BeigeJournal

The Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2005 Oshkosh fly-in (the “Airventure,” as they call it) for 2005 was last week. My photos are gradually being added to my flickr page. I’ll set up a set for them someday. I have over a thousand digital images and a hundred or so still-undeveloped frames of slide film.

I spent the week camped there in Camp Scholler in what’s now my usual location, south of the West Camp Store. They changed the schedule from the former Tuesday through Monday to Monday through Sunday. I arrived on Sunday morning, a hot but windy day. With a strong wind blowing and a lot of time on my hands, I did a seemingly excessive job of tying down the tent with many tent stakes and lots of string. When the thunderstorms hit Monday night, it didn’t seem excessive at all. There is no such thing as too many tent pegs. The winds at times during the Monday night procession of storms were pretty impressive, and it rained all night. I’ve been learning, the hard way, how to set up a tent to survive rain and wind, and my tent stayed in place and didn’t leak at all. No mosquitoes this year, and no significant rain during the day. I managed the week without blisters or sunburn, either. Also, it seems like the water heating for the showers by the West Camp Store has been improved. The water was never cold, though the pressure does drop during heavy use.

Oshkosh isn’t Oshkosh without the fresh, hot, donuts in the morning (near Aeroshell Square) and lots of soft-serve ice cream. This year you can get waffle cones, root beer floats, and, at least in one place, chocolate soft-serve. New and improved.

Staying the entire week is sort of overkill, but for me it’s a chance to get away from it all and camp in a field and watch airplanes all day, so it’s a nice vacation.

I’m not sure exactly what the organization wanted to achieve with the new Monday-Sunday schedule, but somewhat to my surprise, I like it. I always liked the quiet Sunday night in the mostly-empty campground and a day of watching departures, but Sunday, to a surprising extent, is the new Monday. Saturday night is quiet and private, Sunday is uncrowded, and lots of planes are departing Sunday. It’s a more convenient schedule for me, and I get to enjoy Saturday night and Sunday with my girlfriend, who can only spend the weekend.

Besides the experimental aircraft at the event, Camp Scholler is filled with experimental ground vehicles. Weird carts. Every kind of strange motorized bike or scooter ever manufactured. Junk bicycles. Folding bicycles. Recumbent bicycles. Motor homes, trailers, vans, cars, motorcycles, ATVs. All operated erratically in the dark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a properly lighted vehicle at night there other than the fully street-legal regular motor vehicles. Absolutely no one on a bicycle or motorized scooter has any lights.

This was a good year for odd and famous air/space craft. The Global Flyer was there on Aeroshell Square, as was Spaceship One and White Knight. Both the Global Flyer and the White Knight and Spaceship One did flybys for us. The Dornier Do-24ATT, a 1930s seaplane that was converted into an amphibian and re-engined with turboprops in the 1980s, was there, and flew with the more conventional trimotors during the airshows. The Honda jet made its first public appearance. There were numerous B-17s. The P-38 Glacier Girl was on display and flew in Heritage Flights with a P-51, an F-4, and an F-16.

Two Eclipse jets flew a showcase flight. The Eclipse tent, the biggest and fanciest around, seems to get bigger and fancier every year. I wonder if that endless music drove the Eclipse people nuts by the end of the week, though.

Rutan, Melvill, Binnie, a bunch of other Scaled Guys, Paul Allen, Sir Richard, and some others spoke to a large crowed about Space Ship One and Virgin Galactic. I have to wonder, when a billionaire comes to Oshkosh, he doesn’t stay in a tent in the far corner of Camp Scholler, right?

Overall, it was another great year.

I live in the northwest corner of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from an “office park” to which has been added in the last few years a small shopping center with an American Bread Company restaurant. On occasion I walk over there for lunch, something I wrote about a year ago. Walking was obviously not intended. You are supposed to drive a car. Let take a walk anyway and see what happens!

We begin with Fond du Lac Avenue, the street I live on. Here at the northwest end, it look like this:

Not really an inviting place to walk, but at least wide.

