Announcing Petty Politics… A new game
Posted by Robc in Game Design, Games by Robc on February 19th, 2010
I am finally ready to announce the new game that I have been working on since before my accident last year. “Petty Politics” targets politically passionate people. It is a browser based game (javascript) that will play in 99% of the browsers out there without the player having to lift a finger to install, no downloads. The game takes about 5 seconds to load and starts the minute the website appears. As a player your objective is to convert the “igno-rant-masses” and take your party to the top so that you can win elections. Please check out the website at PettyPolitics.com for more info.
I expect the game to really shine as a web based multi-player game in which you don’t actually play against other people but your actions will cause good and bad things to happen in other players’ games. Conversely, the actions of other players will cause good and bad things to happen in your game. Once you choose your political party and which State you want to play in then the game gets started. As you play you will raise money for yourself and for your political party. You will register voters, get them to sign petitions, and finally get them to donate. You can spend the donations on negative and positive tv ads
and eventually even hire high powered speakers to come and change the minds of voters in your neighborhood. Any money that you don’t spend during your game is contributed to your national political party and that money will be used to make it more difficult for other parties to register voters and raise money. As you play you will slowly increase your political clout. Political clout makes you eligible to climb the party heirarchy and to eventually secure positions with high visibility and coveted political appointments.
Twice a year in each State there will be elections and on these days all of your hard work will come to fruition. Polls at the end of election day will be used to determine the final population of IGRM voters in each State for your party and for your rivals. This population will affect how easy it is to raise money for the following six months.
I have only scratched the surface of this game in this blog, the rest will have to wait until I have it fully implemented. There will be a simplified I-phone version of 
the game also that will allow players to contribute even when away from their main computer. At this time I have completed the single player game and tutorial and I have begun the multi-player game. I will be looking for alpha testers as soon as the multi-player game is functional. I am also now looking to hire a freelance graphic artist to develop the final art work for the game and to determine the final art style. As in all my games the development cycle is very slow since I can’t quit my day job just yet. Unlike many of my other games, this one will make it all the way to release. I am anticipating a release date by Christmas 2010 or Spring 2011 at the very latest.
Cheers.
-Robc
Snow…
Posted by Robc in Family Stuff, Robc on December 15th, 2009
Now I wish that I had taken pictures… but while it was happening the last thing on my mind was recording the event. I just wanted to get us through it. Suzanne and I have lived in our current house for almost 20 years now, we have never seen so much snow… followed by such cold temperatures. Our neighbor who has been in her house for 40 years said the same.
Sunday morning I woke up and we didn’t have any water. Its happened too many times in the past and I was starting to get grumpy about it. After traipsing outside and driving down to the well I knew little more than I did when I started… so I called my well guy, “Nate”, and left a message. A few hours later his wife called me and said they couldn’t come out until Monday… damn, it was going to be another weekend day with no water. A few hours later we had water again, must have been frozen pipes I figured… well, ok, I’ll ask Nate to fix it on Monday and please make the heat tape work better this time!
Sunday night it starts snowing. Ah well, no big deal, its winter after all and snow is expected… cuddle up with the nice cozy new pellet stove… hmm warm.
Monday morning and I look outside.. what the f… we have two feet of snow, my 4WD truck isn’t going anywhere because it is just too deep, and the cars are almost completely buried… no power, no water… and what is this? No heat either!? Damn, why did I have to go and replace that wood stove with a pellet stove this year!? Why couldn’t I wait a year! The pellet stove requires electricity and we don’t have any.
So I try pulling out that 30 year old generater that the old man used to use… shocked to actually get it to fire up on the second pull… but there is a bearing shot on it and it shrieks so loud that it sounds like it is going to explode in a matter of seconds. Quickly shut that down and start thinking of options. Getting myself or Suzanne hurt right now would be just about the stupidist thing I could possibly do… bar none. On the phone, the one thing that is working, PG&E says that we should prepare for ‘an extended outage’ due to bad weather. 15K+ people out of power in our area. Shit.
