I Just Can’t Help Myself

Bought another Blipshift T-shirt. Lucky Number 13 and only the 4th non-Miata T. When I showed it to my wife to make sure I had approval to purchase, she said, “Order me one too.”

We are both early VW lovers. Before we bought our first Miata in 1989 we test drove a last year (1979) Convertible Beetle. Not real sorry we didn’t buy that VW, because how long I might have missed out on the Miata fun, but kind of sorry because it would be neat to have an old Beetle again. Don’t know where we’d put it or even drive it, but those cars have so much character.

Donna’s first car was a 1971 Super Beetle. She shipped it over to me on Guam because I was there first, and even though we weren’t married yet, she even trusted me drive it around until she got there (I had sold my B210 before going over there.) While we there we fell in with a squadron mate who had the VW “bug” bad, so at one point we owned three, her Type I Beetle, I had a Type III Squareback and together we bought a 15-year old Type II commercial bus.

Her car was a sort-of rare semi-automatic 3-speed that for the heck of it, Keith and I converted to a regular 4-speed standard. When we left the island we sold it to another squadron mate who was going to take it back to California when he left Guam in about a year. He was from Santa Barbara and I like to think that car is still tooling around out there.

My Squareback was an Automatic too, but the more conventional kind. It had dual carbs with a glass-pack muffler and I’d just roar around island. Sold it for cheap to another sailor when we came back to the states and I bet that thing turned into a Guam Bomb. Probably the only thing left of that car is a slightly higher aluminum content in a of patch soil a few yards off a weed chocked back road on the south of the island.

The bus is a whole ‘nother post by itself, maybe I’ll save that until tomorrow.

Can I Hear You Now?

My original follow-up with the ENT was scheduled for today, Wednesday, in downtown Augusta. I put in for a 1/2 day vacation because the appointment was at 1:15 and figured Donna and I could make a day of it in the big city, lunch then doctor, maybe see a movie matinee afterwards.

Last week the office called and said, the doctor has a surgery scheduled, could I do Thursday at the Evans office. Reluctantly I agreed because I wanted to get this done. I picked the last appointment of the day, 3:15, so Donna could pick me up from work at 2:30 and I’d take an hour of “lost time.” I cancelled the half day vacation. For this appointment, after the doctor we’d hunt up some different place to eat dinner over that way, because we’d probably never purposely say to ourselves, “Let’s drive over to Evans to eat out on a work night.”

Yesterday afternoon the ENT office called and said that we now have a conflict with Thursday appointment, could I call and change it. I called them back fully expecting to tell them forget the f&*^ing follow-up, my initial complaint has been solved to my satisfaction. But was stunned into silence when the girl asked if I could come to the downtown office today, Wednesday, at say…1:15?1 I asked if they had a later in the day appointment and got one at 3:20 PM so I could just that same hour of excused time.

Well, they tested my hearing again today. I think I am cured, the garbled bass is gone, so the steroids fixed me, but if you look at numbers and compare the two dates, today’s test doesn’t look that much better. And they didn’t test the same frequencies, so much for my planned apples to apples chart. 3khz was added and they dropped the 12khz which is probably where I had the greatest gains. I’m not happy with the chart, but I’m happy with the results of the medicine.

Good News Or Bad News?

Depends on who you ask.

In a weird way, I’m kind of disappointed, but Donna is probably pleased as punch by this development – the effects of my earache induced course of steroids is almost all gone. I slept right through last night, I’ve stopped fidgeting and have regained some control over my ability to stay focused at work. More importantly, I no longer have the compulsion to answer the question of “How’s it going?” by starting out with, “Well, I was born in Springfield, but raised in…”

Also good or bad, you decide, the blog posts will probably be a lot shorter and perhaps less frequent. To prove the point, that’s all I got tonight.

Go read something good: Before the Internet.

Parris Island Marine Band

The city of Aiken has held a summer concert series for over 40 years. But either because of our aging population or summers were cooler back in the day, this year instead of not startling until the beginning of June, they started in April to beat the heat. Donna and I used to go often when we first moved to town almost 30 years ago, but either because of our aging or summers were really cooler back then, our attendance had fallen off to zero six or eight years ago.

Today Donna suggested we go out to eat dinner at my favorite restaurant in town, Mellow Mushroom, and if we walked to dinner I could drink a couple of ice cold beers with it. It is 2-1/2 mile walk one-way, but almost all of it is on the dirt roads of the horse district and nice quiet neighborhood streets.The rest of the walk is in downtown Aiken, but by the time we get there, most everyone has gone home and there is restaurant traffic, so it is a very pleasant walk. And with that kind of reward, I am usually ready to take a stroll.

As we left the Mellow Mushroom Donna innocently said, “Ooh, I think the Marine Corp Band is playing in the Hopelands concert tonight. If we walk back a different way, maybe we’ll be able to hear them.” Me, still none the wiser at this point, said”We are walking right by the park, maybe we should just take a few extra steps and cut through to really hear some.”

I wasn’t planning on going to a summer open-air concert tonight, but I think my wife was and she hook-winked into at least listening to a song or two with pizza and beer as the bait. Well played girl.

Turning Out The Light On Democracy

When I bought my Kindle Fire last January2 it came with a free six month subscription to the Washington Post. Turned out this was not totally altruistic, the same dude that owns the Kindle company, owns the newspaper too, so he’s hoping I would subscribe once that trial period ran out.