The intersection of Fond du Lac Ave. and 107th Street is perhaps not too welcoming to pedestrians, either:

The next section of the journey is over Highway 145, a six-lane controlled-access freeway with virtually no traffic on it:

It was not at all hard for me to get a daytime photo with no cars visible. There is actually more traffic noise from the two-lane Fond du Lac Ave in front of my apartment building than from this six-lane freeway behind it. Total waste of pavement.

Next comes this segment of 107th street:

Welcome, pedestrians!

Then, another giant intersection, with Good Hope Road:

We are now nearly there! That building with the green roof at the left, in the far distance, is it:

But how do we get there from here? Remember, we were supposed to be driving a car, not walking. We could take the sidewalk north on 107th street, walk a long way, then follow a long curvy road back to the southwest, but we are not crazy, so we will walk on the grass.

We now discover a fundamental fact about building design in the US: each building has one front side, and one back side. The front side is prettier, and the back side is really ugly, windowless, with utility connections and dumpsters. What if one side of your building faces your parking lot and a small access road, and the other side faces a busy six-lane road, near a freeway ramp, along which many of your potential customers will be traveling? Well, the parking lot and access road side gets the windows, and the busy road gets this:

Hey, I like gas meters as much as the next guy, but is this really the face you want to present to the public? I thought the building was still under construction for a long time after it was done. I kept waiting for the windows. They did eventually take down the temporary banners and put up the permanent signs for each business, at least.

Once you get around to the parking lot side of the building, it looks a bit nicer:

Note the beautiful outdoor seating area in the parking lot:

There is a Starbucks and Qdoba on 124th and Capitol with an outdoor seating area right by the intersection of those two major roads, separated from them by a tiny strip of grass. It is such a strange place to sit that I sometimes go there just for the experience of drinking mocha while watching twelve lanes of traffic intersect. I mean, you wouldn’t want to do it very often, but occasionally, it’s so bad it’s fun. I don’t think the Atlanta Bread parking lot is bad enough to be fun. It’s just ugly.

On January 5 and 6 we got enough snow in Southeastern Wisconsin for good skiing. I went to Lapham Peak State Park after work on Thursday and Friday, and to the Nordic Trail in the Kettle Moraine State Forest Southern Unit on Saturday.

I have a ski photo set on Flickr with more photos.

I saw on Dave Slusher’s blog a link to Charlie Stross’ web site, where I found his article about a tour of the Torness nuclear reactor complex. Since I’ve been so fortunate as to get a tour of a nuclear power plant myself I had to point to his article and thought I’d write a bit about my own tour.

I visited the Clinton Power Station in central Illinois, back then in roughly 1994 still owned by Illinois Power. I was taking a radiation protection course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and since our professor also worked at the plant an the head radiation safety person he was able to arrange the tour for us. Even in those days this involved some sort of FBI background check on us beforehand.

The Clinton plant is a 950 MWe boiling water reactor located, naturally, near Clinton, Illinois. These plants are amazing things to see. Giant buildings, huge pipes, meters-thick reinforced concrete walls, and tremendous bundles of wires, tubes, lines, pipes, and cable running every which way.

We visited the top level in the containment building. One passes through an air lock to get into containment. The air lock doors at Clinton are cranked open and shut with big handwheels. It’s a fairly dull place considering that we were within 20 meters or so of a reactor operating at around 3 gigawatts thermal. Looking down around the edges the suppression pools where steam is dumped during certain sorts of emergencies can be seen. Apparently one would prefer to not be in there on the rare occasions when that happens. There’s a polar crane in the cylindrical containment building for use during refueling. Wrapped up in plastic was the powerful hydraulic device used to remove and re-attach the very large nuts that hold the pressure vessel lid on.

The turbines are hidden behind a wall in a BWR, since the steam is a bit radioactive even under normal conditions. We were able to see the tops of the turbines over the wall from an upper level at the other side of the turbine building. I’ve seen some large generators before, but the 950 megawatt unit basically took the form of a large building located inside the much larger building housing all the machinery that is outside the containment.

Rather than see the actual control room we toured the simulator, which is on-site. The simulator staff was eager to show off things that are basically incomprehensible to people who are not reactor operators. They’d press some buttons and proudly announce that this is what a design-basis accident would look like. What it looks like is every warning light in the control room, and there are an awe-inspiring number of warning lights, lights up. All at once. I imagine that operators have dreams that look like that.