Looking out at the roads I can see many downed limbs and trees so we aren’t getting out. Suzanne and I call work and relay the situation, sorry but we aren’t going anywhere today. I go to bed again, I’m tired and I’m sure this will blow over in about a day.
Day 2… hard freeze last night, inside house temperature now down to about 35 deg F… ok, this is getting serious. Candles and hot tea from our gas burner are keeping Suzanne and I sane and alive. The poor 18 year old dog thinks that hell has frozen over and we take turns keeping her warmed up.
Lots of hot tea… hmm, no toilets. Now we start the snow melting routine. I remember the old woodstove in the garage. Of course I don’t have any dry wood it is all under two feet of snow. I break up some old garden trelis that is sticking out of the snow and get the woodstove fired up, I am surrounded by 6 tons of pellets packed almost right up against the stove… so I have to be careful or the whole place will go up like a steel mill furnace, never figured I’d use that old woodstove again, at least not for a couple of years anyway. What the hell, I start shovelling pellets into the woodstove, it doesn’t work well, but it works a little. We pull up an ancient couch in the garage and the three of us sit in front of the stove all day shovelling pellets in and melting snow on top of it. We need water to flush the toilets, they are getting nasty… lots of tea and oh, did I mention that we are trying to eat everything in the freezer and fridge? And fast! More reason to put toilet water as a top priority… the inside stove top is used to melt tea water, the garage stove melts toilet water. Ok, we are busy at least.
The days start to pass. I’ll spare you the details. Its evening. Our first neighbor attempts to escape and succeeds! I vow that we will go out the next day. We get out in the afternoon right after the temperature climbs above freezing and find power lines strewn everywhere, no wonder we have no estimate for power restoration! First stop I rent a hotel room and drop off Suzanne to get a shower while I go out and drop a wad of money on two generators, 20 gallons of gas, and more from the seriously busy power tool and hardware stores. My turn in the shower and Suzanne goes out to the store and buys 10 gallons of fresh water and so much other emergency stuff that every spare cubic foot of the truck is packed, then we head back to help the dog through the night again. Its freezing and the roads are treacherous but we get back alive. Back home I set up a generator, lovely heat and power! We are saved! I’ll rig up a second generator on the water well in the morning.
At day break I haul the second generator through the snow down to the well and fire it up… water everywhere! Except in the pipes. Of course, no power for several days and all of the pipes froze solid and shattered. Back on the phone to Nate… he is overwhelmed with calls but promises to come out in a couple days. Its getting hard to decide if the helicopters now circling a few hundred feet over our neighborhood are comforting or annerving… they seem to be tracking the power lines. Looking for the last few line breaks maybe? Perhaps they are getting ready to energize? That would be good… patience now cold, dirty, and angry grasshopper…
When all was said and done we were trapped for 3.5 days without heat, had no electricity for 5 days, and no water for 7 days. I told anyone that asked that we were caught flat footed… and I vowed never again. Next storm and we will be ready, bring it on! Or maybe lets just get back to those mild winters from the last 20 years instead! ok? That’d be better.
Folsom Dam Improvements
Folsom Dam is undergoing both massive and continuous improvement to make it safer, more reliable, and to better meet the needs of all the stakeholders who have an interest in its water, power, recreation, public safety, and environmental resources. My job is to focus on the Dam’s ability to help save lives and reduce flood damages. We are doing this on two major fronts, first we are adding a new spillway to the Dam that will allow dam operators to react faster to incoming flood waters and second we are looking to raise the Dam about 3.5 feet. Together these projects will cost over a billion dollars.
