Trainblogging

I am once more on the road to Munich for database business. Customer support this time, hoping to fix problems that couldn't be resolved on the telephone. I am quite certain that all three cases are user error, but cannot prove this without being there and putting hands on hardware. I hope to be finished with the customers in time to meet Georgette before the last train back to Stuttgart.

The Hobbyist version is proceeding well, the tests are coming back mostly positive with very few bugs to report. The user's guide is being fine-tuned and will be ready this month. It's all coming together nicely, which is just as well as I'll be gone in 32 days and whatever is not done at that time will remain not done.

Grey and cold, a dull evenly overcast sky as we climb the escarpment at Geislingen. The forecast for the weekend is for cold (15°) and rain, even sleet in higher areas.

The one last swallow is still in Stuttgart! I saw it flying last evening, on my way home from work. Is it crazy? Was it spurned by the others, outcast and forbidden to return to Africa? Or did it just sleep through the alarm call and now doesn't know anything else to do?

Just before Ulm there is a very large and prosperous-looking farm in a smallish valley, with a huge two-storey barn and other buildings. I have always wanted to photograph this, but never remember to bring the camera. An oddity: Munich is east-southeast of Stuttgart, but according to the position of the sun, we are travelling southwest at the moment.

Work with the architects has been interesting the last few days. I have been checking and correcting the engineers' drawings for the concretework, and the steelwork fabricator's drawings. It's fascinating to see (reconstruct) how they think, in particular the concrete work is instructive. Architects and users of buildings think of concrete as an inflexible and dogmatic substance; the engineers see it as something nearly fluid, they bend it and shift it around at will. One beam (imbedded in the change in height where two floor slabs meet) has acquired a Z-shaped jog just before it meets a wall. This would be heresy to a steelworker: imagine a straight beam twelve metres long, that makes a dogleg in its final twenty centimetres. It would be difficult and expensive to do that in steel, the rotational moment would be immense. But concrete doesn't care, it takes such trickery in its stride.

The checking itself is not complicated, but very thought-intensive. Five hours of that is all the work that I can do in one day. It takes over an hour to check a table-sized drawing: a quarter-hour of thought to understand the system and purpose behind a piece of work, at least half an hour to check the drawing for internal consistency (e.g. 1+1=3, which even in these days of computer-aided drafting happens more often than you would believe), and a final quarter-hour to compare the drawing against other drawings, the walls and floors that this particular section of concrete connects to.

Going past the Donau (Danube) at Günzburg I notice that the river is very high. It has indeed been raining a lot in the last few days.

What makes this job (the checking and also the project itself) so tricky is the differing scales and accuracies of concrete and steel. Concrete work is traditionally done in high winds and pounding rain, up to one's knees in sticky mud; it is therefore necessarily imprecise. If the resulting walls and columns are wrong by "only" two centimeters it is considered a good result.

The steelwork which will sit on these future walls and columns is measured - and pre-cut made-to-measure - in millimetres.

Pair of black-winged herons in the reeds around that pond.

Normally this discrepancy is not a great problem: You set up the steel columns on the up-to-two-centimetres-false walls and level them up with lasers; if the top of the wall is higher than expected, then you just get out the circular saw and cut a bit off the top of the column (simply expressed, it is slightly more complex than that).

Eagle, working hard against the wind.

For reasons that I won't elaborate on, this project is different: there is a very high corrosion risk, all steelwork is prefabricated and sealed in zink. There will be no welding, no cutting, no boring of holes on-site. In other words: no chance to correct mistakes. The final assembly of these pieces on site will be, shall we say, very interesting.

Field of green (unripe) sunflowers at Kutzenhausen, hanging their heads in the gloom.

Munich.