A Darker View

The most direct route from the harbor at Kawaihae to US Army's Pohakuloa Training Area runs through Waikoloa. For the last few weeks the route has seen heavy activity, with convoys several times a day. Any local driver fears getting behind one of these slow moving columns of Humvees, tanker trucks, big guns and armored personnel carriers.

For the most part I have avoided convoys this year, having passed a couple going the other way. The local papers usually carry warnings to area drivers when convoys will be on the road. This may change tonight, Deb and I are headed to Hale Pohaku, and I passed two convoys on the road on the way into Waikoloa.

It has come to pass, the first Furlough Friday. The practical result is that Deb did not have to get out of bed this morning, instead she kicked me out. Along with many, I just cringe when I watch Hawaiian politics in action and wonder about the impacts of this decision, most of which are far more serious than the setting of our alarm clock. With Deb working at the school I have had a good look at the practical implications of a bureaucratic DOE and the unions, not a pretty sight. How can the kids come first in such a situation?

Short work day, just in for a single meeting. I have to be on the summit tomorrow to support the first day of an Interferometer observing run. One meeting, lunch at Hawaiian Style, and home to spend the rest of the day with mi esposa.

I am learning a technology I had hoped never to learn.

There exists something called a PLC, a Programmable Logic Controller. They are used to control many systems that require a complex set of conditions and actions. In the days before the widespread use of computers and microcontrollers it was PLC's that controlled nearly any complex machine from printing presses to sawmills.

I was first introduced to the internal workings of PLC's in a long conversation with my father in-law. He used these devices to control machinery in a large plywood mill where he was the senior maintenance supervisor. I had known such things existed, but until that evening I had never known how they worked. He showed me how they were programmed and how you went about changing the code. As an engineering student I was very familiar with modern programming and microcontrollers, I was a little aghast that anyone would still do something in such a primitive manner.