lot of blank stares from the local dealership, and in a worst case, I could be looking at having to flat-bed the car back to Virginia if something goes catastrophically wrong. Hey, I’m an engineer, I think up worst case scenarios for a living!

2. It’s a version 1.0 product. Never buy the first release of a product. And in this case, it’s a whole new class of product, so this is doubly true.

3. GM has done a fantastic job of being open about the entire development process of the car, but you could also see it as well regulated hype. This could be a colossal boondoggle on GM’s part, and I’m getting suckered into it. Oh well, I’ll have a lot of company, because this car is selling out before it’s even in the showrooms.

4. It’s a pretty small car. It officially only seats four (meaning you can not squeeze three into the backseat) which just belies the fact that it really is a little smaller than your typical compact sedan. On the other hand, it’s really loaded down with standard features, things like premium sound and OnStar connectivity that would otherwise put it more in the Cadillac class. Which leads me to …

5. I have not actually seen the car with my own two eyes! It’s nowhere to be seen, although any week now I expect the first production units to start appearing at various demo events around the country. So all I’ve done is a read about it for the last two years, especially the reviews of the last few months when GM had the press come out to various locations to see it and drive it. I am totally relying on those reviews.

I have this saying that engineers live three years in the future. At any given point, we are typically working on technology that will make it to widespread use in about three years. So, since 2007 I’ve been seeing a lot of activity in electric car development, and it’s finally starting to come to fruition with the first large-scale production cars coming to market this fall.

I really do believe that electric vehicles are critical to the future of automotive technology. But talk is cheap, and at some point you have to start putting asses in chairs and showing people what you’re talking about. So my mission is now to get people into the car, show them how this technology is different (and yet the same!) from all previous cars, and have lots of long talks debunking all of the myths that somehow have crept into people’s heads.

In all seriousness, most folks wouldn’t see this as a particularly noble move as it might appear I’m making it out to be. It’s not like I’m deciding to devote myself to working on third world infrastructure or lifting inner city children out of poverty. But it’s a critical incremental step that I think we need to make if we seriously want to stop screwing up the planet, both environmentally and politically, like we have been for the last century.

By December, I should have the car, and I’ll happily show it to whoever is interested. Lunch or dinner will be on me!

For now, Happy Birthday to me!

See also my previous entries about Electric Vehicles, as I have studied this technology for the last two years:

part 1 from Sept 2008: my first thoughts on EVs (though rather dated by now)

part 2 from April 2009: I test drive a Tesla Roadster!

part 3 from Jan 2010: the Nissan Leaf roadshow comes to Atlanta

part 4 from Mar 2010: grab bag of news and analysis

One of my little obsessions is with the practice of teaching. While I’m nominally an engineer, whose job it is to essentially make machines work, I’m a pretty good teacher in a small scale environment (e.g. explaining some new technology to a small group of colleagues) and I think I’m good at constructively engaging and maintaining the attention of the average child. And while I do recognize the critical role of teachers in our society, and the dire need for scientifically and mathematically literate teachers, I don’t think I’m the right person to do that.

But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by the topic. Here are a few recent things that I found engaging.

The Principal Story ran on PBS last year and focuses on two school principals who are trying to educate in an environment where everyone expects failure. They are not afraid to scrutinize teacher performance or even fire teachers, but there remains a lot of dysfunction there in the teaching corps, even within the principal himself/herself. They put a withering amount of energy into their efforts, with some impact on their personal lives. And at the end is a coda where Arne Duncan is interviewed about questions raised, and not just softball questions either.

The Street Stops Here is a documentary about St. Anthony’s, a parochial (Catholic) school in Jersey City, New Jersey. Known nationwide for producing great basketball players, the school has a perennial struggle to find the money to keep the doors open and keep educating some of the most deserving kids of the New York metro area. While the doc is structured around the basketball program and the high-strung coach Bob Hurley (yeah, father of Bobby), there’s a lot of insight into the world that these kids are coming from and trying to escape.

