From the very moment I hurt myself, I kept thinking that it was no big deal and I’d be over it in no time. That was certainly the case when I first sat up under that tree, got to my feet and thought “I’ll just walk it off” — even though I was turning green and realizing that my right arm wasn’t working right. While Wendy was driving me to the urgent-care center, with every bump and jolt in the road a miniature adventure in pain, I kept thinking that all I needed was to have someone pop the shoulder back together (I thought I had dislocated it), give me some pain medication, and I’d be good as new in a couple of days.

Some realization began to set in even before we saw the orthopedist. It was clear from how wrong my right shoulder looked, the new bulge and the way my right arm hung too low, that I was going to need surgery to set it right. And yet I kept thinking I could get back to the office in just a couple of days. It’s just a little outpatient procedure, right?

Yeah. Right.

I’ve heard time and again that surgery is no stroll in the clover. It takes time to recover, even from relatively minor surgery like mine; and yet for some reason I thought I’d be back at work in just a couple of days. What really brought reality home to roost was the day after the surgery, when the anesthetic all finally wore off and I realized that I was back to square one. Except for the codeine, which didn’t do much more than take the edge off the pain, I hurt every bit as much as I had right after the injury.

In the four days between my fall and my operation, I had begun to feel better. Getting in or out of bed didn’t hurt as much. Sleep was easier. I was regaining a little strength in my right arm. The shoulder was still rather painful, but I expected the operation to improve its condition considerably. Despite all I had been told about surgery, I expected it to be a leap forward. Instead it seemed like a leap backwards, despite the fact that the repairs did put me on a road to recovery. When all the pains of the original injury returned, I began to realize that the road back was longer than I thought it was going to be. Sometimes you’ve got to whop that ol’ mule upside the head with a two-by-four just to get his attention.

So I live and I learn. If at first I underestimated how long it was going to take to recover, I’m now more content to get just a little better every day, not expecting to improve by leaps and bounds. Recovery may take a bit longer than I had expected, but at least I’m going to recover; the doctor says I can expect to find myself near 100% in about six months. And when I’m tempted to complain over having to spend a couple of weeks away from work, I remind myself that if I had landed on my neck instead of my shoulder, I could be spending the rest of my days in a wheelchair. Or the rest of eternity in a pine box.

I’m fortunate in many ways. I have good insurance, an employer who’s willing to wait for me heal, and an understanding and extremely supportive family, both at home and away. Best of all, I have a loving wife who’s giving me the best care possible — so I can forgive her occasional Tarzan joke. I just have to be patient and soon I should be back at work… where I’ll have to listen to all my co-workers’ Tarzan jokes.

It’ll be music to my ears.

I had just finished my morning classes, and I was in the van, headed to Wendy’s trailer for the afternoon. I had WEGL on the radio. 91.1, “Auburn’s Best FM”, playing progressive and alternative rock. I was on the Shug Jordan Highway, about a mile past College Street, and headed toward Wire Road, when something unusual happened.

The DJ broke into the music with an announcement. I turned the radio up, because I knew something major was going on. The policy at WEGL – where I worked a Friday night shift – was that you never ever interrupt the music. Even when the word came down the wire that President Reagan had been shot, the DJ allowed the song to finish before reading the announcement.

The station had just installed a live feed from CNN radio news. As he broke into the song, the DJ said “We’re going straight to CNN. Something has happened with the Shuttle.” Then he flipped a switch, and the CNN announcer came on, in mid-sentence.

At first it wasn’t clear what the announcer was trying to describe. It wasn’t even clear what he had seen. He obviously didn’t want to draw premature conclusions – I guess that’s something that reporters worry about. But in being cautious, that reporter was also rather vague. All I could tell from his report was that something was very wrong and that the shuttle was off course. I began to get an uneasy feeling in my stomach.

When I got to Wendy’s trailer, I turned on CNN, although by then the news was on every channel. When I saw the video for myself, my heart sank. It gives me a chill just to think about the first time I saw the replay of the last moments of Challenger’s flight. That queasy feeling in my stomach turned into deep sickness. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

As my knees went weak, and I sat down in front of the TV, I realized another reason that CNN radio reporter had been so vague. He didn’t want to believe what he’d seen. Challenger had disappeared into a giant fireball. The NASA Public Affairs spokesman had announced a “major malfunction”. The implications were just too awful to contemplate, much less to speak out loud.