One thing that was really quite interesting to actually see was the spent fuel pool. There’s not actually much to see, but the size is interesting. The pool there is sized to hold twenty years worth of spent fuel. Twenty years is a long time, yet the pool really isn’t very big, especially considering the giant scale of everything else there. Spent fuel is extremely hazardous but the quantity produced is remarkably small.

One of the things I noticed during my recent visit to Arizona was the prevalence of speed bumps. We have speed bumps here in Wisconsin here and there, but they really love them in Arizona. They build them bigger over there, too. Here we just have little humps, out there, perhaps desensitized to height by all the mountains, they build mini-mountains. If an Arizona-style speed bump was built in central Illinois, people would climb to the summit of the speed bump to enjoy the view.

The assisted living home where my grandmother lives has a giant speed bump right on a tight turn in the tiny parking lot. Do the old people speed there? Since it is on a turn, each of the four wheels of the car rolls over it separately, causing a vigorous rolling motion. That must be great when one of the residents is carried away in an ambulance, which I imagine is not so uncommon at such a facility.

While visiting Green Valley, Arizona, I ended up finding 2nd Look Books. It’s a nice, small shop in a small town, or at least what certainly looks like a small town to someone from Cook County Illinois and currently residing in the small city of Milwaukee (just under 600,000 in the city itself). I found a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I’ve only read twenty-odd pages so far, and it is hilarious, as you’d expect if you’ve heard him on public radio.

I went out walking in the city today. Rolling my Scalex Map Wheel along the route on a city map indicates about 15km, down the Hank Aaron trail, out to the lake shore and out on the harbor breakwater, a stop at the Alterra Coffee shop for a mocha shake, past the art museum, and eventually back to the car.

I decided that I didn’t want to carry my camera on the walk. A 35mm SLR is a bulky and heavy thing to carry, and I’ve photographed much of this area before, after all, so why bother? Well, crossing the Menomonee River at Emmber Lane, I saw a truck driving down the river. It was some sort of ex-military amphibious truck, with some people in the back having a good time and using their camcorders. Guess I should have taken my camera.

I wrote last month about a day spent wandering around Milwaukee with my camera. I have some photos scanned now.

I started on the Hank Aaron trail

The other side of the river has some less interesting sights:

and some more interesting buildings:

Plants can grow anywhere, from barbed wire

to pavement

Birds clearly perch on this tire on the riverside:

There are interesting things stored in the maintenance yards along the trail:

There is a Marquette athletic field with lights:

This is as far as I could go. The concrete on the right was once a rail line, I think. The water to the left is where the path is:

Along the way I saw some work in progress:

Some parts of the Milwaukee river are pretty, like this section with a kayaker, photographed from the 6th street viaduct:

Some areas are uglier:

There are some other interesting places, like this parking lot:

There is a roundabout at the end of the 6th street viaduct. It has a blinky arrow sign

Though it is strapped to a light pole, it was apparently easier to use a solar panel than to tap into the power grid:

I spent a few years in the electrical and computer engineering department. Can you tell?

I’m fascinated by the old outside fire escapes:

While I was on the 6th street viaduct photographing fire escapes, a train arrived at the Amtrak station:

I went to General Mitchell International Airport to pick up my girlfriend upon her return from a trip to Louisiana. Her flight was delayed about a half hour by weather, so for the first time in a few years I actually parked and went into the terminal.

As part of my continuing series of used book store visits, I did stop in the Renaissance used book shop in the airport. As far as I know, it is relatively unusual to have a used book store in an airport, but we have one here. I only had a few minutes to spend there, but it does tend to fit the usual profile of lots of books, all over the place, though it’s a bit more organized-looking than some.

In the realm of political statements, there is a hot air hand dryer in one of the men’s rooms in the terminal with a sticker on the button that says, “Press here for a message from George W. Bush.”

