Still Around, Still Working

Eleven months since the last post...not the best of effort. Still working at the same place and haven't yet had a review. Not even the annual one. I did get a 3.75% raise in November so something must be going right.

However, my first project to construction had the Mechanical Contractor (MC) replaced after some ductwork installation occurred. The replacement MC failed to install required accessories on the fan coils and condensing units which resulted in two systems failing miserably. It also didn't help they piped the steam coils as if they were heating water coils and they didn't even do that correctly. Things are fixed and the systems are fine now but because I asked for a rebalance of the air systems to a maximum air flow, the company is having to cough up some minor money to pay for that work. Crap.

Another project, now under construction, had a plumbing designer show incorrect waste line invert elevations, missed plumbing fixtures, routed fixtures to the grease waste instead of the sanitary waste and spec'd fixtures not complying with the Owner standards.

On that second project, I found that during submittal review by others in the office there are apparent standards required by the Construction Adminstrative staff that somehow do not appear in the Design Standards. Of course, the Design Standards are incomplete and out of date. Frustrating at best, waking me up at 2am freaking out about failure. Sent updated info off to the architect for their acoustical consultant to review everything. Better if we have a change now before things are installed, not afterwards when the building is occupied and people are complaining.

I've done a number of updates and reorganization on the Mechanical Sequences of Control but none have been put into the Master version. The Master is 13 pages. I have 63 pages covering about half of what has been requested. Of that, only the first 10 pages or so have been reviewed, commented, corrected but not having final approval. Portions of what I have written get used since coworkers stop by for advice.

I've put together a list of Top Peer Review items that are frequently found on plans I check. I've also have a list of general review items to check and need to review/expand it. Both need to be passed out to the staff, probably at a luncheon presentation. In general my project review effort has caught a number of items on several projects that  would have been aggravating to embarassing to fix. Likely costly, too, given the issues would not have been found until during construction.

I had Revit MEP 2012 and Navisworks installed on my office PC which meant it got a second much larger hard drive for file storage. I use Revit Viewer to look at designs on-screen for MEP, Architectural and Structural while I'm looking at the printed documents. The info on paper doesn't show everything used for the design. Besides, I've seen strange looking building sections on the printed architectural plans that I know are not correctly shown. It also helps to zoom in on a screen image when reviewing half-size plans.

Considering I'm likely past some irritations with mhy projects I'm hoping to post more frequently. Obviously, time will tell if I fail or succeed.

Keeps on Rolling

Fitting in with the new company. 30-day review was positive and rather typical. 60-day review was missed. 90-day review is now over 30-days late. Got my first project deadline nailed. Did much more than a Design Development set and did it all in two weeks. 19 sheets at an average 4.5 hours per sheet, which includes learning the CAD menu (not Revit). Turned over a set of plans to a partner for review.

Since there is a limited amount of spare hard drive space on the work computer I use I've upgraded my USB stick to 32GB for my Gmail accounts using Thunderbird (always backup Tbird elsewhere to avoid data loss!) I also us the USB stick for a serious amount of reference material. I created a web page front-end so I don't need to go through Windows Explorer. It has worked out very well. Got quick access to all the ASHRAE Handbooks and other similar documents.

Being a very new member of the Mech Tech committee I was assigned to standard detail activities which included making sure a PDF existed of each detail, updating the detail list document and moving it to an Excel spreadsheet to maintain hyperlinks that open the PDFs while the list on-screen and confirm the variation of a detail they want to use with a checkbox. It can also be printed and manually checked off.

At long last I've had an orientation session on Revit MEP Suite, 4 hours, primarily for mechanical. Does it mean I'm doing Revit? Nope. The one project I have to design is not using Revit since it's a one-story building with the previously remodel on the existing structure done in AutoCAD 2004. It was fortunate for me since AutoCAD was more familiar to me.

Do I like the new place? Friends and relatives tell me I'm not acting like I do. I think that's due to me not being firmly assured I have a secure job yet. After all, I had a 22-year run with a company I thought would last my entire career to retirement. So it's understandable I'm not placing all my bets on this company. Nonetheless, I do think it will be around for a very long time, at least to cover me until I decide to get out of the business. At least at the new place I don't have any invested money.

