Yes, it's 10 o'clock, and yes, I DID just get out of my meeting. Long meetings mean lots more steaming hunks to shovel, so today is going to be mercifully light for posting of steaming Possumblog hunks. But, there is some housekeeping to do before I waddle off and do something ostensibly productive.

First, many thanks to Steven den Beste for the kind link to the story a few days back about the WTC seminar I attended and commented on. Steven has some excellent comments of his own, and I urge you to take a look at them, ignoring that I am billed as a structural engineer. I sent Steven a note of thanks and a clarification that I am an architect. In school, we had to take more or less the same materials and forces classes that the engineers had to take, and I learned how to do all the sizing and connections for steel, timber, concrete, Play Doh, etc.--EXCEPT if I were asked to do it now, it would take me about three years to do a two-story building. In general, architectural training in the mechanics of building, such as structures, plumbing, heating and cooling, and electrical work is geared toward broad general knowledge. You learn about how big to make columns or how many #12 conductors will fit in a 1 inch diameter section of EMT, but the most important thing you learn after you get out of school is the telephone number of a good engineer who specializes in such stuff.

Second, FRED FIRST IS MOVING! No, not away from the bucolic environs of Floyd County, Virginia, but to a new URL and a spiffy new Moveable Type type blog. So, go visit him at http://fragments.blogon.com/fragments/ and see all his purty pitchers o' flaars 'n' bugs 'n' such like.

Now, I gotta get to work and do real impotent, I mean IMPORTANT stuff.
posted by Terry at 10:40:00 AM