After 911 the Federal government closed a major roadway that passed over the top of Folsom Dam for homeland security. As part of our plan to raise the Dam and surrounding dikes it was also to our advantage to get traffic off the top of the Dam, to that end one of our first orders of business was to build a new bridge and roadway to restore the disrupted traffic around the City of Folsom. That bridge was opened to traffic with much celebration and fanfare in early 2009. I was the State project manager for that completed project.
Our next task is to construct a new spillway that increases and improves the timing of discharges from the reservoir during floods.
You might ask why we want to discharge more out of a reservoir when it is flooding!? Why don’t we hold more water!? Well, it’s simple really, we discharge the water that is in the reservoir slowly and safely just before and at the beginning of a big flood to make room to store the rush of flood water that is expected to come from the mountains.
The spillway construction has just started but here a few pictures of the work in progress…
Arny himself came out to preside over the ground breaking ceremony for this all too important project!
The last thing that I will likely be involved in out at Folsom Dam is a plan to raise the Dam and surrounding dikes about 3.5 feet. This work has not started yet so I don’t have any pictures to share. Wait a few years and I’ll see what I can do.
That’s enough for now, cheers.
-Robc
Folsom Dam
I don’t talk too much about my job at the State. That’s because I find it difficult to understand the bureaucracy and the motivations of the people in it. And that goes for the partners I work closely with in the Federal government as well. My Momma taught me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say then to say nothing at all. So I say very little…
But the project I am working on, the Folsom Dam in Northern California, is interesting, and some of you may be interested in seeing pictures. So I thought I’d do a series of 3 or so entries in this blog to show pictures of the dam and some of the work being done out there. I have to be careful of what pictures I publish though because Folsom Dam is #1 on a Federal list of threat targets for terrorism acts because of the number of people who live downstream. Still, there is plenty that I can show.
Folsom Dam is a 340 foot high concrete gravity dam that was originally completed in 1956 for $81.5 million. The improvements I am working on today are estimated to run $1.3-$1.5 billion.
<whistle> …my my, the cost of stuff sure has changed.
The dam provides flood protection, hydroelectric power, irrigation and municipal water supply, and recreation benefits to people in the Sacramento area.
Folsom dam is tiny compared to the other large dams in the US and in the world. For example it is half the size and holds only about 4% of the amount of water that is behind the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in Nevada/Arizona.
But…
Immediately downstream of Folsom Dam are the City of Sacramento, the State Capital of California, 460,000 people, and 110,000 structures valued at over $58 billion. A failure at Folsom Dam would be catastrophic and is simply unthinkable. And so it is my job and the job of a great number of other engineers, economists, and scientists to think about such a failure and take steps to prevent it. We also think about how to use the dam to save lives and reduce flood damages for the much smaller storms that hit California all the time.
Next time I’ll show some pictures of some of the work we are doing to make the dam safer.
-Robc
When a 1Tb Hard Drive crashes, now what?
Relax! It’s a RAID5 system… your data is safe! NOT! Uh oh… this could bad.
Or so I learned in the most painful way recently. I used a Buffalo 1 Terabyte network storage system on my network for two purposes, first it held a backup of every machine on the network, and second I kept a folder in there titled simply “archives.” Archives was a nicely organized repository for all my current and older versions of websites and game development. It held all of my original articles from back in the days when I wrote about games, it held all of my poor but original artwork for games, it held all of the artwork and sound files that I bought from other more talented people, it held all of my access and security information for software packages that I have bought over the years… it even held every presentation that I made from my wetland restoration days including many original powerpoint slides and all of my original photography. It held all of our vacation and personal photos too. Yeah, it had a lot of irreplaceable important stuff.
In the past I would never have put such important material all in one electronic basket, but the truth was that the amount of material had grown so large that I couldn’t just store it on multiple computers anymore (1 Terabyte=1000 Gigabytes or over 200 DVDs worth of data)… that’s why I invested in the Buffalo system. A RAID 5 system is a unique arrangement where your data is stored on 4 separate hard drives in such a way that if any single drive fails you still have a complete set of data on any 3 remaining drives and the data can be fully recovered. That sounds about as safe a storage system as I could ever ask for. And it seemed to work fine for a couple of years.