Whatever It Takes (via Independent Lens) is a similar story on a smaller scale. Edward Tom quit his burgeoning business career to take on the job of principal at a new public school in the South Bronx, one of the worst neighborhoods in the US, and follows him and his faculty and his students as they struggle through the first year of the school’s operation.

A March 2010 feature article in the NYT magazine really drew this into focus for me personally. My central problem with the career of teaching is that I don’t think I could maintain control of the classroom, or even control of myself when faced with various classroom order challenges. Brute intelligence is no match for a room full of choatic teenagers. The NYT article talks at length about the efforts of Doug Lemov, an education researcher with an organization call Uncommon Schools, who has gone around the country observing successful teachers. He’s trying to distill exactly what the techniques are that make the difference between a good teacher and a bad one.

The result,so far, is his book Teach Like A Champion, which proscribes 49 techniques that a teacher can use to maintain control in a classroom and effectively deliver new knowledge. Techniques like “No Opt Out”, which deals with the bored shrug of a student by asking another student for the answer and then doubling back to the original student for the same answer. Repeatedly, until he answers (basically repeating the answer he just heard from another student), thus showing him that he’s not going to avoid get picked simply by doing a crappy job.

The book even comes with a DVD containing short video clips of actual teachers employing these techniques in their classrooms. It is an inspiring sight to watch these teachers maintain a tight grip on their classroom, but do so in a positive way that doesn’t let the inevitable classroom disruption derail the day’s lesson.

It’s quite sobering to see the amount of energy and discipline that goes into running a classroom this way. And I can see that there are probably critics who will call these techniques rigid to the point of cartoonishness. I mean, school uniforms is one thing, but these teachers have the students standing at attention and responding in unison to barked-out commands.

And the teacher unions. Teachers know more about these issues than anyone, but then you have these ludicrous situations that result from a horribly distorted system, such as rubber rooms. I think there are valid criticisms on both sides of the debate, but it’s hard to separate when there’s so much shouting and posturing going on. I do still have faith that Obama and Duncan will at least make some progress in pushing this mess in the right direction.

I really don’t think I want to be a teacher, but the subject does fascinate me.

Friday July 9th

Off we went to Seattle! Sharon had a conference and Chris was to be the idle spouse, just like Boston last year.

I (Chris) continue to be a giddy little boy when it comes to flying. I always want a window seat, and I really do spend most of the flight, even a 5 hour flight like this one, with my face pressed to the window looking down in amazement. And also looking at my GPS receiver, which I received for Christmas from my family a few years ago specifically for this purpose — seeing what I was flying over.

Here’s a crappy cell phone picture of, no lie, the Crazy Mountains.

Arrived in SEA-TAC airport, took the shiny new Link train to downtown, checked into hotel, and went out for dinner. I’d identified a sushi place that appeared to be on the same block, and it turned out to be practically in the hotel. It was one of those Japanese style places with a central conveyor belt carrying pre-made plates of sushi, and you just sit next to the belt and grab what you want. It make for an oddly frenzied experience, like you’re in a competitive eating contest and must grab grab grab go go go spend spend spend!

Saturday July 10th

We intended to go to Chinatown / Intl Center first, but were foiled by the seemingly impenetrable bus system (OneBusAway, you suck. Google Maps in transit mode, you rule).

So we punted and took the monorail out to Seattle Center. The monorail, built in 1962 for the Worlds Fair (coughknoxvillecough), is perfectly functional but looking a bit dated, and really only goes from Tourist Point A (Westlake / downtown area) to Tourist Point B (Seattle Center). Seattle Center is most known for the Space Needle (more 1962 municipal construction) and the Experience Music Project, both of which we planned to studiously avoid. There was a indie craft fair (excuse me, “urban craft uprising“) that Sharon wanted to troll, and I figured I’d find some way to amuse myself. Well, we messed up on the timing thing (new timezone for us) and got to the fair hall waaaay before they opened so suddenly had time to kill. It looked like we were going up the Space Needle after all! Bought the overpriced tickets, waited in the crowded lines, went up the crowded elevator, stood on the crowded platforms, went back down. Woohoo! In doing all that, though, we did indeed kill enough time for the craft fair to open. Sharon headed into there and Chris went off on an expedition.