Even twenty years later, the sights and sounds are still burned into my mind. That goat’s-head hanging against the blue Florida sky, the trails left by the solid rocket boosters rising like devilish horns above the massive fireball. I just close my eyes and I can see it. And I still cringe when I hear the shuttle commander say “Roger, go at throttle-up.”

I don’t remember specifically what I did the next few days. I suppose I continued eating, sleeping, and going to class. What I do remember is that I was consumed by the need to see and read everything I could about the accident. I watched the TV all that afternoon, and late into the night. I went out and bought newspaper after newspaper (I probably still have some of the front pages in a box somewhere). I consumed every theory and speculation in my attempt to understand that had happened.

We later learned that Challenger hadn’t exploded at all – not in the technical sense of being torn apart by internal forces. A faulty O-ring in one booster had allowed a plume of hot gas to cut through both the strut that attached the booster to the shuttle’s external tank, and the tank itself. With its structure significantly weakened, Challenger was torn apart by tremendous aerodynamic forces.

So much has happened since then. NASA got back on its feet, got the shuttle back in the air, and for seventeen years everything looked good. Then three years ago, the whole nightmare repeated itself. As an employee of a NASA contractor, I got a much closer view of the process: implementing our contingency plans, investigating, making changes, and returning to flight. From a personal perspective, though, it hasn’t changed. The shock, the grief, the coping… it was all painfully familiar.

As we wind down the Shuttle program, debate rages both within and without NASA over its safety. One former astronaut has even gone so far as to call the Shuttle a “deathtrap”. That’s a huge exaggeration that ignores the fact that the Shuttle has flown over a hundred crews and brought them safely home. I believe we can fly the Shuttle to its scheduled retirement without another loss, but somewhere down the road – either in this program or in the new Constellation program – another tragedy is inevitable. Spaceflight is just too dangerous. It could happen this year, or it could take a hundred years, but we will eventually lose another craft and crew. I fervently hope that day is many decades away, because it’s not something I ever want to experience again.

Your turn: do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you got the news about Challenger? If so, leave me a short remark in the comments section (or in your own blog – but don’t forget to trackback).

When I hired on with RSOC, my job was in the private sector, working with Rockwell Software in Milwaukee to develop a new generation of programmable controllers for use in factory automation. Our group was called the Rockwell Advanced Technology lab or, RATlab. Great name, huh? When USA was formed, we had to stop all work outside the new contract, and so I found myself looking for something to do. That’s about the time Dr. Matt Barry returned to the company from his service in Washington and started the Advanced Technology Department (ATD) where I still work.

In the ten years I’ve been with USA, I’ve worked a wide variety of challenging projects. I’ve written articles for NASA Tech Briefs and other technical publications. I’ve shared credit on several patents. I’ve won both USA awards and NASA awards for technical innovation. But the most rewarding part of my experience with USA is that I’ve written software and designed systems that are still in use today. Why does that make a difference? Because many people in the software industry work very hard for years on software that never gets used, or that gets used very little before getting put on the shelf. It happens to good and bad programmers alike; it’s just the nature of the business.

One of my first projects, a Java implementation of a NASA telemetry protocol is still in use at Johnson Space Center. The most significant project I worked, consuming five years of my tenure at USA, and producing more than its share of sleepless nights, is now in use at JSC training flight controllers in the Shuttle program. I was the software architect of that project, and although it will be retired in four years when we wind down the Shuttle program, it will have been used to train dozens if not hundreds of flght controllers. I get enormous satisfaction from having made even a small contribution to the Shuttle program. I’m now working on code that may fly on the International Space Station, and I expect to get involved in some way on the new Constellation program.

Everybody else from the early days has left ATD and moved on to bigger and better things. I sometimes wonder whether I should be looking for something else to do, wondering whether I’ve become stagnant in my job. On the other hand, the job continues to produce opportunities to learn, it still lets me exercise my creativity, it still brings me together with the best and brightest people in our company, and it continues to produce new challenges, both technical and personal. I don’t guess you can ask for much more than that in a job.