So what happened? Well the drive was starting to get full but I had a little room and I was using an older computer to manipulate some video work and that computer could not hold all the huge files that are generated when you edit video. So I was passing very large avi files back and forth between my network storage and the computer when the computer crashed… and thats when the RAID system crashed. I tried a bunch of stuff but I couldn’t get the system to re-mount, started getting nervous… looked for help online and got some good suggestions including removing each drive one at a time to see if the system would reboot with the minimum required 3 good disks. Nope.
Ok, not time to panic yet… call a reputable data recovery system… sure, they can take a look and probably recover all of the data. I drop off the system and wait a few days for the assessment and estimate. $4,711 to recover all data!!! Oh, and its free if they fail to recover it all! Yeah, thanks bud. So, I agonize for a few days, the value of the data loss was worth more than $4K when I consider the time and money invested for that stuff, but is it still worth $4k going forward? Oh, I just don’t know and what a hard decision to have to make.
The answer is probably not. I have a few remnants of the lost data on old computers and I’m carefully reassembling what I can, although it is a fraction of the original material. I am getting one more quote from the data recovery service because they tell me there is one more option. If I can leave the system with them for a long time, then the rep said that they can sometimes work on cases like this one in their spare time when they don’t have other client business and I can get a deep discount… but I need to wait for a new quote. I said, sure, why not! Its a 100% loss to me otherwise. I don’t have that quote yet. If it is still too high (and it probably will be since he suggested it would be around $2500) then I’ll probably just take those 4 drives out and store them in case I feel an urgent need to spend money later.
So what am I going to do now? Well, I’m going to move forward without a lot of my past work to fall back on I guess. Hopefully my best ideas are still in front of me. As for backing up data… I’ll buy 4 new drives. Perhaps I’ll try storing the original data on two drives and use the other two as a full backup. It will probably be many years before I collect even half a terabyte of information, so that should work for the foreseeable future. And then cross my fingers? Why do I still have this sinking feeling that nothing in electronic form is really safe unless you are prepared to spend every last dime you have protecting it? <sigh>
-Robc
Goodbye to the IGDA Indie SIG
Posted by Robc in Game Design, IndieGameTools.com, Robc on October 23rd, 2009
I have been a member of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for many years. Last spring I joined a sub group of the IGDA called the Independent Game Developers (or Indie) Special Interest Group (SIG). Yesterday I decided to leave the group after less than a year and I figured a blog entry is a good place to tell why. The group was struggling to reinvent itself when I joined and I thought perhaps I could help. What I didn’t realize was that the leaders were hell bent on an agenda and would stop at nothing to achieve it. An agenda I might add that I find both preposterous and damaging to the Indie community.
I left the SIG for a number of reasons. First, the SIG leaders are deathly afraid that the IGDA will try to impose its will on the SIG, something that in my opinion they have every right to do. The IGDA brand name is valuable. It is reasonable for the larger Association to protect its brand by providing guidelines to groups under its wing and using its name. Second, I left because the SIG leaders want to narrowly define Indie game developers. They are attempting to do so by defining appropriate “Indie” relationships to IP (Intellectual Property) and to companies with which they may do business. The SIG leaders fear that AAA companies want to infiltrate and somehow control the SIG and by God they are going to bar the gates against it! The SIG leaders also believe that installation of a traditional Board structure for governance of the SIG would result in suppression of the members’ views. I think they are afraid of anything that will weaken their grip on the agenda.