… to the Tesla dealership about a 15 minute walk away. Really, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and thought there was a slim chance I might be able to get myself another quick drive (see April 2009). Plus they had just received the new Roadster 2.5 model in the store. Anyway, I did walk over there and see the car but didn’t get to drive anything. The receptionist there, holding down the fort while the sales staff were away at some event, kept egging me on trying to get me to buy one (“wouldn’t it be cooool if the receptionist made a sale” she giggled). Walked back to the craft fair, seeing more of what has got to be the dullest part of Seattle (I believe the neighborhood is call South Lake Union). Idled with a newspaper until it was time to meet up with Sharon again, bags in hand.

Walked down to a pizza joint for lunch, took the monorail back to downtown, and got a bus to Chinatown (I was getting better at figuring out the transit system, thanks again to my Android phone’s Google Maps in transit mode). Trekked down to an important destination — Uwajimaya Inc. This massive store has a huge collection of everything Asian, from Japanese manga in the bookstore to Chinese food ingredients in the supermarket to general Asian collectible tchotchkes.

From there we backtracked a bit to where we’d spotted some sort of Asian street festival, which was in full swing with marching schoolgirls, information stands, a performance stage (including a robot dancing along with the Hawaiian hula demo), melon sculptures … Escaped from there and on the way back to the transit station Sharon spotted a “variety store” advertising Asian wares. Inside we found a truly strange and wonderful place. Kobo at Higo is sort of an artsy collectibles store / gallery that took over an old neighborhood storefront “Higo Variety Store” after the last of the founding family members had become too frail to continue the store’s operation. Besides the Crazy Crap for Sharon to coo over, over in the back there was an installation that an “artist in residence” was assembling to give an example of what the store used to be like. It included some fascinating family history items, including transcriptions of interviews done with the elderly family members (e.g. mentions of the Japanese internment camps, a sad chapter in US history).

We tore ourselves away and made it back to the hotel in time for Sharon to go off to her first conference event, and later a dinner banquet with conference attendees.

Sunday July 11th

Day 1 of 2 where I (Chris) would be on my own. I walked across downtown to a bike shop where I picked up a bicycle rental — I figured bicycling would be a great way to see this bike-friendly town, and I’d brought my own helmet so I wouldn’t have to futz with getting one to fit.

But time was a wastin’. I had to get to an Irish pub (Kell’s) in Pike Place Market to catch the World Cup final, and got there in time to see the end of the first half. The place was pretty crowded, but some nice ladies let me share their table and I proceeded to get an earful of Seattle travel tips over some Irish food.

After the game, I strolled around Pike Place a bit, killing time until 3pm when I met up with two old friends from my WREK days, Allie Beerthuis and John Selbie. We got caught up on our lives and then parted ways. I had a long trip in mind for the rest of the afternoon — West Seattle and Alki Beach.

From Pike Place, it’s a long straight trip south along the back sides of somewhat dull shipyards to get to the bridge over the cargo harbor and the Industrial District to the peninsula of West Seattle. At the top of the bridge, the gates came down so they could let a sailboat through, giving me an opportunity to make a panorama photo. Mount Rainier can be seen in the distance in the center of this shot.

After crossing the bridge, you are on the east side of the peninsula, and so I biked around the northern end (along Harbor Ave and Alki Ave) to get around to the west side. Stopped at a fishing pier for the panoramic view back at the city.

And of course you can click to enlarge these photos, although the panoramas won’t enlarge by much here. If you like any of these panaroma shots in particular, email me and I’ll send you the high-res version.

Finally reaching Alki Beach on the west side, I found … an actual beach, with sand and volleyball nets and beach bums and everything. The weather was quite sunny and hot, and it was a Sunday, so the place was jammed. Looked like the Jersey shore (well, not that Jersey shore).

