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There are an unusual number of silicone experts at my workplace so I asked one of them if my dream of using silicone ice trays to produce brownie-fists was reasonable.  Turns out the answer is a qualified “yes”.

Coworker: Silicone is silicone.  If it’s a true silicone ice cube tray it’ll take several hundred degrees C without a problem.
Me: What do you mean “true silicone”?
Coworker: Well, some just use a silicone backbone, so they’d have a low melting point.
Me: I think I’ve dealt with that before.
Coworker:  What are you trying to do?
Me: Trying to create a silicone tray to make single server brownies.
Coworker: We could make our own.  I asked Dow for some sample silicone and they sent me 70 kilos that’s body-safe.  We’d just need a sample shape.

I’ve been avoiding learning our CAD design, rapid prototyping and thermal simulation software.  I think I now have a reason to.

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Coworker: I have funny one today.
Me: Oh?
Coworker: I try to contact old tech who work at firm I was boss for.  I tell her I get Chinese mafia on her if she fail as a joke.  She say she have hard time at work on Facebook.  I call her and say “Chinese mafia going to kill you, ha ha ha”.  She scream and hang up.  Turns out, I have wrong number.

Hilarious…

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One of the promises made when we received our new computers was that we’d have unfettered access to the devices which wouldn’t be as crippling as some of the limitations on the old computers.   So I ran through a checklist:

Can turn off McAfee Antivirus – No
Can prevent machines from going to sleep after 10 minutes – No
Can access certain parts of the Windows folder – No
Can run web connected apps over something besides port 80 – No
Can change the screen saver – YES!

Take that showing-diversity-from-people-playing-cats-cradle-with-our-logo.scr!

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Our new workstations arrived today and I began setting up one of them. They are a massive improvement over our previous systems but about 75% the power of my reasonably powered home PC at about four times the cost and I am skeptical that they will last the 40 months asked of them.  This after my request has several corners shaved from it for trivial cost savings.  I did some initial benchmarking and my very excited boss asked for feedback about their speed.  I was unsure of how to respond and the revision history of the email was something like this:

While sufficient to run AutoCAD I don’t think they’d run Crysis as well as you’d like.

They’re fast enough that I no longer realize how much slower they are than my home PC.

They are sufficient, for now.  Please plan to upgrade in 18-24 months.

While an improvement over what we have, I’m glad they didn’t come out of our department’s budget.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the monitors included displayport adapters.

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Me:  This server’s going absolutely bat-shit insane.
Boss:  What does that mean?
Me: I can remote desktop to it, but I can’t ping it, and another computer located physically on top of it can’t communicate with it either.
Boss: Contact the host, see what they can do.
Me: I did, they claim they’re doing nothing to it except that when I look in processes I can see the processes associated with being logged in like explorer.exe and freecell.exe listed in the Task Manager under their name but they insist no one’s logged in.  Also, a little icon in the corner of the screen keeps telling me a network cable is unplugged and, whenever it is, I have an Internet connection and, whenever it’s not, I don’t.
Boss: I have an idea.  You’re from the future, just a few minutes or maybe an hour and you’ve come back to warn us that something disastrous is about to happen.  But the trip through time has damaged your memory and you can’t remember what you need to avert.
Me: So what should I do?
Boss:  Go out to lunch.  There’s no way of knowing when the real Terry will return and your meeting may cause the end of the universe.
Me: Good thinking.

That, sir, is how one applies Ockham’s Razor.

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Whenever a new product is launched my firm films a promotional video to inform marketing people.  I’ve participated as a “scientician” (someone in a labcoat doing a test to make stuff look sciency) in several and today the project managers were being filmed which clogged the hallways with equipment requiring novel ways of navigating the building.  I was speaking with a coworker and he left to use the restroom.  Thirty minutes later he returned.

Me: Problem?
Him: Close bathroom is blocked, far bathroom is closed.  Using bathroom has become… how you say, non-trivial.

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Coworker: I just got an email that it’s a half-day does that mean we leave at noon?
Me: Yes.
Coworker: Do we have to, I’m a contractor?
Me: No, you don’t have to leave but if you don’t you have a delicate balance.  Staying reminds others that you’re effectively a second-class citizen or makes them feel that their work isn’t important.
Coworker: But if I leave they might think my project isn’t as important as it actually is or they’ll say “look at the contractor, taking every opportunity to leave”.
Me: Exactly, life gets tough when your firm tries to be nice.
Coworker: I got it, I’ll leave now with the rush of people, get lunch and come back so the other people who think their stuff is important will think my stuff’s important.
Me: Now you’re thinking.

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I brought in a spiced apple cake yesterday but I arrived somewhat late and it wasn’t completely consumed.  At the end of work today there was a single piece left at 6 PM and my boss’s boss commented that it was sad that there was one piece left alone.  I replied “I don’t consider it to be a piece, so much as a monument to the pieces who went before it”.  He nodded in agreement and we bowed our heads a bit.  With that, I downed the memorial piece.  I wish all monuments tasted this good.

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I got a computer virus today… from work.   I’m somewhat confident it wasn’t the other way around as my home computer recognized the infected autoexec.inf file on my thumb drive immediately and the worm it contained.  I did some checking and the infection is spread via thumb drives which probably came to me via the technician that performed a setup operation on a computer attached to a device to which I move files with a thumb drive.   That computer doesn’t even have web access, so I’m confident the technician had it on his drive which he picked up from someone whose browser window probably includes eight toolbars, the original install of AIM and a Bonzai Buddy.

I find it strangely satisfying that our expensive McAfee license was circumvented in that the virus was being spread by a computer technician who will then have to repeat his circuit to remove the damage he’s wrought.  There’s really no risk to the machines as the worm simply initiates a DDOS after contacting an IRC channel which isn’t accessible through works firewalls.  So in my head I have a picture of every computer at work knocking on the work firewall going “I can has payload?” and the router going “No 1 hear, go hoam” which probably slows web access.  A coworker recently said that there was no way the tech folks could slow web access anymore.  Looks like they’ve outdone themselves.

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Every company has its set of idiosyncrasies like oddities in work decor or strange holidays or seemingly backwards business practices.  When these occur at my firm I’ve taken to saying “Welcome to <firm name>”.

For the last few days, a coworker and myself have been testing a patch to our CAD system to bring back a piece of functionality lost during an update.  The functionality is non-trivial and involves CAD documents remembering their parameters.  It would be analogous to a document that whenever you opened it all the formatting went away in addition to the information like when it was created and by whom.  After doing a bunch of testing, the patch appeared to function correctly and we got ready to deploy the fix across our servers.

Me: I’m applying the patch to our development server.
Boss: Whoa, you can’t just change the CAD system.
Me: But this is the dev system.  I thought we just had to document changes to our production server.
Boss: Nope, since the dev system receives changes that may eventually reach the production server those changes have to be documented too.
Me: Then, do we have a sandbox that we can just mess around with?
Boss:  Yeah, we have a copy of the development server that runs as a virtual machine that we wipe each week.  You can make any changes you want as long as you document it.

–Later–

Me: Ok, I’ve documented the change on the development server and I’m ready to roll it out to the production server.
Boss: You can’t just change the production server, you need to submit a business justification.
Me: I need to submit a business justification?
Boss: Outline costs, how it will change our operations, any training required.  Yep, tell me when it’s done.

So, I need to write a justification, to get permission to apply a patch that’ll make our non-functioning system functional.  That’s like requiring a business justification to turn on a piece of manufacturing equipment.  I wonder if I should include the cost of doing the business justification in my business justification.

Welcome to <firm name>.