I’m guessing I’ll still be at USA this time next year, and probably the year after. Beyond that… who knows? But I’ll let you know. Stay tuned.

This is another example of how little we have learned since 9/11, or of how little we have acted on what we learned. One of the heartbreaking sights during that tragedy was of people driving hospital to hospital trying to locate someone who had been in one of the two fallen towers. In the nearly four years since then, why has no one within FEMA seen the need to provide some means of uniting friends, neighbors, and families strewn asunder by the chaos of disaster?

Over lunch, I vented my spleen about how inexcusably lax the federal government’s response has been to the aftermath of the hurricane. But that post was about traditional response: the need to supply food and water, to evacuate the homeless, to keep order. What I’m talking about tonight is the need for creative thinking about ways to use modern technology to solve a problem that’s a major source of stress, tension, and anxiety for the people affected by a disaster like Katrina: simply not knowing where your loved ones are and how they’re doing.

But technology is not the problem; the technology is fairly easy. The problem is leadership. That’s why we have umpteen “where are you” web sites instead of just one: because FEMA is not leading, but following. Visit the FEMA web site and you’ll find a link leading you to the dozen or so sites that are trying to put people back together with family and friends. Too many choices are no choice at all.

A lot of people, myself included, like to complain about how badly messed up things can become when the government gets involved. This, though, is one of those situations where the government needs to provide leadership. FEMA should choose just one of the many sites and link to it, or provide a site of its own, perhaps http://findme.fema.gov. And FEMA should encourage every news site and weblog around the country to link to the one central site.

Leadership is about getting out in front and showing the way. What we’re getting from FEMA is not leadership. We deserve better, but what are the chances that we’ll get better from FEMA in the next major disaster? No, I’m not counting on it either.

Don’t feed me that line about nobody foreseeing the levee breach in New Orleans. I have two problems with that suggestion. First: experts, including the US Army Corp of Engineers, have predicted for years that a major hurricane would overwhelm the levees that protect New Orleans. The FEMA director, Michael D Brown, was well aware of the risk a major hurricane posed to New Orleans, breached levees or not.

Second, it shouldn’t matter whether anybody specifically predicted that the levees would fail. Our nation’s homeland defense should be prepared to respond swiftly to a major disaster anywhere, and with little or no warning. Do you think we will have days of warning before a magnitude 9 earthquake strikes a major city in California? Do you think we will have any warning at all should terrorist detonate a dirty bomb or a nuclear bomb in Chicago, New York, or Washington DC?

Joe Becker of the American Red Crass said that – under the circumstances – the govenment response has been “Nothing short of heroic.” In my business, heroism is the hallmark of poor planning and lack of preparation. It means that a job that should have gone smoothly instead becomes a last-minute race by desperate engineers to meet a fast-approaching deadline. In the case of a natural disaster, “heroic effort” suggests that men and women in the field are giving their all to help desperate victims, but it also suggests a lack of leadership. Heroism speaks well of the rank and file, but it indicts management as poorly prepared.

Bush has stated that the response to Katrina is unacceptable. You’re darn right it it’s not acceptable, Mr. President. It’s a disgrace. The response should have been disciplined, efficient, orderly, and massive. We’ve had years since the wakeup call on 9/11. If the response to Katrina is any indication, we’ve done little in that time to prepare for another major terrorist strike. At least with the hurricane we had a few days warning and were able to evacuate many people in advance, saving many lives. A major terrorist attack, however, will strike a fully populated city with no warning, and if our response is as poor as the response to this hurricane, we’re in deep, deep trouble.

The weblog is Ernie the Attorney, written by Ernest Svenson of New Orleans. His essay, “Blogger, know thyself; Reader, find something better to do” delves into two questions: the first asks why he writes many of the things he does, especially those things of a personal nature. The second question asks why he is unable to answer the first question. Ernest’s conclusion was that there are some things – things rooted deeply in the subconscious – that we not only are unaware of, but which we are also incapable of discovering for ourselves.