I then turned back east to head back towards the city, first climbing up and over the big hill that West Seattle is on. Whew, that was some exercise. Thanks to Google Maps’ transit mode (again), however, I knew that on the other side of the hill would be a bus that would take me back to downtown, with my bike mounted on the rack on the front of the bus.

Sharon and I met up for dinner, looked for something in Park Place but finding it mostly shut down on a Sunday evening, and settled for a nice place at the edge closer to Belltown.

Monday July 12th

Day 2 of 2 where I (Chris) would be on my own. Yesterday would be just a warm up, because the route I had in mind for today would take me all over the city. Looking forward to a partly cloudy forecast, I stepped out in the morning with the bicycle to find … rain. Well, a light drizzle. I guess when someone in Seattle says “partly cloudy” that translates to “drizzle”. I got on the pedals anyway and headed for Capitol Hill. The drizzle actually wasn’t much of a problem, barely dampening my clothes and just making for slightly slick roads. Capitol Hill’s shops district was nothing worth seeing (maybe because I didn’t look in the right place, maybe because it was Monday morning) but the residential streets and houses were nice. I made it over that hill and descended down the east side, riding down a too busy Lake Washington Blvd until I made it to the Washington Park Arboretum. Poked around there a bit and decided they didn’t like bikes so I skipped back out and across the canal to the University District.

Joined up with the Burke-Gilman trail that passes through the University of Washington campus. Stumbling across the sundial mounted on the side of the building, I marveled at it for a while and studied the instructions . Back on the bike for another hill to climb … Made it up 15th Ave to NE 45th street, where my next destination was Dick’s Drive-In restaurant, home of the Dick’s Deluxe burger. Mmmmmm, fuel. Well, I knew ahead of time I wasn’t going to be biking very well on a stomach full of cheesburger, so I’d planned for the trip to head downhill from there to Gasworks Park.

Gasworks Park is great. Amid a few oddly barren grassy hills are some old abandoned gas refinery machines thrusting towards the sky. Rusted a solid dark red, or painted over for kids to play on, this site used to be the home of an industrial plant that converted oil coming in on tankers into synthetic natural gas (SNG) that was then piped around the city for the usual purposes. In the 1950’s they shut down the plant and started converting it to a city park.

This is sited at the north end of Lake Union, so as you look out across the little lake you see downtown Seattle just beyond the opposite shore. Seaplanes curve over your head as they arrive and depart on … air tours of Puget Sound and environs, I guess, I don’t know.

Back on the bike … From there I rode along the canal all the way over to the Chittendon Locks, aka the Ballard Locks. Just locks and surrounding gardens are great, but then they also have a fish ladder that you can get up close to and watch the salmon working their way upstream. I was surprised to find that this is pretty much a year-round activity, because they have a half dozen or so different salmon species, that all spawn at different times of the year. Right now the sockeye salmon are busy, but we saw a few huge Chinook (aka King) salmon as well.

South from the locks was the entrance into Discovery Park. Well, the back entrance apparently, because I sure felt like I heard inadvertantly broken into a military base. Turns out you just need to bike through that to get to the proper entrance, where I found a map that told me how to get out to the lighthouse. This park is surprisingly quiet — I saw maybe 10 people my whole time there. Up and over another hill (and a few wrong turns and frankly rough terrain) I’d made it out to the extreme western point of this area of Seattle, which juts out into Puget Sound and has an old lighthouse at the very tip.

It seems quite remote, perhaps because all of the nearby coastlines are all protected, but surburbia was only a few miles away.

Climbing back over the hill and heading out of the park, I rode through the Magnolia neighborhood — another hill to get over. Made my way across the somewhat treacherous Magnolia bridge (elevated high over the docks and railyards) and ended up on the Elliot Bay trail, which is a typical linear park along the waterfront approaching downtown from the north. It terminates with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which itself has lots of amazing sites, but none more amazing to me than the massive Richard Serra sculpture “Wake”:

Hulls of ships? Fish in a stream? Downtown skyscrapers? I love how many different ways there are to look at this, and how you can go in and around it and keep getting different perspectives.

