For today:-Honeywell patches with Darrel
-Crane tour with Robert Hessler and Dave
-talked to Charlie for E&I HW patches
-contacted Kerry to "borrow" Bob Dart and Ross Kusch, also 375 update
-Ernie wanted color printer....couldn't, network firewall
-checked AMS clients....AMS not even installed...labelled server PKB
-EJ overloaded after vacation from Mexico, helping out
Today is just WOW. The EJ above is not me.....her actual name is EJ. Whenever I call - "Hello EJ! It's Elysia." That sentence is really weird for me to say xD
CRANE. It was awesome. I don't remember how high it actually is....but it's one of those things where a truck with wheels way taller than you looks like a small thing. Basically....the whole machine moves lumber. It slides left and right down the lumber yard on tracks, length of 3800 feet I think Robert said.....I used to be afraid of heights. Now I say "used to" because I was fine today.....the operator ran it as normal while Robert was giving me the tour. So not only was I walking around way up high, but the entire thing I was on is moving...usually in a different direction. It's an odd feeling....I didn't take any pictures since I didn't want to drop my phone.
I did take a short video when I was in the cab with the operator....not going to post it, I can show if you want when I'm back in Edmonton. What was awesome, was that they (Robert and the operator/Dave) let me try controlling the thing. I seriously thought they were kidding when they said, "Wanna give it a shot?"
There happened to be a cleared out area in the lumber yard with a pile of logs in the middle......this will make more sense if you see the vid.....the logs are piled way high in rows so the entire thing looks like a rectangle with width*length in like a 1:200 ratio. Or something like that. You get the point. When they clear out a section...it's like a blank rectangle in the entire rectangle. But yes. They said I could try picking up those logs in the cleared out area.
Now, I'm not sure if they purposely put a pile there for me to try out or if it was just a defective pile....the logs were all uneven sizes and lengths. So how you see is like this: half the cab floor is a giant window. The operator looks down the entire time....the crane is pretty much right under you. This is hard on backs so they rotate ops every 3 hours. There are joysticks for each hand and a trigger button on each stick.
This might not be too interesting, but for the left stick......forward/back moves the cab and crane (attached to each other) forward or back. Left/right moves the entire machine left/right on the tracks. For the right joystick, left/right rotates the crane clock-wise and ccw. Forward/back moves the crane up/down respectively. The triggers make the claw clamp. So you sort of have to multi-task a bit. The operator says it takes time to get used to, but it's kinda like playing a game, haha.
It's interesting....Darrel, my IT boss, was showing me how to do patches on the servers without blowing stuff up. There is one "couple" server.....so server A and B for backup. He did patches on B then when we confirmed it was stable we made B the primary and A the backup. Apparently that broke something, because a red alarm showed up......there are hundreds of alarms a day....most useless. Red is BAD. Any other color is pretty much "meh."
Darrel didn't know what the alarm was. He searched around a bit, then he called my controls boss, Rick. While we waited, Darrel turns to me and says, "You can't see it, but my stress levels just went crazy. Like, I don't know what this alarm is so I don't know what to do." Basically, controls and IT overlap, but each side doesn't really cross into the overlap....they do kinda understand the but stay away from it. I'm supposed to sit in the middle xD Turns out that alarm was okay, the servers just freaked out when we did a manual switchover....
Crane was pretty much the highlight of my day.....
Ah. I found a picture. We have 2 cranes on site. They look exactly like this one.
Yay~~~
~EJ