The old company continues to wind down. Only one lawsuit continues and it appears to be heading for a very low cost resolution. The plan is for the old company to be dissolved sometime late this year so that it will be done and gone for tax purposes, both for the company and us stockholders. The positive note is that money continues to roll in for aged invoices and in sizable amounts. Nothing like a jackpot but when a company shuts down due to a lack of money and business getting those final payments to cover bills and leave something behind for distribution is truly a good thing.

Another Chapter Started

October was the month without pay so technically I was out of work. In reality, I was working for free and the company wasn't getting any money either. While checking the local ASHRAE chapter October newsletter I found a company looking for HVAC design people with HVAC design experience so I sent off a resume via email on a Tuesday evening.

Got a call on Friday while sitting in a bar with friends that was effectively a qualifying interview. Had an in-person interview on the following Monday with a follow-up interview on Monday a week later. I started work with their company on Nov 3. Friends were amazed that I found a job so quick. Not really an issue. I knew the company had work and knew people working there. I did not use them though for greasing the wheel, instead, I did the job seeking process without asking their help.

At the new company I'm not doing the job for the position they were looking to fill. Instead they've created a position for me involving primarily quality control in checking projects before they are issued, some work on design and doing updates to their standards including a good amount of work on control sequences of operation. It is a position that is yet to be clearly defined, and until then, I'll be the equivalent of a utility fielder.

The new place has an interesting work environment. 80+ people, open office with sizeable cubicles, very quiet and rather formal about things. Not quite the intensity of work that I'm accustomed to nor the looseness of my old company. Type of work is mostly institutional, educational and governmental with some commercial. Yep, it's different from what I've had for 20+ years but my base salary is similar to what I was getting at the old place. I'm glad to have a job.

Revit MEP Suite is a part of the new company CAD scheme. Not yet working at a fully smooth mode but I started attending the meetings for company standards and education. Otherwise, AutoCAD 2004 is their baseline CAD program. My PC is quad-core Xeon with 12GB Ram running WinXP64 and VMware.



Just found out the old company will next week be paying for accrued vacation that stopped on July 5.

More Home-Office Thrills

Other principals still working from home have had an interesting time running AutoCAD which using our VPN access. Of course, it's because the Profile they are using has many network drive reference folders and that takes a lot of time over a VPN. Loading the active drawing and several Xrefs is also a time-eater. I reset those folder references to a local drive (a 1TB, 7200rpm, Seagate that had been external).

Not that I'm free of any hiccups. The ex-CAD Manager had recently saved background updates on a project in AutoCAD 2010 format and me normally running version 2008 had to shift gears. That meant closing 2008 and opening 2010 which resulted in an annoying long wait for all the folder references to take effect. Once done I exported that Profile as backup and started modifying it to local folder references making separate incremental backups. I advised my co-principals to make backups as well, not that they'll actually do it. Those changes got AutoCAD 2010 working faster albeit with what amount to a near duplication of the Menu Bar headers.

Tried again to do a disk drive upgrade with the Western Digital specific Acronis software - caused a BSOD result due to the snapman.sys file. It's apparently a known problem going back to mid-2009 without a solution. Thus, I say screw Western Digital; never will buy another their hard drives. Seagate's version works fine.

The 2nd Dell 390 also has a single 80GB drive but accessing the machine through any of the usernames has been fruitless even when using boot CD methods and various software. I pulled the 80GB WD drive and installed the two 320GB WD drives. Setting up the motherboard to do a RAID 1 setup was interesting as it apparently is not a true RAID. I only found that out after 1)installing FreeDOS and Ubuntu 10.4 LTS only to find out that the Intel RAID setup wipes out the data. Okay, start over. After checking out a few things online, I found that Winddows wants to be the first OS on the drives when using the Intel RAID-1 setup. I installed Win7 64-bit Ultimate.

All 8GB of ram the max allowed by the machine was acknowledged by Win7. Installed Dataram's RAMDisk so I could have a 512MB ram disk where temp files for certain programs would reside, I can dump PDF files to check before sending to paper and a drop spot for download files before committing them to drive storage.