A quick jaunt across downtown to drop of the bike (after two days, thanks bike!) and I was back at the hotel to meet Sharon for a nice dinner at a swanky bar a few blocks away.

Tuesday July 13th

This would be Sharon’s only other day to get to see Seattle, having otherwise been busy in the conference, so the plan was jam packed and carefully choreographed with the transit buses (thanks again Google Maps for transit mode).

First up was the new Rem Koolhaas Central Library. Probably my biggest regret of this trip is that we didn’t spend more time here. It turns out that we approached from the “wrong” side, into a somewhat subterranean foyer very much like the Atlanta library, meaning not so great. We looked around for a minute and headed back out to proceed with our day. Only after we got home to Atlanta did I look at the introductory pamphlet that Sharon had grabbed, and that building is astonishing! Duh.

Moving on … we walked down to the waterfront to catch a streetcar ride along it. After some drama we did finally catch that ride and ended up at the Sculpture Garden.

From there we stopped by the CoCA Ballard gallery (freakishly small, literally the size of a closet) on our way to catching a bus out through the Magnolia neighborhood, and took a cool woodsy trail down to the Chittendon Locks, aka the Ballard Locks. Fish ladder. Good stuff. And this time took a closer look at the garden, with impossibly huge flowers.

We walked about a mile out to the main CoCA gallery, which overlooks Shilsole Bay. Hear this: do not spend a shred of effort trying to get to CoCA. What a hilarious disappointment. Housed in some sort of private “beach club” event hall, it’s basically a hallway with baaaaad student art. The exhibit they had up was, no joke, literally a direct application of the bad-photo-plus-helvetica art meme. Spend your efforts elsewhere.

We high-tailed it out of there and over to Fremont. Which was kind of quiet, and the fact that Deluxe Junk was closed was a bummer (open Friday though Monday? Whatever.) Got an obligatory view of the grotesque Fremont Troll and then trekked down the hill to Gasworks Park (again, this time both of us). And back to the hotel by bus, exhausted.

Final stop: the touristy restaurant a block from the hotel. Walls covered in beer tap handles, attracting a mix of tourist dullards and drunk rednecks. We were served an assortment of meat in impossibly huge portions. And got the hard upsell from the wait staff.

Wednesday July 14th

Flew back home. To have Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams all out there in the distance is an amazing sight, massive conical volcano peaks poking sharply above the mountains around them. Even Mount Hood was visible, a hundred miles away in Oregon! It’s quite a shock to be flying over hundreds of miles of mountain ranges (the Rockies and Cascades) and suddenly see a mountain towering even higher.

Time for another roadtrip to see a space shuttle launch! Sadly this will almost certainly be my last shuttle launch. There are only two more planned launches — Endeavour’s STS-133 mission in September (or a little later) and Discovery’s STS-134 mission in November (or a lot later). The insider consensus is that they are going to add one more flight to the plan in 2011, likely June or so, but then that will really be it. This shutdown of the shuttle program was decided in 2004 as part of the Bush administrations “Vision for Space Exploration” (VSE) that would take NASA to Mars. Per that plan, they started shutting down factory assembly lines and laying off workers two years ago, so that horse has clearly left the barn.

My day job as an engineer in the TV news business gives me the possibility of extremely good access to NASA TV feeds and Kennedy Space Center itself. So, anticipating the end of the shuttle program, a couple years ago I started getting serious about trying to see a space shuttle launch. I also considered that, living in Atlanta, I’m within reasonable driving distance (8 hours drive) of KSC, and I don’t know that I’m going to live in Atlanta forever, so that was another reason to go ahead and do this while I could.