Bear with me for a moment in the supposition that the personal essays of E. B. White are similar in kind, if not in quality, to the personal writings on weblogs like that of Ernest Svenson. (Not that Mr. Svenson’s weblog isn’t quality writing, but most our writing doesn’t even begin to approach the quality of White’s.) The similarity of White’s personal essays to the personal weblogs now prevalent on the Web is a topic I’d like to explore here some day. For now, though, I don’t think it takes too much of a leap of faith if I ask you to consider them to be roughly equivalent, these two forms of personal writing, published for all the world to read.

What, then, motivates people to write and publish introspective essays or blog posts about themselves? Is it possible that these people all share motives as simple as the one E. B. White ascribed to the essayist? Or, on the other hand, is it possible that the motives lie so deeply buried in the subconscious that, like Ernie the Attorney, we’re unable to find them for ourselves? Perhaps White was incorrect in explaining why he wrote about himself. Ernest Svenson was speaking only for himself, but is it possible that White, too, didn’t truly know why he felt the need to write his personal essays?

One scholar questions White’s explanation about the “childish” delusions of the essayist. Charles Gould, Jr., writing in Book Source Magazine, notes that everything that White wrote about in his essays truly was of general interest. Gould suggests that White’s statement should be modified slightly, to read “The great essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the [true] belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.”

In the end, Gould accepts White’s original, unmodified statement as true. But suppose, just for the sake of discussion, that we do not. Suppose we choose to believe that White, like Svenson, isn’t as sure as he claims to be about why he writes. What, then, do we make of his statement about his “childish beliefs”? I have a theory.

Ernest Svenson writes that he gets a lot of questions about why he speaks of himself as freely as he does. People ask him how he can be so open – and isn’t he afraid of the consequences? White probably got similar questions about his essays, some of which were almost intimately personal. So here we have White, a modest man by all accounts, who is about to publish a book of personal essays, and he feels some need to explain his writings – an explanation he is not sure of himself. How, then, does he explain himself? He makes something up. An explanation that makes sense, at least on the surface, is modestly self-effacing, is delivered with White’s typical sense of humor, and is intended not so much to answer questions as to deflect them. To give it emphasis, he delivers this made-up explanation as the very first sentence of the book.

This theory makes perfect sense, if you believe that White himself didn’t have a good explanation for why he wrote about himself. The trouble is, I don’t believe it. It’s an interesting exercise, but I just can’t believe that E. B. White, an honest, insightful man with a gift for simple, clear communication, could have such trouble understanding his own motives. On the other hand, I don’t entirely believe the explanation he gives in his foreword. I believe White understood why he wrote, but his statement about “childish beliefs” sounds more like deflection than explanation. I doubt that White truly believed his motivations were rooted in childishness.

What about the rest of us, though? Are we more likely to be like E. B. White, or like Ernest Svenson? I obviously speak only for myself, but I know why I choose to write about myself and publish on my web site. For one thing, it’s a way to keep in touch with my family, all of whom live in other states, to keep them up to date with the daily trivia of life. For another, it’s a way to create something that will outlive me. The Internet is ideal for both these reasons: it has global reach and a very long memory – it spans both space and time.

I know that one day I’ll be gone from this earth, and I’d like to leave something of myself behind. Something to tell my story. Something multidimensional, with family photos, accounts of my daily doings, and the occasional introspective essay like this one. One day in the distant future, if one of my descendents should become curious about that peculiar ape hanging a few generations back up the family tree, all that person need do is plug jimthompson.org into the Wayback Machine at archive.org, and a thousand slices of my life will spill forth.

The desire to tell our story to future generations must be a common one. My grandfather wrote his story, which he modestly called his “Memoirs,” although it was actually an autobiography. My father has said he wants to do the same, and I dearly hope he does. I have the same desire; for me, the idea of passing on without recording my story in some form or fashion – even a jumbled web site – is just unthinkable. I think something of this sentiment must have motivated E. B. White too. Consider the first sentence from his essay “Death of a Pig”:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.

I , too, feel driven to account for my time. It’s one of the reasons why I put pieces of my life into this web site. It is a far less eloquent accounting than White’s, but it serves its purpose. I hope to be more diligent in the future in keeping the site up to date. Come to think of it, I’ll have to be more diligent; I don’t have any pig to do my accounting.