Turning Out The Light On Democracy

When I bought my Kindle Fire last January1 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.2 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.”3 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!

aLL hAIL sHIFT f-3

Almost all of the work I do during the day is in AutoCAD and everything is in capital letters. So the CAPS LOCK key is my friend. It can also be my sworn enemy as you might imagine. I do work in other programs, email, Word, Excel occasionally and when I start typing invariably the first letter is a small one and the rest of the sentence is big shiny capital ones.

When in Word it is not a real problem because a couple of menu clicks and you get a dialog box with a four options to suit the issue at hand. If I forget and leave the CAPS LOCK off in AutoCAD it too has a little menu option for selecting the correct capitalization for text. When in Excel though, I have to highlight, copy, open Word, paste, key press, key press, highlight, copy, close Word, back to Excel, paste or just delete and retype. Guess which one I use?

The email thing is the most frustrating. It’s Outlook. Its Microsoft Word pretty much with the same ribbon and almost all the same text formatting options, but no sentence case swapper thing. Really? So I have to revert to the Excel procedure and depending how far I’ve gotten in the email I have even done the 20-step copy-paste dance.

It is a pain and usually I muddle through mumbling to myself. But today it got to me (steroids, ya think?). I started crawling the web looking for a macro or something that would automatically take the CAPS LOCK key off anytime I started typing into an Outlook text area. Couldn’t find anything like that or didn’t use the right search term, but I did stumble on an older page on Online Tech Tips that was designed for Word, but actually still works in Office 365 Outlook.

aLL hAIL sHIFT f-3 → press 2 keys together
ALL HAIL SHIFT F-3 → press 2 keys together
all hail shift f-3 → press 2 keys together
All Hail Shift F-3 → It’s a June miracle.

Dead Crow

On my usual route to work I pull up to a stop sign at the intersection of the 5 lanes of US-1, turn right, run most of the way through the rev range of first and second gears until it is time to signal left and to enter the turn lane for making the left onto the parking lot access road. Time to execute this takes about 6 secs. The 100 yard access road is traveled at selective speeds depending on the closeness of other incoming Valve Store employees and takes another 5 to 15 seconds.

When I take the left turn on US-1, I can get a good idea how I’ll handle this final approach. I do have to be 3/4 of the way down the access road before someone gets in it behind me, because I have to do a u-turn into the lot, stop, shift into reverse and back into that very first spot. Today there were just two vehicles headed north towards me and both were at least 1/3 of a mile back, so no worries. Wrong boy chick. Turns out the lead small pickup truck was hauling ass.

I should not have been too surprised because less than a 1/4 mile before where I spotted the traffic is a red light that catches most everyone and right past it the speed limit jumps to 55. So naturally most everyone who has to stop this one last time on the way to work, and possibly having just been sitting at the previous much longer stoplight 1500 feet before, pushes their foot to the floor and leaves it there until it is time to slow down to turn left.

So I’m only halfway down the access road when the truck hangs the left in behind me, I look back to see their new velocity and it hasn’t changed (much). By the time I transit the last half of the access road his headlights are right bright in my mirror. Now this is no big deal as I’m not militant on the backing in thing, if I don’t time have to to execute the maneuver gracefully without holding up the person behind, I just pull straight in. As the truck zips by towards the front of the lot I recognize it and I know the fellow well. I pass right by the machine he operates quite a few times a day, so I tell myself to be sure to tease him about his speed during the day. At least once.

Later in the day while walking through the shop he is standing there, so I walk over and ask if he ever looks down at his speedometer when traveling that stretch of road. He laughs and says, “Not if there no one in front of me.” “Well,” I say, “You were really moving this morning, I was kind of curious.” Then he asks, “Did you see the dead crow there on the road in?” I said, “No. How’d you? Moving that fast?” Which led me to tell him my favorite joke from Mark Turner about why you never see a dead crow on the side of the road (read it here.)

When it was time to go for my morning walk, sure enough I could see something black, fairly large, laying in the middle of the access road. I took a picture to ask him if this is what he saw. When I got right up to it I took another confirmation picture. Then when I walked back by after my walk, I showed him the pictures and told that maybe he better slow down a bit so he can really tell what he’s looking at.

God

The way I’m feeling this may or may not be your bonus post for today. There may be more, way more.