We went down in December 2007 to see one but they ran into problems so that trip was a bust. I drove down again in March 2009 and did successfully see a launch. I decided to go to one more over the 2009-2010 winter, but my schedule didn’t allow for it until now. As you get in late spring and summer, you start seeing the launches get scrubbed due to weather (thunderstorms popping up) so I did want to get this last trip in before the frustration of summer launch scrubs. Plus as we get closer to the very end of the shuttle program, frankly all of the crazy procrastinating half-assed fans come out of the woodwork, and it’s only going to get harder and harder to get close for a launch. Meaning that the hotels will be booked up for 100 miles around, traffic gridlock for a whole day before and after, and a generally unpleasant experience. All things that I will happily avoid.

So, off we go!

Wednesday May 12th, L-2 Day

I hit the road around noon, which would still get me to Cocoa Beach by 8pm or so. For weeks I’ve been stashing stuff in the mp3 player (my cell phone) for this drive, beyond my usual weekly fare of WREK radio shows from their mp3 archive. First, there’s a new show called Fonotopia , produced at WYPR in Baltimore, that digs into archives of ooooold 78 RPM records — music from all over the planet, from the 1930s and earlier. Second, WREK has a science discussion show called Inside The Black Box hosted by a couple live-wire professors. I normally can’t find the time to keep up with it weekly but try to catch a couple episodes now and then, and they didn’t disappoint; both the piezoelectricity and biomaterials shows were completely fascinating and entertaining, notwithstanding one of the hosts’ annoying penchant for interrupting. Finally, I had a few live concerts from WebInFront cued up: an effortlessly beautiful 2-hour performance by Radiohead, an uninspired gig by Dinosaur Jr. circa 1994 when they’d signed to a major label and weren’t having that much fun anymore, and a Big Star show that I didn’t get to but will soon.

Thursday May 13th, L-1 Day

Launch wasn’t going to be until Friday, but I’ve learned from previous trips that I need to get there and onsite at KSC early on the day before a launch because they will have some unique things planned for the media, like a tour of some facility that is otherwise off limits to the public. But you have to get there first thing in the morning and check out the signup sheets. Which I did, and found that they were offering a tour of the SLSL building; kind of a letdown (the ultimate would be the VAB or an OPF) but I’ll take it. So I signed up and then had a couple hours to kill before it started.

I sat in on the L-1 briefing, which is the briefing one day prior to launch where a handful of managers have one last sitdown in front of the cameras to tell the world (via NASA TV) what’s up with the launch. What’s the progress of the countdown (which is actually 70 hours long), what’s the weather outlook, and to answer whatever the media are interested in asking about. It’s always a thrill for me to sit in that briefing room, the same room that I’ve seen in hundreds of briefings on NASA TV. It looks good enough on TV but is actually rather drab and shopworn. NASA doesn’t get a lot of funding (surprised?) but the recent Obama budget does plow a bunch of money into modernizing KSC so hopefully that will improve.

The briefing wrapped up and I killed some more time, and then got ready to go on the SLSL tour. Bastards left early. No tour. Bah!

Instead, though, they announced that they were going to do a space suit demo. The main media center at KSC is a big old building with a large central room where reporters can sit at rows of counters to do their writing, and up front are various NASA representatives available to answer any question, and all around are various TVs showing the NASA TV feeds. So in a modest area up front, they had a space suit expert who had brought in a suit and was dressing up some poor young lady from public affairs staff in it and explaining the parts as he went along. This wasn’t the big white suit they use for spacewalks, rather the orange “launch and entry” suit that the astronauts wear when inside the space shuttle during the hazardous phases at the very beginning and end of each mission. Pressurized air, coolant loops, helmet with visors, and even an emergency life raft and oxygen.

After that, I grabbed a quick bite to eat at the cafeteria (the same one the workers use, another thrill) and then had a couple hours to kill until the next event. So I did a test setup of my telescope in the parking lot. I’d brought a telescope with me in March 2009, but this time I was bringing the fancier new one. I hadn’t actually used it in a couple months, and just threw it in the car for the drive down, so I needed to give it a full test before things got busy on launch day. I spent two hours swing it around, looking at the launch pad, osprey nests, airliners high overhead, vultures circling over the VAB, etc. It all looked like it was working and I packed it back up into the car. I had my head down looking in the eyepiece most of the time and laterfound that I hadn’t put sunscreen on my neck and now had a wicked sunburned “red neck”.

