Name That Place

As I was reading through a magazine the other day, I came across this familiar sight. Do I have anybody who can name this place? Here's two hints:

1. The conference mentioned at the beginning of the article was written about in the Winter 2007 issue of a magazine.
2. If you've traveled somewhere with me in the last five years, your odds of recognizing this place increase.

For those of you who don't have the advantage of #2, you could always try googling it. Speaking of that, you know your company name or product has arrived when:

1. The name of your company becomes a verb (for example, "google" it).
2. An engineer/scientist names an electrical waveform after your product (the "Hershey Kiss" waveform).

Did I already talk about this once? It seems familiar, but I think I might have started forming the above thoughts a long time ago and then I never verbalized them in a post. I must be getting old if I can't remember something like that, and I'm too lazy to go back and check, so just deal with it if it's a repeat.

"Sage" Advice For Thanksgiving

This weekend I was reminded of a quote I saw at an exercise club a few years back. It said, "Remember, holidays are people events, not food events." While I did enjoy the people, I also totally ate way too much. I've never eaten so many times in my life and so much food when I didn't feel hungry. But it just tasted so good! I didn't take any pictures either, so you're stuck with using your imagination to see all the fun times I had.

While driving to Thanksgiving dinner, I had a great idea. I think people should start making Thanksgiving songs. That way we wouldn't have to start listening to Christmas music until AFTER Thanksgiving. How in the world am I supposed to get into the Thanksgiving mood when all I hear on the drive to dinner are Christmas songs? Does anybody have a Thanksgiving song to start off with next year?

A Must-Have For Everyone, Even If You Don't Have A Hitch

Why wouldn't you buy one of these? And while you're at it, take two, they're small. Which one is your favorite? I think my favorite is the surrendering deer.

View the Hitch Critters

Eso Si Que Es

After wearing these last week, I decided that it was probably time to dispose of this faithful pair, much as I would have loved to keep them. Unfortunately, they did not get the opportunity to be worn for the last time in Europe and then discarded in a European wastebasket. Not all sock dreams get to be fulfilled.

Drowning

Don't you just hate it when the mice who live near your hot tub ignore all the "Swim At Your Own Risk" and "No Lifeguard On Duty" signs and go swimming in your hot tub anyway? Then you have to scoop their bodies out when you find them a couple days later and fully drain the tub. Blech.

On a different note, a couple weeks ago a technician in the lab retired. That's not very remarkable in itself, but what was remarkable was that he filled out all the paperwork with HR and all that, but his boss didn't know until 4:00 PM on the day before he retired that he was retiring. Now that's what I call a lack of effective communication. The technician was a bit of an odd duck to start with, but I that still takes the cake on retirement stories so far. Ironically, his name is Norm.

Reminder

At the end of the day today I was feeling a bit down as the day didn't go all that well. But, when I checked another blog I regularly visit, I was reminded that I forgot to think of three things I'm thankful for today. I've noticed that's much harder to do on a not-so-good day. So here goes. I'm thankful...

1. ....for sleep at night, which helps me to recover from the previous day and to have a fresh perspective in the morning.
2. ....for the e-mail of appreciation and thanks that I received from a co-worker today.
3. ....I have not caught the illness/cold that a lot of people around here have right now (knock on particle board).
4. ....for a friend online to IM.
   

See? That wasn't so hard after all. I even had one left over. Thanks Jen for the reminder. Now I'm going to go do #1 so I can continue with #3. Farm out, right arm, gravy, all that stuff.

For one brief moment today....

I was scheduled to go to Korea for an "emergency" work situation next week. But alas, they decided I needed to stay home and continue my work here while they sent someone else to deal with the situation. Lucky me I'll probably get to be on a conference call with Korea in the middle of the night instead. Oh well maybe next time. There's always Mexico in the January/February time frame.

Foxy

Here's a few pictures from the last week. I've seen the fox in the picture below three times in a week's span. This is the best picture I managed to get of him.



Tonight Reggie almost ran over a baby raccoon. Raccoons, foxes, opossums; the wildlife has really been out in force this fall.

Even More Ridiculous

I went to Wal-Mart on Saturday, and they already had some Christmas stuff set up outside. On November 3rd! The poor pumpkins weren't even cold in their graves yet, and the turkeys haven't even approached the grave. The candy hadn't even fully settled in the kids' stomachs! I would advise selling any stock you have in Wal-Mart because I think their health insurance is going to increase sharply after all their employees go stark raving mad from listening to Christmas music for two months straight. I kid you not - they already had the Christmas music going over the PA system. Too far, Wal-Mart. Too far.