One of the times I got up in the middle of the night I wandered over to the PC, and looked over my Google News feed for distractions. After scanning the headlines and looking at all of the crap that is going on here, there and everywhere it caused me to think of God. Your God, his God, their God. There are a lot of different religions in this world with their own corresponding deity. How the heck does that work? Is there a God Boardroom where they gather and divvy up all the creatures of Earth?4

But a God Collective can’t work, because there has got to be some being making sure nobody gets out of hand with the plagues and pestilence stuff. And all the religions I know about, the one big Tennent is I’m the ONE God, don’t be worshiping anyone else. Hey, maybe that is the way this whole thing works, all the little individual Gods can’t let anyone outside the board in on the secret. Kind of like Fight Club: Both rules #1 & #2 are: You do not talk about Fight Club. But I digress.5

Why would a benevolent god let all this bad crap happen? And from there I spent the next indeterminate minutes discussing God in my head. Well, today on my lunchtime perusal of my Google News feed I came across a headline that got me to click on it: Creationist Ken Ham Blames Atheists For Ark Park Failure. You can click on the link to read the actual article if you want, I found it entertaining in that this fellow is blaming the lack of success on the 3% of America’s Atheists teaming up with America’s new Enemy of the People (mainstream media) to damage the reputation of his big ol’ boat, the Ark Encounter.

I then wandered to the bottom of the article to read the comment section because this is almost always where the fun stuff really resides. It didn’t take long either. Four or five views down the line someone takes a slight dig at atheists and claims he, a mainstream Christian, is the harmed party by being lumped in with the Ark Encounter charlatan6 And then proceeds to state emphatically that the universe we all live in “is just not possible that universes don’t exist that have a ‘God’ of some sort.” And the reply to this is, which I’m going to copy below, is the sort of answer I would like to memorize so I could spout it at the opportune time when confronted with someone making that kind of statement to me.7

i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in god, just as i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in thor or my disbelief that hitler and elvis are living on the dark side of the moon planning an invasion. Your comment seems to suggest that ‘the existence of a universe’ has one of a set of answers in a multiple choice scenario – a. god b. aliens. c. science. d. computer simulation. The correct answer may not be in that set, it may not be something you could even understand at this point – but that does not mean you get to make up an answer or run with one these when the correct answer is “i don’t know, and neither do you”. You’re running with a god of the gaps explanation. The god concept is refutable because there is no evidence to support the claim – if there was, you’d have a fact, not faith. trying to support it by claiming it is ‘the only answer “that makes sense” to you’ regarding ‘why is stuff here instead of not stuff not here?’ no more supports your version of god than it supports thor or magic beans. So, i doubt anyone is “relying on science to justify not believing in god”, if they are that isn’t a very good reason. We don’t believe in god(s) because there is no evidence to back up that claim

For the record, I’m not a believer, nor am I a disbeliever, I consider myself an agnostic.

Well, I Missed Posting a Day

So as a bonus, today you will get two and because it is the Summer Solstice (AKA the longest day of the year) I will have plenty of daylight to accomplish them.

I’m blaming it on the ‘roids. My synapses are firing all over the place, trust me, the stream of consciousness that is going on it there is deafening and somewhat alarming.

My lovely bride has to except a little of the fault for the ‘no post’ too though. When I got home from work she was already a bit hungry, so we did the evening meal an hour early. Compound this with the fact the FRS are playing ball in the mid-west, so their games are starting an hour later, I now had 2 extra hours to kill until I had something to occupy my brain enough to tamp down the cacophony.

I tried reading a book I’m partway through on the Kindle and I couldn’t concentrate on the sentences because all I could think of was poor Jeff Bezos who is just missing out on being the richest man in the world with only Bill Gates left to catch. I wanted to help, but didn’t think running down to Whole Foods and buying a gallon of milk that the money would get back to him yet.

I tried watching a Season 6 Episode of VEEP, but it had already started to lose it luster before my head got this N20 shot. I’m just watching now out of morbid curiosity to see if body man Gary ever gets to hook up with Ex-President Selina. Sort of like I keep reading the Beetle Bailey cartoons hoping for Beetle and Miss Buxley to do something besides casually date.

With still another hour to go, I thought maybe plugin some headphone to Radio Paradise and just close my eyes. Well that worked. Only too well. I fell asleep. Donna went inside to accomplish some stuff, clean up after dinner, etc. and when she came back an hour later I was snoring peacefully. Thinking I needed more rest, she suggested taking a shower and going to bed early. This sounded like a great idea. So, about the time the Red Sox came to bat in the top of the first inning in Kansas City I was pulling the covers up to my chin and exhaling slowly. Perfect.

Until about 12:23 AM this morning when my eyes snapped open. Suffice to say there is another 10,000 words I can write here to tell you all about the machinations I tried to get back to sleep and all the random, tangential thoughts that developed in my head, but you’d be exhausted reading them. And frankly I think that they exhausted me enough that I did manage to fall back sleep about 3 hours lateranyway…