They have written a mission statement…
The IGDA Indie Special Interest Group (Indie SIG) exists to advocate on behalf of independent game developers, and to assist them in the difficult task of bringing their games to a larger audience. For purposes of this SIG, an “independent / indie” is defined as a game developer who owns and controls their intellectual property (”IP”) with respect to Publishers and Distributors. The terms “Publisher” and “Distributor” are not regarded as equivalent or in any way synonymous; the former implies control of IP, the latter does not. A self-publishing game development studio is independent. However, a company that wholly owns a game development studio as a subsidiary company, or has multiple game development studios as corporate divisions, is not regarded as independent, as the company is removing IP ownership and control from the game development studios. A game developer who gives up ownership of their IP to a Publisher in exchange for funding, or a game development studio owned by a parent company, is not independent. A game developer who seeks a distribution deal with a third party, and retains full rights to their own IP, is independent.
…that makes my head spin. If you don’t see anything wrong with that mission statement then you might as well stop reading any further. Mission statements should be simple and provide easy to remember guidance to help members make decisions when the path forward is not clear.
While I was a member of the SIG I tried to help with its reinvention. First, I suggested a slogan when it was suggested that what the SIG really needed to prosper was a slogan. I thought it a little silly to be discussing slogans when the group didn’t even have a mission statement yet, but hey when in Rome. So I suggested a slogan that I thought was rather catchy. I recommended that we advocate for III games as a parallel slogan to AAA games… III stands for (I)nnovative, (I)nspiring, and (I)ndie! I was told, nope, Indie games don’t have to be either innovative or inspiring… so that slogan would not work. What!? No they don’t have to be either but the developers should certainly strive for these as goals for the community as a whole. Eventually the idea of having a slogan sort of just faded away.
Next I figured perhaps I could help with the newly proposed mission statement. They were still debating on what language to recommend for adoption so this was a great opportunity for me to help. I recommended a mission statement that was simple, inclusive, and made no attempt to define Indies. I believe that being Indie is more a matter of personal decision. There are far too many reasons that people choose to become independent and that any definition will fail to capture them all. My mission statement said simply…
The IGDA Indie Special Interest Group (SIG) exists to help independent game developers to make and distribute better games. The SIG seeks to include all game developers and organizations who identify themselves as Indie.
I was told emphatically NO… that AAA developers were trying to control the SIG and this mission statement would let them infiltrate. Seriously?! Why would AAA companies have any interest in this small group? A group that is plummeting in size even as we speak? The SIG couldn’t even muster up 20 votes for their most recent election so the leadership dropped the required quorum to 10! Talk about a small club. The AAA companies do not care what this SIG does. And even if the SIG were to become powerful someday, I believe that inclusion of everyone who sees themselves as an independent developer to be important. Buried in the minds of many AAA employees are independent game developers screaming to go it on their own… or so I believe anyway.
My last act was to try and provide an opportunity for the members to see a traditional governing structure for an Association and a constitution that was not permeated with a specific agenda. So, I attempted to rewrite their proposed constitution and offered it as an alternative to their 9 page assemblage that they described as a “confederate” governance document. My draft was a much simpler 1.5 page document and included a traditional association leadership board. I believe that the constitution should be silent on the SIGs position on issues and leave the business of the SIG up to the leaders. Positions and activities undertaken by the SIG will change as the state of the industry changes, the constitution should weather those changes without the need for constant tweaking. The constitution should establish rules for governance, motivation for the existence of the organization, and the rights of the members and little else. I was told “NO and HELL NO” and that I was naive to propose such a structure even though such structures have worked well in thousands of organizations and for hundreds if not thousands of years. Well that was enough for me. I also came to realize that the only people left in the SIG by that time were the 10 or so advocates for the leaders’ position. I was wasting my time and so I left silently and came back home here to write this blog.
Anyway, enough ranting. I was originally inspired to develop IndieGameTools.com by the needs of the Indie SIG and I expected my efforts to be formally adopted as one of the SIGs initiatives. I was encouraged by many in this objective, but, in the back of my mind I was hesitant. I was hesitant to declare that the website was associated with the SIG, or the IGDA. In part I was hesitant because I did not want to claim an association that hadn’t been formally granted. I saw that as a potential legal problem. And another part of me saw signs that the SIG was not going in a positive direction and I thought I might harm my effort and harm Indies in the long run by sticking to the SIG. That premonition seems to me to be a reality now. The ten or so remaining active members are voting on their new mission statement and constitution this week, I wish them luck. I am going forward as an independent advocate for independent game developers, lol… that has a ring to it… no?