Hannah Montana

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I finally heard about a Hannah Montana concert on the radio enough times that I had to go and look up what exactly the rage was all about. I also heard some mom on the radio a few weeks ago saying that she had bid more than $1200 on e-bay for a pair of tickets to a Hannah Montana concert so that she could take her daughter to it. At that time, the bidding wasn't closed yet either. Can you believe that? That's totally out of control.

Warning! Boring Math Explanation! Do Not Read if Allergic to Math!

I had a request to explain a couple of the previous engineering jokes. The two jokes with the punch lines were based off a mathematics/physics concept call a cross product. To explain a cross product, you have to start with a vector. A vector ALWAYS has a magnitude (scalar value) and a direction. A cross product is the multiplication of two vectors, and the result of the cross product is another vector that tells you how close to being perpendicular the two vectors are. The direction of the resultant vector is always perpendicular to both of the vectors that were multiplied. Thus, three dimensional space is required to do this operation.

If you cross vector A with vector B, the resultant magnitude is A*B*sin(angle between A and B), and the direction is determined using the right hand rule. Put your right hand fingers in the direction of A, fold your fingers toward B, and where your thumb is pointing is the resulting direction. When A and B are perpendicular (90 degrees between them), the sine of 90 degrees is 1, so the resulting magnitude is A*B. If the two vectors are parallel, the sine of 0 degrees or 180 degrees is 0, and the cross product is the vector 0.

One of the most common uses of the cross product is to determine torque. Usually you have a distance vector determined by the length of your wrench that points parallel to your wrench. Then you exert a force on your wrench perpendicular to the wrench, which when you take the cross product of these two vectors causes a torque in a direction perpendicular to the force and the distance. This is also why a longer wrench creates more torque - because the magnitude of the torque (cross product) is determined by the force*distance. The other common use of the cross product is to determine how much force a magnetic field will exert on an electronic charge.

So, the reason the joke is funny when it asks what you get when you cross a grape with an elephant is because the answer takes the cross product of the vector grape with the vector elephant. Statistics show 99% of the population considers these kinds of jokes to be lame. And, in order to take a cross product, both things must be vectors (no scalars allowed!).

Did you make it through all of that? How much drool is on your keyboard? Any vacant eyes yet? Was that so exciting that now everybody wants to be an engineer? Was the explanation so skilled that I should become a math or physics teacher? Probably not since it's hard to cram a whole semester of physics into a two paragraph explanation. ;-) But, it was fun for me to take a trip down college class lane. Next week: The joys of taking a dot product using vectors.

Halloween

What is up with the opossums lately? In the last three days I've seen at least three of them, and I could have run over two of them if I had tried even a little bit. I'm pretty sure the ones I saw tonight weren't little kids dressed up.....

And here's your greeting for the season.

Random Wonderings

Last week a lady at work brought up a good question that I was reminded of this evening when I went to use a ziploc bag. Why do those types of bags always come out of the box sealed? Do they test the seal of the bag before they ship it? Does it make it easier to put in the box? Does it keep contaminants out of the bags? Does anybody know the real answer to this? Has anybody ever toured a Ziploc factory? I already asked Jeeves, and he didn't know.

Nashville, TN and Bad Engineering Humor

For part of the past week and weekend, I was in Nashville for a National Society of Women Engineers convention. It was a lot of work and very exhausting, but lots of fun too. Below are a few pictures of some of the things we did.

The first night, there was a genuine George Jones sighting. I guess his aging process has been a little bit out of the ordinary since his skin turned color and everything. I also saw Elvis and Tony the Tiger while in Nashville, but I didn't get any pictures of them unfortunately. And, I was told that the "real" Garth Brooks was in the building while we were there, but we were busy working and couldn't go to see him.

Jeni, Heather, Autumn, Jason, and Laurel building a tower for a team building activity.

Jamie and I - yep, we got the same attire memo. :-) We both ordered the same kind of steak cooked to medium well with mashed potatoes too, so it was getting a little bit eerie.

Boma cooking up a storm at the hospitality suite.

And sometimes, it's just better not to ask. We were expecting the mothership to arrive that night I believe. And they said something about phoning home too.

***Note: Red sweater sighting!***







We have to get in some engineering humor that I heard while I was there:

What do you get when you cross a grape with an elephant?
Grape Elephant sin(Theta).

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a mountain climber?
It's not possible, silly. A mountain climber is a scaler (scalar).

One of my more favorite quotes from the weekend was when we were discussing the logistics of moving some boxes, and Lewis said, "Much as it goes against all of my Lean Manufacturing principles, I think in this case it makes more sense to handle the boxes twice." And you probably had to be there and be an engineer to think that was funny.

One final interesting tidbit I learned.....a woman (Mary Anderson) invented the windshield wiper and got a patent on it in 1903, many years before it was ever used. In fact, the patent had expired (17 years after being granted) before anybody ever used the invention for mass production.