Airports are big and complicated and full of people who are distracted and who have never been there before. They try really hard to put up informative signs, and I think they did reasonably well here. The biggest mystery was figuring out which direction to walk in to get to the terminal from the middle of the parking garage. The garage is an especially difficult case because due to the low ceiling with lots of structural beams plus the columns you just can’t see anything, including the signs, from any great distance.

I just had a truly hilarious walk and dinner this Friday evening in Milwaukee. I’ve been doing quite a bit of walking around downtown recently, and though I’ve complained that there isn’t much in my neighborhood, I do live, technically, in the city of Milwaukee, and relatively near, at least what would look near to a bird circling high overhead, to an “office park.” (They are not fooling anyone. Office, yes, park, no. Forest rangers work in parks. The people who work there, do not.)

A few restaurants have recently been built there. That “recently” part is interesting in itself. The big office buildings have been there at least since I moved here, in 1995, and probably some years longer than that, but building a restaurant near them, that’s a radical new idea.

Anyway, I thought, why not walk to the Atlanta Bread Company for dinner? Why not, indeed. I’ll be going back with the camera someday to document just what a special experience walking to this place is.

Step one was getting to the vicinity of the office area. I walked north-west on Fond du Lac Avenue, which, out here, is two lanes, mostly no sidewalks, partly wide gravel shoulder and partly narrow or no shoulder. 107th Street is two narrow lanes, lacks sidewalks, and has very narrow gravel shoulders. After crossing the Good Hope Road and 107th Street intersection, I then had to figure out how to get to the actual building. There is a sidewalk that runs off into the distance to the north. Figuring that a sidewalk must be a good route, I set off. And walked. And walked. Right on past the buildings. Off in the far distance, the paved road heading, in a curvy way, to the west and south and past the restaurants, was just coming into view. Much of the grass is very tall and probably muddy, but a little way before the road it turns to mowed lawn, which is reasonably walkable and cuts some distance off. After then walking quite a way back toward the way I’d come from in the first place, I finally reached the building. I was laughing much of the way at the absurdity of the layout.

My actual meal, a roast beef sandwich on rye bread, was fine. There were some other customers (including a small child who was a strong argument for effective birth control) who drove there, as was obviously intended. I assume the designers had lunch customers from the offices in mind, and the building faces the office complex, but I did not explore how easy that walk would be. There are roads leading that way, whether there are sidewalks I didn’t notice.

I took a different route back, walking behind the building, first on a service road, then over the lawn to the intersection. That’s shorter, at least. The “back” of the building faces a major road very near ramps on and off highway 45, and is a blank wall with electrical and gas equipment everywhere. There are some signs indicating what some of the businesses are, some of them temporary-looking banners tied to the wall. No windows, no access except over the lawn or by circuitous route that no pedestrian would take.

There is what I assume is a public sidewalk running from, well, a few meters east of 107th street (it just ends amidst the grass, with a dirt trail leading to the actual road) alongside the church there and past a landscaped berm to, I think, West Leon Terrace. That end is at least paved all the way to the paved road. From there it is a fairly pleasant walk through suburbia on sidewalk-less but low-traffic roads to the Little Menomonee River Parkway underpass under highway 145, which takes me right to my apartment building. That would be the preferred route.

A few years ago I attended a meeting at a motel near that office complex regarding the cleanup of the Little Menomonee River, which was contaminated by a wood treatment plant. I rode my bicycle

to the motel, but could see no place to lock it, so I walked into the lobby rolling it along beside me and asked the person at the desk where to park it. To her great credit, she had a solution. She called a maintenance person who is a serious cyclist himself, and he led me to a boiler room with, obviously, restricted access, and let me leave it there. When I was ready to leave I inquired at the front desk, and they contacted him by radio. He let me out through a back door in the boiler room, which was convenient as well as saving the hotel from having someone rolling a long wheelbase recumbent through the halls. I don’t think they get a lot of cyclists, and they may have been talking about me for months after that, but they did make me feel welcome. I imagine it didn’t hurt that they were hosting a meeting about an environmental cleanup and thus might have been expected some enviroweenies, plus I think I present an image more of fitness-nut/environment-nut with ridiculously expensive gear than of looser who can’t afford a car, which in the United States is much lower status than overeducated exercise nut.