The Dangers of Strapping Yourself to an Engine
Posted by Robc in Game Design, IndieGameTools.com on October 8th, 2009
Jet Powered VW
Pretty cool huh? Well go here if you want to see more pictures of Ron Patrick’s Street Legal Jet Powered Beetle or you can always check it out as well as other cool pictures at What were they Thinking, Doing, Smoking! Gimme a bungie cord and I’ll strap myself to that baby and oooh what a ride!! But that’s not what this article is about.
The big news in the Indie Game Development world this month is the release of Garage Games’ Torque 3D engine. GG touts the new engine as follows…
If you’ve already made the jump, you know that this is a whole new breed of Torque. The tools are ground breaking for development productivity. The content pipeline gets your art into Torque at light speed and live asset updating lets you iterate on your content in tools of your choice and watch them update in Torque instantly.
You can read more about it at their blog here. But that’s not what this article is all about either, I am here to discuss the proverbial… rest of the story. I received an email a couple weeks ago from GG at the IndieGameTools.com site that said “We will soon discontinue Torque Game Engine (TGE) and Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA).” …and later on their blog was the small public announcement ”as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”
If you hadn’t already heard this news then I’ll pause for a moment and let that ’smaller’ announcement sink in. If you have already strapped yourself to either the TGEA or TGE engine then I am guessing that the blood is starting to boil in your veins… the community forums have a discussion about it here if you need to release some steam or get more info. I can’t begin to characterize the frustration that the GG announcement has generated and I’ll not waste your time trying.
I am working on a game, Adellion, with a small team of developers and we have been tied to TGEA for some time now. Oh it was a lively discussion at our most recent developer meeting to be sure. You see there are still problems with TGEA that will be difficult for a small team to resolve without the help and backing of the original developer, I’d say that this is true of every engine out there. When the engine creator decides to abandon a project then they are in effect abandoning every developer who has made the decision to use that engine. And I haven’t even begun to address the licensing issues, which are very serious if you have hopes of commercializing your game. GG hopes of course that their decision will inspire developers to pay a little more for the new and improved product. But burn me once and I will be less quick to trust you a second time.
There are some who believe, or who hope, that GG will release TGEA as open source. Personally I don’t think that will happen until after Torque 3D is itself obsolete, its simply not a good marketing move for GG when so much of Torque 3D is based on TGEA (estimates of 80%) AND they already have the attention of the low budget development teams… there isn’t anyone new to attract to their camp and too much potential hassle and cost to have to keep an eye on a parallel open source project. A smaller community of developers will almost certainly join together to support one another whether or not the old engine goes open source, so all is not lost, but the Indie developer’s job just got harder and that’s really too bad.
Ron Patricks Jet Powered VW
Ok well let’s not be naive here, </whining off>, engines do have to fall to the wayside eventually to make room for better products. And the Torque announcement really wasn’t a surprise. Insiders and even quasi-insiders have known for the better part of a year that Torque 3D was the only real focus for GG anymore and that it was only a matter of time before the older engines would be abandoned. I confess that I thought they would at least make a pretense of supporting the older engines for a year or two after the new release. Perhaps we should congratulate them on their honesty? Somehow that just doesn’t feel right… to me the ultimate lesson here is that if you have chosen a high powered engine, no matter what size team you have, get your game built fast while your engine is still supported and before the new technology outruns you. That is your takeaway for this blog article, and though I could say a lot more about it, I’m sure most every reader here has their own story to tell on the subject and I’ll not waste your time with mine. I’ll just repeat the lesson in caps so it sinks in… 
Do NOT let your engine technology outpace you!! …or you will be sorry. Nuff said.
