Yabba Dabba Doo

ON THE SECOND DAY of the Spring semester, I awoke in bed bleary-eyed and glanced at the clock. Good Lord! I had a class to teach in five minutes!

I ran to the phone to try to find someone at the college to tell the class that I would be a tad late. As it turns out, the School secretary was not at her phone. I then tried “IVC information,” but, as usual, that only gave me a recording. I tried some of the extensions mentioned on the recording, but that only yielded more recordings!

Boy was I steamed. How hard is it to hire actual human beings to answer the gosh darn phones?

I guess we’re a pretty peevish bunch at Dissent. Even our friends are peevish.


bout a week ago, I ran into a couple of student friends at Rutabegorz in Tustin, an old-school vegetarian restaurant. One of them, Jonathan, said hello, while the other, Mr. E. Debs—an occasional contributor to Dissent—grunted diffidently, as is his custom.

“What’s up?”, I said.

That prompted a torrent of abject peevitude from Jonathan. He explained that, several weeks ago, he had tried to register for classes at IVC online, but he was immediately stymied because, somehow, his enrollery was premature.

He had not waited, it seems, for his “enrollment window."


“What’s that?” I asked. Well, nobody at IVC had actually told Jonathan what his enrollment window was. He had one, though.

Jonathan then explained that, when he proceeded to try to enroll anyway, he received an error message according to which, owing to his prematurity, he was preventing other students from enrolling! Imagine that!

None of this meant anything to me. “So what’s your beef?” I asked. Jonathan looked at me like I must be kidding or something. He then patiently explained:

"Any well-designed system will have excess capacity built in to handle things like this—busy periods, network attacks, and so on!”

But of course! Any idiot knows that!

Well, that was about it. Jonathan said goodbye, Mr. Debs grunted, and off the two went.

A few days later, Jonathan sent me a message to which he attached two emails regarding the above-mentioned incident. The first, dated November 22, was addressed to Glenn Roquemore, President of IVC:

Dear Dr. Roquemore:

It has come to my attention, through a message placed on the Web by your programmers, that your system is unable to handle the extra load placed on it by students attempting to enroll prior to their enrollment window. I had no idea how determined my fellow students were to register, or that two or three of them might attempt to register prematurely at the same time! I also had no idea how starved for funds you truly were! In order to see any appreciable delays from an extra three users per second, you must be running your college enrollment software on a ten-year-old Pentium laptop with 48 megabytes of memory.

I am prepared to help. If asked, I will donate to the college my dual processor Pentium Pro server, circa 1998, with four 9Gb disk drives and 512 megabytes of memory. With Linux, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database engine, you ought to be able to get 100 users/second out of that machine, easily enough to accommodate over-eager enrollers. If, by some astronomical windfall, you get hold of an off-the-shelf computer from Sam's Club—well, your limiting factor becomes your network capacity.

In the interim, you have my profound sympathies, as does the engineer who has to prevent that poor Pentium laptop from melting down.

Very truly yours, Jonathan

Weeks passed, but Jonathan received no response from the Roquester. Jonathan commenced seething in peevitude.

He then turned to plan B. On December 9, he emailed one Jim Phaneuf, the district’s “Associate Director of Information Systems & Services”:

Dear Mr. Phaneuf:

I am a registered student at IVC. When I attempted to register prior to my registration window, I got an error message stating the following:

You are being denied access to the registration system for the following reasons: You may only use registration during your assigned appointment periods. By trying early you are preventing others from gaining access to the system. Please do not try again until Tuesday, November 29, 2005 after 02:00 PM

Is it literally true that I was inadvertently preventing others from gaining access to the system? Don't you have sufficient system and network capacity to handle requests from people accessing the registration system by mistake, without undue stress?

My brother works on online multiple listing service solutions for the real estate industry. His systems can handle tens of thousands of Web transactions per second, each involving multiple page builds and database calls. The data centers are modest—four or five dual processor machines facing the Web, four database servers, and four application servers. The connectivity in each facility is also modest—two peered T1 lines.

I can't believe that SOCCCD can't field that kind of architecture for its students! If you have something reasonable like this in place, why do you say that people who attempt to register early are preventing other people from using the system?

Sincerely, Jonathan

Once again, he received no response whatsoever.

Yesterday, I ran into Jonathan yet again. He was still steamed about the enrollment snafu. Said he:

“My guess is that either they were being stupid and moralizing for the hell of it, or that students were trying to game the system by trying to ‘snipe’ the first available classes in the enrollment window. If the latter, there are obvious technical steps to solve the problem, e.g., decoupling the authentication phase from the subnet used to run the rest of the enrollment system.”

