cetan's weblog a man, no plan, a blog, golbanalponnama.

South Side

My trip to the far south-west side of Chicago yesterday was an interesting one.

For those of you interested in maps, here's a google-map link to the entrance of the facility: http://lnk.nu/maps.google.com/8z8. This is a BNSF rail yard inside which my company has a couple tracks and a large repair building.

It was about 67.5 miles one-way from home to this location, and, while at first I was told I had to be there at 7:00am, I later negotiated that to between 8 and 9am. I left the house at 5:45am and arrive almost right at 8am. The drive was uneventful for the most part; usual Chicagoland traffic (i.e. someone's going to try and kill you at some point). My route was 31 to 62 to 59 to I-90 to I-290 to I-294 to I-55 to the Pulaski exit. I-55 was the biggest traffic problem, but I was well into the commuting bubble by then.

I spent the morning session at the company training car (2 flatbed cars set up for training field workers on brake systems, hitches, container securement, and articulated connectors) and then spent time doing misc. things.

My latest project at work is to produce a safety video (to be distributed on DVD) using company employees on company equipment. It's a pretty big project and has allowed me to start learning a whole new skill set. As I'm much more of a still-photographer type of person, I've not paid much attention to video and video editing technology; this project will certainly be changing that. My role in this will be to edit and assemble the video segments, offer instructions to those filming on ways to create better video, and eventually create the full-fledged DVD set for distribution to our many repair facility locations. I'm going to be using video, stills, and probably additional audio segments for this project and will have to produce a web-suitable version as well. Lots of fun but lots of work.

So far the best software package I've seen for our needs has been Sony Vegas+DVD (though I still need to evaluate Adobe Premiere Elements). It seems to be insanely powerful and complex. The only downside is that the trial version doesn't let you see the DVD-creation portion of the software and thus I have no way of evaluating the quality of this part of the product. Boo to Sony for not at least seeing that part.

Anyway, I ended up not being able to leave the rail yard until 6:20, but that was something of a blessing. I was able to make it from the yard to Algonquin in an hour. An amazing feat, to be certain and traffic was fantastic. Sadly, that corner of 31 and 62 did me in and it took another 30 minutes to finish the remaining 10 miles.

An interesting and sometimes stressful day, but a break from the office was excellent, and learning more about how the guys in the field work is very valuable.