So back to that Jet Powered Beetle… with a little bungie cord you too could set yourself up for the ride of your life! Choosing a high powered game engine for your project is much the same, your adrenaline will definitely be high when the engine first fires up and you start to move… but I suspect that you may develop doubts as you pick up speed. And when that bungie cord finally lets go, well, you may find that you have little desire left to go out and find another engine and a new bungie cord.
When 26 – 33 = 18,446,… gajillion, really!
Posted by Robc in Web Page Design on August 30th, 2009
In MySQL version 5+ be aware that…
Subtraction between integer values, where one is of type UNSIGNED, produces an unsigned result by default. If the result would otherwise have been negative, it becomes the maximum integer value. If the NO_UNSIGNED_SUBTRACTION SQL mode is enabled, the result is negative.
Need more info? Go here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-types.html. I lost several days of downtime on about 30 of my websites when I decided to upgrade to the latest version of mySQL. The quote above finally explained the problem. I can totally see why there could be a problem subtracting unsigned integers and storing the value in a signed field… the resultant integer might not fit. Nevertheless, there has got to be a better way to warn the programmer when he or she has stumbled on the problem. I was on my fourth page of going through google search results before a link finally directed me to the above statement. This was after hours of pouring over my code and scratching my head on why the simple substraction statement…
26 -33 = 18,446,744,073,709,600,000
gave me such an outrageous answer. Anyway, I am blogging this in the hope that google picks it up and the next person won’t have to search so far for their answer. Here was the offending code…
$query = mysql_query(”UPDATE $db_update SET NetVote = (ThumbsUp – ThumbsDown) WHERE id = “.id($vote));
Of course there is nothing wrong with the code… the problem was that ThumbsUp and ThumbsDown were designated as unsigned integers in MySQL and NetVote was of course allowed to be positive or negative. MySQL delivered the largest integer it could possibly create in response and of course my vote tally’s choked on it. What bothers me I guess is that I didn’t run into this problem in MySQL 4 but only on the upgrade to 5. I guess I should be grateful that I am saved from a diffcult to find bug later on down the road when my vote tallies start getting up into 9 or 10 digit range… lol.
Add a $1 billion agreement to my resume please
I have made hundreds of presentations in my life time in many venues, on tv, in front of both friendly and hostile audiences, but none perhaps as significant as I made last night. Over the course of the last year I have been the point person for the State of California in negotiation of an agreement between the State, The Army Corps of Engineers, and a local organization called the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency or SAFCA. This agreement authorizes expenditure of up to $978 million to build a new auxiliary spillway at Folsom Dam in Northern California plus annual increases for inflation. Construction is already underway.
Never in my lifetime did I expect to be a principle negotiator on an agreement valued at almost a billion dollars. It’s a little weird to realize now that I have become complacent with multi-million dollar agreements since I worked on my first over a decade ago. At that time I helped to bring Ducks Unlimited into the big league by partnering with CALTRANS (California Department of Transportation), and the Army Corps. I have been involved in negotiating, executing, and delivering on small and large projects ever since. This is a new chapter.
The Central Valley Flood Protection Board approved unanimously and signed the billion dollar agreement at its meeting last night right after my presentation. To be sure they took a pound of flesh out of me in doing so. That’s because the Corps forced our hand to make last minute changes to the agreement language and the Board did not feel they were given adequate time to review those changes. I pretty much knew before hand that I was going to receive a whipping for it… I just didn’t realize the ferocity. I was the messenger and an easy target standing alone at the podium. But no worries, I have a thick skin from many years of facing hostile audiences and I was able to take the punishment standing tall. I know that the true blame lies elsewhere in the system and we’ll leave it at that.