I guess so. Absolutely!

The "toxic plume"

"The long-term effects of trichloroethylene [TCE, a solvent] on human beings is unknown. In animal studies, chronic trichloroethylene exposure has produced liver cancer in mice, but not in rats. Studies on its effects on reproduction in animals have been similarly inconsistent, and so no conclusive statements about its ability to cause birth defects in humans can be made."

--Wikipedia on "TCE"

or some reason, we never seem to hear much about the toxic plume beneath us here in Irvine, caused by 40 years of solvent dumping at the former El Toro Marine Base.

When I say "we," I mean denizens of Irvine Valley College in particular. (See plume map below.)

If you visit the Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) website (IRWD contamination history), you'll find this helpful "History of El Toro Contamination":

* 1985: [TCE] Contamination discovered
* 1989: Installed Well ET-1 [across the street from IVC] to slow plume movement. However, one well is not enough to remove the plume completely
* 1990: Dept. of Navy accepted its responsibility and Superfund site created
* 1994-2001: Negotiations with the Navy and the Dept. of Justice
* 2001: Settlement agreement reached: Navy agreed to pay for removal of the volatile organic compound contamination
* In October 2003, proposed project modifications were made, including changing well locations, and adding a shallow groundwater unit (SGU) volatile organic treatment facility near the former MCAS El Toro
* In February 2004, well site acquisition in Woodbridge was unsuccessful
* IRWD reached agreement with The Irvine Company (TIC) to take over existing TIC agricultural wells and pipelines, some of which can be incorporated into the Irvine Desalter Project. Therefore, construction costs were lowered, resulting in a more cost effective project



ecently, the IRWD has attempted to build a much-needed second toxic cleanup pump, but that got NIMBYd into oblivion. For the story, go to "Woodbidge nix sends well back to drawing board"

Some excerpts from that Irvine World News article:

The Irvine Ranch Water District is back to re-evaluating options in the project to clean up the plume of toxins in the groundwater under Irvine.

The Woodbridge Village Association board voted Feb. 4 to not allow the water district to drill a cleanup well near the community's North Lake Lagoon and to work with IRWD to find another solution in dealing with the "toxic plume."

The board had initially agreed to allow the water district to use the Woodbridge Lake well to pump trichloroethylene (TCE)-contaminated water from the plume in groundwater that extends from the old El Toro air base. The well would have been part of the larger project, dubbed the Irvine Desalter Project, which would clean up toxins from the air base that seeped into the groundwater over a period of about 40 years. One such cleanup well has been in operation at Irvine Center Drive and Jeffrey Road since 1989, but the water district says that one well is not enough.

Other wells will pump uncontaminated water upstream from the plume to help slow the progress of the plume's expansion and slow movement toward areas in the underground water that provide drinking water.

The plume also is headed toward areas in the aquifer that might be used in the future to supply Irvine with drinking water. And, the contaminated part of the water basin is a potential source of drinking water for the future.

...Some residents questioned why the project was named "Irvine Desalter Project," when it's a toxic plume clean-up.

...Without the cleanup well, the lake will continue to be filled with water pumped from the toxic plume by an existing well owned by the Woodbridge Village Association, as it has been since the lake was created. About two years ago, the association stopped using the well water to fill the swimming lagoon beside the lake, which is now filled with drinking-quality water. No TCE has been detected in the lake, according to association official Bob Figeira, though it has been detected in the existing well.

...At [a] meeting, environmental medicine specialist Mary McDaniel said that measures would be taken to ensure the safety for the community during the drilling of the proposed toxic plume well.

She said a study indicated that the project did not present a health risk during the drilling of the well or during the clean-up operation, which is estimated to last about 40 years.... (Feb. 12, 2004)


P.S.:

I ran across an interview of Ray Watson, former President of the Irvine Company (Watson). He designed the Woodbridge Village Association, which opened in 1976. In the interview (evidently in 2001), he explains why North Lake is warmer than South Lake:

The main idea was to have a recreational community connected by paths. We also came up with the idea of lakes. I don’t know if you ever heard the story, but the water that goes into the North Lake Lagoon is warmer than the water that goes into the South Lake Lagoon. This happened by accident in the sense that when we were drilling for water for the North Lake, we hit a natural hot water spring.

Yeah, but that's not all they hit.


Note: NIMBY = "not in my back yard"
It would seem that opposition to the El Toro Airport was largely fueled by NIMBYism, although other motives existed.
Trustee Fuentes was among the leaders of the opposition movement. Oddly, given their differing politics, so was Irvine's Larry Agran.