The final event of the day was another media tour, but this time it was going to be for the money shot: a trip out to the launch pad to see RSS rollback (click to see what that’s about, I won’t bother explaining it here). This was an extremely rare opportunity to get close to the launchpad and see Atlantis nearly ready to launch. Lighting was perfect and so the 100 or so of us there (hauled over in busses) set up out tripods and clicked away while the structure slowly opened the clamshell to reveal Atlantis.

I signed up for the next morning’s junket and headed back to the hotel for an early night’s sleep.

Friday May 14th, Launch Day

Got to KSC right on time and got in line for the busses. These were going to take us over to the Operations and Checkout (“O and C”) building, where we’d be able to see the astronauts get into the Astrovan to head out to the launch pad. This is a common shot that you see in the evening news highlights all the time and there’s always a hundred photogs there getting the shot. Well, you’re getting pretty deep into the belly of the beast at that point so they do a thorough security screening: they make you line up all your bags and gear and then step back a good 20 feet while they let the dogs go down the line sniffing for … weapons, I guess, although they’d probably not be too happy to find dope either.

Anyway, no terrorists were found and we headed over the O+C building, where everyone set up and started jockeying for position. Once the Huey helicopter started circling overhead we knew it wouldn’t be much longer. The astronauts came out, lined up in front of the Astrovan grinning and waving while the crowd hollered, and then they got into the Astrovan to head out to the pad.

And now it was crunch time for me. I need to get my telescope set up, camera and tripod set up, radio scanner set up, and generally get everything checked out and ready to go. At one point my work colleagues interviewed NASA VIP Bobby Braun, and then just prior to launch astronaut Dave Wolf showed up to do on-air commentary with our reporter.

Launch itself is quick. We’re 3 miles away from the launchpad, so you see the rockets start up in silence, and a few seconds after liftoff the rumble finally reaches you. The shuttle climbs quickly off the launchpad and accelerates pretty much straight up (from our vantage point pretty close in), then gradually bends over and heads away over the Atlantic. The exciting noisy part is really over within about 30 seconds, and then you’re either watching a small dot race away, or watching in binoculars, or watching on NASA TV.

I’d brought my telescope in an attempt to track it on the way up. Tracking an object manually with a telescope (even a nice motorized model like the one I bought last year) is terribly difficult, because once you lose the object it’s very hard to get it back in view. Use of a finders scope (typically mounted on the side of the main telescope) is absolutely critical. I have one, that projects a virtual dot on the sky using an LED and a special lens, however I had made the unfortunate mistake of leaving the thing switched on. So at the moment of truth, 2:20pm, when I went to use it to track the shuttle racing up through the sky, the battery in the finder scope was dead. Damn it. I tried for a few seconds to catch it with the telescope and then gave up and just watched the launch with naked eyes.

Two minutes after launch, the SRBs separated, and the shuttle continued rocketing up to orbit on its own three main engines. After about 4 minutes I was able to pick it up again with my telescope, and I was able to track it all the way out until it was lost in the haze of the horizon, nearly all the way to MECO at T+8m30s.

And that was it! My coworkers didn’t have any more on-camera appearances to do so they rapidly started tearing down their set and packing it up into the truck. Apparently they were more interested in their Friday night plans back home than soaking up the ambience like me! I packed up my gear into the car and started to head out.

So there I was heading out of the parking lot, and sitting in traffic behind a few cars at a stop sign. Traffic was also stopped in the other direction. I lazily looked over to the left at the car next to me, going the other way, and I see Mike Moses in the driver’s seat. Huh, Mike Moses, neat. Holy shit, Mike Moses! He’s going to the briefing! I forgot about the briefing!