Well, I fell for it. I did, but only because they used the same model as satellite radio did, another 6 months for like the price of the one month. When that ran out I thought I might try a different major paper, the failing New York Times maybe? How about the Boston Globe? But all the biggies were priced 2 to 2-1/2 times the cost of the WaPo’s $3.99 a month. Jeff beat me down, I had become used to reading the Post, so I gave them him my credit card and subscribed.

But the experience has been wearing thin. My big problem was they way it updates. You pick up an actual paper and you get what you get, but electronically with the Post you’ll be reading along article after article, swiping to advance and all of a sudden you’d find yourself 5 articles back. What happened? You’d guess that maybe something new has been added in front and maybe it is newer news. Nope. WTF?

You know when something has been updated on the “paper” because a small semi-transparent balloon appears over whatever you are reading to let you know. The only way to get rid of the balloon is to click on it. And instead of trusting you to remember to go looking, you are taken all the way back to the very first article.

Today I decided that I had enough and decided to just go back to getting my news from my Google News feed. It’s free and I’m a cheapskate at heart. I cancelled subscription.

It wasn’t easy and that is a whole other post…

It’s Been A Week

About time to talk about garage flooring again, don’t you think?

Before I had finalized my design last Friday night, just to be sure I opened up a live chat with someone off the Garage Flooring, Inc webpage. I wanted to be sure, even though they looked like it online from pictures, that my Diamond Grid-Loc tiles would, well, lock, with the Vented Ultra-Loc tiles I wanted under the car.

Chat Transcript
08:08:14 AM [Brian] Diamond Grid-Loc can mate to the Vented Ultra-Loc?
08:08:22 AM [Teanna] Hello Brian Thanks for clicking to chat with me! I’m happy to help!!
08:08:34 AM [Teanna] yes
08:08:54 AM [Teanna] they are able to click together
08:09:25 AM [Brian] That was simple, sort of figured they would, but wanted to make sure.
08:09:33 AM [Brian] Thanks.
08:09:48 AM [Teanna] your very welcome is there anything else I can helpy ou with today?
08:10:50 AM [Brian] No that’s it, I saved an order, but first I’m going to order a sample of each my chosen colors. Thanks again.
08:11:01 AM [Teanna] great idea!

The samples came in the mail today. The pieces are only about 4″ square, but all three did in fact show at least one of the connections. The Graphite Diamond Grid-Loc had a male end and the Gunmetal Diamond Grid-Loc had a female end and no surprise, clicked right in. The Vented Ultra-Loc not a chance.

And when think about it, why would they? Grid-Loc. Ultra-Loc. They don’t even sound the same. The Grid-Loc tiles have 4 connections a side while the Ultra-Loc tiles have twice as many. Maybe why the superlative sounding Ultra was used? What I really meant to ask was do the Diamond Grid-Loc tiles mate to the Vented Grid-Loc tiles. So we had a customer who knew what he wanted to ask, asked it wrong and a CSR confirm that his incorrect request would work in a situation where it clearly wouldn’t. Or maybe I really do have Jedi Mind Powers!

This sample order was helpful on a couple fronts. Turns out I didn’t like the Diamond texture, so I’ll go with the Coin pattern instead. Plus the Grid-Loc vented tiles are 40¢ each cheaper than the Ultra-Locs.

I played around with a couple different designs. Instead of a 1′ square checkerboard pattern, doing a 4′ checkerboard, and looked OK on the web page, but would be too large for the small garage. Then I tried a diagonal stripe pattern, which I thought looked OK on the web too, but not enough to commit to really using it. I really thought this snake skin look would be just too cool park on! But we still have bipartisan support for last Friday’s small checkerboard surrounding a black vented middle.

Richard the Safety Guy

The Valve Store has always been a safe place to work. We of course have a Safety Committee made of salary and hourly employees, but it is ingrained in the culture and it shows. You can never be too safety conscious in a machining & manufacturing factory. And our parent organization, Emerson Corporation, which manufactures all kinds of gizmos worldwide, treats safety as a high priority as well.

Up until recently the company’s main safety coordinator was a dual job person, she was also our on-site Occupational Health Nurse. As our number of employees has grown, both the health portion and the safety portion became too big for one person.3 Enter, Richard. He is a nice enough guy and by all accounts a very intelligent individual. But, you knew there was something coming didn’t you? As sometimes really, really smart people are, he can be a little flaky.

The other day he came into our Fabrication offices and started to explain to our engineer that he had done a walk-thru and noticed that one of the anti-fatigue mats had a turned up corner that created a trip hazard and need to be replaced. Tom says, “Sure I’ll write up a purchase request right now.” “What size?” “It’s ahh,” he then starts to hold out his arms, moving them around in an approximation of a rectangle, “about that big.” Tom asks, “Which machine?” Richard replies, “Well, it was back there on the left side when I walked through and it is the 3rd or 4th or maybe 6 or 7 back.” The entrance to our offices are smack in the middle of the manufacturing area and seeing as there was no mention of which direction he was traveling when he came in, the offending mat could be anywhere on the shop floor. Tom sighs, and says, “I’ll take care of it.”

This is where I come in, because Tom comes over to the Arts & Crafts Department, tells me the above story and then says, “That guy has sure got some fantastic Safety Powers. Could you design me a logo for his super hero identity?” I ask playfully, knowing Tom, and knowing where he is going, “Nice SG for safety guy?” “No,” Tom says, “I was thinking more along the lines of SD.” “S for safety, combined with the first letter for a Richard nickname that is not-so common in usage anymore.”4 So I used the color green for safety, a nice round logo for center chest placement and a little extra flourish added to the letter SD to get across the point.

Richard might just try and rock a suit like that at Halloween, but I bet he’d want a cape!