Car Retirement

This week my car needed a minor repair on its exhaust system, and I was reminded again that my car is getting sort of old. I have been contemplating getting a new one, but Reggie still runs too well to get rid of him yet, and the other problem is that I don't know what I want. But to be prepared, I should probably try to figure this out ahead of time so that when Reggie finally gives up the ghost I'm only in a mild state of emergency.

Here's my criteria for a new vehicle:

1. Gas mileage must be greater than 25 mpg, and more than 30 is preferred.
   
2. I should be able to fit my bicycle in it (it's acceptable if I have to remove the front bike tire to make it fit).
3. It should be reasonably priced (less than $30,000 I'm thinking, preferably much lower than that).
4. I am open to alternative energy cars if they make sense (extra cost of car is well compensated for by the large savings in fuel). Only breaking even is a no go.
5. It would be nice to be able to fit larger items like plywood or something in it, but it's not a requirement.
6. Another wish list item is to have a bit more get-up-and-go than 4-cylinder Reggie has, but if I have to choose I'd rather be economical than powerful.
7. No Chinese cars, and no obscure manufacturers where a dealer will be difficult to find.
8. Style of car......I'm pretty open. I'm open to suggestions of cars, trucks, jeeps, whatever you've got.
   

That's all I can think of for now; is that picky enough? Any suggestions? The suggestion from my brother awhile back was that I should get a Subaru, but I'm still waffling. If you want to give even more input, answer the poll on the right about when you think I should get a new car. If you have suggestion that doesn't fit the criteria, go ahead and suggest it. I can always ignore it if I don't like it. :-)

P.S. Note of clarification: When I say no Chinese cars, I mean Chinese only. Japanese are OK. Korean.....eeehhhh.....probably not.

Backwards Process

Today I did things a bit differently. I didn't go so far as to do my evening activities first and then go to work. I went to work like usual. But, after work, I went outside and ran around and got all sweaty, then I went to the YMCA and changed out of my exercise clothes and into my "Tuesday -go-to-meetin' " clothes, then left. I was there for probably less than 10 minutes. I betcha the people manning the front desk don't see that real often. Possibly because the people who do goofy thing like that slip out the back door so it's not so obvious how goofy they are.

Seriously?

Al Gore? A Nobel Peace Prize? I feel like a grandparent who always bemoans what this world is coming to. But I read in a magazine just yesterday about how to improve our lives we should count every day three things we are grateful for and not dwell on the negative so much. So, I'm grateful.....

1. That Al Gore is not president
2. That Hillary Clinton is not president (yet)
3. That I am not required to buy carbon credits, which are a total rip-off in my opinion
   

OK, that was just for fun. The things I'm really grateful for....

1. Feeling in good health today because the day goes so much better when you're not sick.
2. Being in a good mood on a Monday because I had a fun weekend sitting by a bonfire, playing some basketball, soaking up some nature, and spending time with friends.
3. Another chance to try to put the most important thing (God) first for the day.
4. Getting a few more lines done in my derating documentation for the control I'm working on - and getting done with derating training today in an hour instead of the two hours I thought it would be.
   

It Cracked Me Up

I was at a restaurant yesterday, and near the cash register was this small urn thing with a cork stopper, and on it someone had painted "Ashes of Rude Cell Phone Users". Apparently they hadn't had any rude customers lately because it was empty. Or else they have so many they have to empty it really often.

Giving In Already

I turned my furnace on last night (October 10th). My aunt and uncle stopped by for the night, and it got kinda cold yesterday and looked like it was going to stay that way for a couple days. It's ironic that two of the three times this year that I've had overnight company corresponded to the day that I turned my AC or furnace on.

So let's see now....October 1st to October 10th would be.....9 days. Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner who guessed correctly! I have no clue who it is, but if whoever it is wants a free blog post on this site, that's the usual prize. Apparently no one wants to be associated with this site too badly as I haven't had any takers on this offer from my previous polls.

That's about all that's happening here, folks. The daylight hours are rapidly getting shorter, and it's cold, drizzling, and dreary here. This all leads to an increased "depression index" that must be combated with trips to the YMCA and going somewhere on the weekend. The sunny side is tomorrow is Friday with a whole weekend ahead! Later gators.

For Eva (and Other Inquiring Minds)

The person I went on the hike/walk with was a very nice, kind, enjoyable LADY who has two teenage daughters and a husband. :-) Sorry to dash your hopes! And Eva, I'm not quite sure I understood your comment from the previous post. You didn't like my nature pictures? Or maybe they weren't as good as my prose from the post before it? Or was that sarcasm that didn't come through very well?

I'm not sure if I would include convention stew, but I should definitely add convention strogonaff to the list of fall foods. Mmmm....Mmmmm....Mmmmm.