The Board passed the amendment unanimously. Despite their anger at the process, the Board knows full well that this project is critical to save lives and protect billions of dollars of property in Sacramento. And my work is far from done. Now we have to deliver on what we promised to do. For my part I have to secure and send almost $300 million in State money to the Feds so that the Army Corps can complete the design and construction work over the next 5 years. That might not be so easy with the State budget in such a bad way. I will be there every step of the way reviewing technical documents, monitoring schedules, and doing my best to secure State money while monitoring the overall expenditures on the project. I’m up to the challenge. My bosses here at the State have repeatedly asked me to test up into a higher level supervisory position… and I keep saying ‘been there, done that, no thanks.’ If the last thing that I do before I retire is deliver on this project then I will feel proud of one more extremely important accomplishment in a very productive lifetime. Its good to be working at the technical level again, very good.
-Robc
Taking the Kazoo to Kudzu
Posted by Robc in Wetland Restoration and Wetland Engineering on July 28th, 2009
Kudzu is no laughing matter. It is an invasive plant species that was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant.
It is a huge problem for the Southeast United States. Kudzu has naturalized into about 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometers (7,700–12,000 sq mi) of land in the United States and costs around $500 million annually in lost cropland and control costs.
Pampas Grass, is a tall grass native to southern South America that seeds prolifically, with each plant able to produce over 1 million seeds during its lifetime. My wife and I harbored a ten foot diameter bunch of Pampas grass on our property for well over 15 years before we removed it. It was a beautiful plant and we couldn’t bear the thought of killing such a wonder of nature. Our neighbors still have almost a dozen of the plants. I have seen first hand the desert landscape created by these plants in California marshlands.
In the early 1900s Ice Plant (C. edulis) was brought to California from South Africa to stabilize soil along railroad tracks and was later put to use by Caltrans for similar purposes. Thousands of acres were planted in California until the 1970s. It easily spreads by seed (hundreds per fruit) and from segmentation (any shoot segment can produce roots). Its succulent foliage, bright magenta or yellow flowers, and resistance to some harsh coastal climatic conditions (salt) have also made it a favoured garden plant. The Ice Plant was for several decades widely promoted as an ornamental plant, and it is still available at some nurseries. Ice Plant foliage can turn a vibrant red to yellow in color. This is another plant that I have personally observed taking over California salt marsh environments and providing nothing in return.
When I was a young engineer I can still recall specifying reed canary grass as a desireable species to plant in treatment wetlands to improve the wetlands performance at treating wastewater. Later I learned the devastating impact of this plant on wetlands in the Western United States and was ashamed of my own actions. Reed canary grass is an invasive species in wetlands, particularly in disturbed areas. When reed canarygrass invades a wetland, it suppresses native vegetation and reduces diversity. The grass propagates by seed and rhizome, and once established, is difficult to eradicate. Reed canary grass is still planted today as a hay crop or for forage and it is also used to provide fibers which find use in pulp and papermaking processes. I took the attached picture of the complete devastation of a wetland area by this species while surveying potential wetland restoration sites in Oregon.
So what is the point of all this? I just want to do my small part to educate visitors to be careful what plants you buy from your nursery and introduce into the landscape. Many have devastating consequences on the ecology of wetlands and other habitat areas. I am all for an exotic and interesting garden, just be careful about it. For additional information on invasive weeds that are a problem for wetlands you can check out the aspwe.org invasive weed page. You can also visit www.invasive.org which is an excellent source for information on invasive species, flora and fauna. Here is a direct link to their exotic weeds list. Here is a link to the Federal noxious weed list for more info. If you want to learn just why some plants have lesser value in the environment then others then contact me and lets talk.
Oh and Kazoo? It is just a funny sounding instrument that makes a razberry like sound… its exactly the sort of sound you should make when you hear of another cultivar or introduced species that escapes into the environment and causes harm. Or perhaps a darker noise is in order, you decide.
Please garden responsibly. Thanks.
-Robc