Not sure yet what to do with my old 933Mhz P3 box. It has a 500GB PATA drive with WinXP-SP3, SCSI CD writer and an 8GB SCSI drive. A spare 250GB PATA drive sits unused as well as a 64GB and a 40GB. Just not sure where to let this thing fit in my grand tech scheme.

September work activity when fine and I progressed well on a few projects getting them completed. Only two remain, one with documentation on HVAC commissioning for LEED uploads and another awaiting architectural update plans to confirm changes. HVAC revisions are done and I just need to confirm they align with the arch'l plans.

With the end of September I finished my commitment to continue working with the old company for two months at half-pay for half-time work. I agreed with the Engineer-of-Record on the two projects that I'd stick with them to reach the next milestone but not beyond that point.

Had one episode of the UPS signing during an overnight power outage. Didn't matter since I had powered down all the gear but it was nice to know the beast worked as advertised.

I started a job search based on choosing potential employers by their distance from my home. The closest is only a couple miles away but one of the partners was once a coworker whose design on project I had to fix when he left my old company. Not a good option.

I sent off a resume to a company about eight miles away where I knew a few people and one that had advertised in the local ASHRAE newsletter looking for mech design staff. That happened on a Wednesday eve. The next Tuesday I got a call from a partner for a telephone interview. On the following Thursday I got any email offering a time for an interview the following Monday which I accepted.

The interview process is a bit of a freak-out thing for me since I've not done a personal one for so many years. I kept my resume to two pages so I guess I did that part correctly with length and format. I've been on corporate interviews so I imagine the personal version won't be too much different. Just got to remind myself to relax and allow a natural flow of exchange between the interviewers and me. I expect an offer but the size of it will be interesting to see.

The Physical End and Home Working

I got everything moved home by last Friday that I wanted and was allowed. I could have taken much more but my rule was if it did not fit in the car it would not fit in my home as I have enough big stuff. I decided against a four-foot folding table and was glad I did.

Thus, I got two, two-drawer, file cabinets that replaced old small ones of much lesser quality. I have a pair of quad-core, 2.4GHz, Dell Precision 390 PCs which includes my office workstation and a spare box that was missing RAM plus the two monitors I used and various accessories. Had to disassemble my chair (purchased personally years ago) to fit in the car and am using it for now without the back or arms installed which oddly seems to be working well so far.

Got the office PC setup again without any problems. Upon finishing I thought I had missed something and realized I did. I missed the rat's nest of cables because I wrapped and tied the excess, tucking it down behind the desktop for a clean look. That office PC started up without a problem and all the components worked once all the USB conections were recognized at different port locations.

My plan is is to get a dual-monitor DVI KVM switch with USB connectors for mouse/keyboard and audio/mic. Not an easy animal to find but StarTech make them and they're available for $250 and higher. Another online order to make. Tuesday PM the RAM for the second PC arrived and I installed it today. Haven't powered up that machine yet since I wasn't able to connect the monitor as I only had a spare VGA cable. Mistakenly thought I had a DVI cable on the space LCD monitor.

Working at home is different from what it was a few years ago. Back then it was simply a matter of bring home a CD with files, copy them over to the PC hard drive and run AutoCAD 14/2000i to put three or four more hours into the design and burn another CD to take back to work. Now it's a bit more complicated with taking on the other aspects beyhond only design like clent and partner email messages.

This week I've put in four hours per day working. Started with getting the VPN setup corrected to work properly. Then I had to reconfigure AutoCAD for local rather than network drive locations for files. Several menu Shortcut HotKeys weren't functioning and I had to add them back into my Personal HotKeys. I got most all of it running Monday PM so Tuesday and today was spent truly working on two projects. Interestingly a partner wanted an addenda finished by Friday on one project but two others took the lead while the first has been completely quiet. One of those two projects took the lead at having a deadline on Friday for issuing responses on plan review from the building department which has over 130 comments. Unfreaking-believable.

With this home working situation I now get, in addition to the original email, forward copies of the same message from two or three of the partners two of whom are on vacation with nothing added of value. Some justice. Two more days of fun with Friday deadline plus I have to setup the 1500va UPS I bought today at Best Buy for $170 but only after I had to tell them of the lower price advertised on their website. Otherwise, I could have spent $30 more.