Words of anger

[plonq]

There was an angry torrent of angst streaming from our project manager in this morning's scrum. Fortunately they were not directed at me - in fact, he singled out me and my counterpart at the head office as being two of the lone bright spots in the whole project to date. That's good, given how rough our start with them was. Let's just say that it was a bad enough start that both of us were anticipating being fired or demoted over it. Our PM was very angry with our IT department who browbeat him into switch to a different reporting environment after he had already chosen one that was perfect for his project, and then started hedging over whether this new tool would be able to deal with the terabytes of data anticipated to flow into this report system. Oy. It's a bit late in the game to suddenly start wondering if the new tool you foisted on somebody is going to work. I don't blame him for being angry.

These are not happy days in the company.

Right now, I am waiting for one of our developers to unwind 700 lines of nested loops and PLSQL routines into something resembling plain SQL that I can import into our design application. He has promised to deliver it by end of day tomorrow, but in the meantime I am sitting here with nothing to do and a very short deadline. I managed to find all but two of the data elements that I need, but figuring out how to unwind it in plain SQL may be tricky. I understand the scripting interface in this application has some similarities to VB, so I might be able to have something mostly in place by the end of tomorrow without too much assistance.

It took a bit of deduction on my part, but I finally figured out how the data is being stored. It is stored hierarchically, with a repeating set of dependent vertical layers. What I need to do is find a way to unwind it into horizontal layers. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense to read, but it makes about as much sense to me at the moment. We'll see what my brain can do with it after a good night's sleep.

One of the things that I noticed when I started visiting the midwest was all the water towers. If we have them up here, I have never noticed them.

I did not know that they served a purpose the first few times I went down to visit. They always had the name of the town on them, so I assumed they were just some kind of standard way of identifying the town to visitors. Then when I learned that they were water towers, I assumed they were post-war relics or the like that the towns kept around because it was handy to remind the residents of where they lived.

Can somebody who lives in a town with a water tower tell me if they are still in use, or are they relics of a time before the invention of pump houses?

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

They are used all the time. They serve to even out demand variations. The pumps that fill them can be sized for average rate of use, not peak rate.

They also allow water pressure to be maintained in the event of a power outage.

I wonder if it may be too cold in midwinter where you are for water towers to work well.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

>I wonder if it may be too cold in midwinter where you are for water towers to work well.

I took this shot in Fargo, where it gets almost as cold as it does here, so they must have some way to deal with the cold.

I am pretty sure that we do not have them in these parts, in part because I don't recall seeing them, and in part because when we had a power outage at our nearest pumping station a year or two back, our water pressure dropped to nigh zero.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

A difference may be that Winnipeg (you're in Winnipeg, right?) gets its water from an aqueduct/reservoir system, while many US midwest cities/towns get water from wells. The peak flow rate from wells may be more constrained.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

They are still used in water supply systems all over the world. My town doesn't have them, because we have water tanks at the top of the hills. You only build towers if mother nature didn't provide you with enough hills. They serve as pressure heads and reserve capacity for the water supply system.
Say your town uses a million gallons per day of water. But your water supply, be it wells, desalination plant, or the nearby river or lake, can produce only 1.3 million gallons per day at max capacity. But, most of your city water use happens between 6-8am, and 6-8 pm each day. The water tanks provide reserve storage so you don't have to increase your water production capacity to satisfy those peak demand times.

They also regulate pressure using that most reliable of pumps, gravity.

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

We have a water tower here in North battleford and it's still used :)

[kfops.livejournal.com]

I think around my old stomping grounds Morden and Killarney also use water towers. My home town was always well-based, though they've stepped in up and the whole system now has a reverse-osmosis filtration plant.