Spun the car around and headed back in and got into the briefing room just in time to catch the briefing 🙂

This time, being a post-launch briefing, all the usual management rock stars were there: the aforementioned Mike Moses, his boss Bill Gerstenmaier, KSC ops guy Mike Leinbach, and Russian space agency VIP Alexey Krasnov (the shuttle was carrying up a Russian addition to the station). The Russian guy was pretty interesting, as he tended to go off script more than the NASA guys. And it’s always fun to watch Mike Moses nodding off when he’s not on camera — he’s paying attention, but he does let his eyes roll up and his eyelids droop.

Finally, after the briefing I said one last goodbye to KSC and headed out to plow through miles of traffic back to Cocoa Beach. This would probably be the last time in shuttle era and possibly last time ever that I personally would be at KSC to see a launch. I do expect to be back here some day with my nieces (gotta get them exposed to some science and engineering, right?) but otherwise that’s it for me.

As I drove past Port Canaveral, I stopped by the Canaveral Locks, where the SRBs would be getting towed in a couple days after launch. After separating from the shuttle two minutes into flight, they fall down to the ocean under parachutes and are then intercepted by two medium-sized ships (called Freedom Star and Libery Star) who then tow the SRBs back to Kennedy to begin the refurb process. I was hoping they’d get towed in, through these locks, before I left on Sunday morning. Unfortunately they didn’t make it in until Sunday night.

Saturday May 15th

Finally it was time to relax a little. I went to the KSC Visitors Center, which is essentially a NASA theme park. They do have two IMAX theaters and so I saw a screening of Hubble 3D and a screening of Magnificent Desolation. The Hubble movie I’d seen already (via long drive down to Columbus!) but wanted to see again just to catch more detail; it’s actually not that great of a production in my opinion, but I’ve been spoiled by watching the May 2009 STS-125 mission progress live at work and also the daily highlights in HD. But the other movie, Magnificent Desolation, is fantastic! (tagline: “Only 12 men have walked on the moon. You’re next.”) The general idea is to reintroduce young audiences to what exactly Apollo was, and so what they did was incorporate actual lunar surface footage with really stunning simulations of the lunar surface. In IMAX it is truly breathtaking. Go see this if you can!

I took a ride in the Shuttle Launch Experience, which is a kind of just a silly ride but entertaining nonetheless. Visited the rocket garden, and got a panoramic photo of the field where the crowd was watching launch just one day prior. They actually can’t see the launch pad from here, due to the trees, but once the shuttle clears the treeline they get a good enough view and certainly get the sound.

On the way back to the hotel, I checked out Jetty Park, which is another vantage point from which one can see the SRBs being towed in. There are cruise ships heading in and out of Port Canaveral all day long, and an unbelievable number of people all hanging out on the jetty and the beach nearby, apparently just enjoying the sun. It was actually crowded (and noisy) to the point of being claustrophobic, probably because it’s a free beach with easy access. Avoid Jetty Park.

Sunday May 16th

Leaving Florida and heading back home, I decided to drive north through Canaveral National Seashore. Just north of KSC is Playalinda Beach, a nice remote location that has a good view of the launchpads from the north. This is also the playground for the astronauts as they are getting ready to launch.

Drove past a large radome that apparently was “Beacon 42” but I have no idea what that is, probably a navigation aid.

Here’s an excellent long form piece in Washington Monthly about the current struggle over NASA’s long term plans. The author is a little toe quick to dismiss the value of micro-gravity science, but otherwise it’s a great overview of the issues.

Epilogue: Atlantis returned to Earth on May 26th with an ontime landing back at Kennedy Space Center. At the post-landing news briefing, reporters were asking the panel about their thoughts on the approaching end to the shuttle program, and Gerst had some very nice words about his time with the team:

“We are tremendously blessed to get to do what we get to go do. All of us up here, this as much of a passion for us as it is a profession. We all want more, but I look at what we’ve got, and I am very thankful for what we have. I’m thankful to work with this team; I can’t think of any individuals I would rather spend my hours with than the folks I work with [nods to panel] in this business. There are no more sounder professionals in the world. We’ll take what we’re given and we will implement the absolute best program that we can implement with what we’re given.”

Godspeed.