Monthly Archives: February 2008

It’s been 10 years now since I graduated from college. Scary. Where does the time go?
I don’t talk about what I do much on my blog, but here is a summary of what I have done for the last decade, work wise:
Worked at a company called Dalec Electronics. Real small place. I was a big fish in a very small sea. I started as a technician, then as a lab manager, then as sales person. I really really hate sales. I will never do it again. I learned a lot about test and measurement there. Load cells, pressure transducers, panel meters, thermocouples, RTD’s, and many other measurement devices. Turns out I would follow the path of test and measurement for most of my career to date.

Then, I worked at a place called Instrument Repair service for a little more than a year. They are out of business now. Word of advice, never base 95% of your business on one client. I repaired telephone linesmen equipment. Stuff like butt sets (telephones you can ‘butt’ into a line with), break down boxes, cable locators, and other mundane devices. I did learn two things: How to fix something without schematics, and why land line phone calls sound so bad. They sound bad because some of the junctions formed by creating a carbon bridge.

After that, I worked at MPC Products as an Environmental Test Engineer. That basically means I got to torture test aerospace equipment. I learned how to perform temperature, vibration, shock, salt fog, icing, vacuum, and many other tests. I tested the cooling pump for the F-22, I tested the engine cowl opener for the A380 and much more in my time there. Good people, crappy pay, too much stress and deadlines.

Now I work at Grayhill. This has been my most challenging job so far. I design automated testers for all sorts of rotary switches and joysticks. My first big project is something I named F.A.T.E. Fully Automated Tester for Encoders. In this case, optical encoders. It measures torque, pushbutton force and travel, duty cycle, phase angles, and many other parameters that separate a quality switch from crap. I have learned a lot of LabView and data acquisition and motion control. Pretty cool stuff if you are an electronics engineer, which is what I am.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the choice I made 13 years ago. To be honest, it was kind of spur of the moment. I really didn’t know what to do with my life. At the time, electronics was a very hot industry in the U.S. It somewhat is now, but so much is being shipped to China. I find it nice to work an American electronics manufacturer. I only really hated the end of one job and my year fixing dirty telephone equipment. One thing is for sure, it sure beats working retail or flipping burgers.

Well, it looks like most of us will get non refund refund checks. The money they will be sending will just be an advance from next years taxes, unless you have little or no income. So, for most Americans, the incentive check with be total loss for next year (after the elections, of course.) The government is depending on Cletus to open up his mail and call out “Hay, Maw, the gum’ment just sent me a chee’eck! Lets go and spend it down at Walmart!”.
The way I see it, you have two choices, save all of it or don’t cash the check. That way, you won’t be penalized next year and you may make some interest on it. If you actually follow financial planners’ advice and have your withholdings set such that you get little or no refund, you will OWE ALL OF THAT MONEY BACK NEXT YEAR. So, you can’t even give the money away to a good cause. It is not real money. Thanks for nothing.

In other thanks for nothing news, Bush wants a plan to stop foreclosures for 30 days. Wow, talk about bailing out the Titanic with a slotted spoon. 30 days won’t do jack shit in the big scheme of things. ARMS are going to be resetting for many months next year. Most people buy in April through August, so all those ARMS will reset then as well. Stopping foreclosures for 30 days in March is really going to be pointless. In any event, yeah, it sucks hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people will loose their homes in the next 18 months. They are the ones who took on houses they couldn’t afford. The bigger crisis is correcting itself, the housing unaffordability crisis. It hurts, but bubbles have to burst and the economy needs to find a new level. When it is all over, the people who can afford their homes will still have them, the price of housing price increases will reflect general inflation ( 1 to 3% a year instead of 10 to 30% a year), and maybe, just maybe, we will all start saving money again.

I would usually post this on my watch blog, but I thought it would get more views here.
I was talking to a co-worker during a training session, and I noticed he was wearing a Seiko 5 (Automatic Watch) which was well worn.  He told me it was 10 years old now, and still works great with no servicing.  His previous watch was a Seiko 5 which he wore for 20 YEARS with no service.  He just got sick of the styling and gave it away.  Think about that.  Something that costs less than $100 lasting 20 years with no maintenance.  We are not talking about something sitting on a shelf here.  This is something strapped to your arm, with endless shocks, exposure to temperature extremes, and water.  Yet, this humble, little watch lasted 20 years with no complaint, and as far as we know, it is still ticking away somewhere.  I wish they could make everything that well.

Comcast was here over an hour today, but, it looks like something did the trick (knock on wood).
For now, it is running at about 20 mb/sec 🙂

In other news, hooked up our VCR to watch an older tape.  Man, I forgot how really really crappy VHS looks compared to DVD.  Heck, it looks really bad compared to cable TV.  I see why DVD’s were the fastest new technology EVER adopted by U.S. consumers.  It works, looks good, and is cheap.  It’s not perfect, by any means, just try to watch really dark scenes and you will see where the problems are, but it is eons better than VHS.  Laserdisk was cool, but the form factor was too large and inconvenient.  Most people don’t want to flip a disk or wait several seconds for the head to come over to the other side.  Human nature, I guess.

For the last two night between 6:00 P.M. and who knows when our Comcast connection has basically been a joke.  Gave up last night and called comquack and they did the usual reset modem, computer crap.  Always does nothing, I do it to humor them.  After that little dance I asked him to ping the modem, he said ‘man, you have 25% packet loss’, no shit sherlock, I tried that as well before I called. 
The worst thing is that it only happens at night, you know, when we actually want to use the internet.  I hope they can find something obvious wrong.  I really hope it is not some shmuck in the area doing a huge upload or playing some connection intensive game wrecking it for everyone else at 6:00.
We shall see.  It is very aggravating right now.  Works great at 5:30 in the morning.