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A coworker asked me to help him troubleshoot a Microsoft Word problem.  He was trying recreate a hand drawing of how to fold a piece of packaging and he was having difficulty.  Word doesn’t enjoy sub 1/10th inch placement of objects and often raises a fuss when creating a drawing area inside a text area inside a drawing area inside a text area.  He’d created a mediocre hack job but found somethings wanting:

  • A dashed line was created by making a bunch of little lines, spacing them, then grouping them together instead of using the right-click -> format -> line style option.
  • Transparent figures where given white sublayers by creating white borderless boxes.
  • All the text was in a single text box with each piece being located with spaces and tabs of various sizes.

I was able to replace his work with a more accurate drawing in Publisher in about 10 minutes including a narrative of what I was doing.  I ask him how long his version took, “about six hours”.  I asked him if this was average and it apparently was.  This man is probably paid 50% more than me and received healthcare.  I felt bad when it turned out the guy I replaced was 50% better than me at my then job, but I am roughly 60 times faster at this job than he is.  I think I can make a reasonably strong productivity case for replacing him, should it come up in conversation.

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At 2:00 AM, Monday, September 14, 2009 a blueberry cake died.  It started off as a good cake, straight muffin mixed and true.  The carrot cake recipe was pushed into service with heavy cream replacing yogurt and shortening for butter to make ends meet.  Instead of carrots of most carrot cakes, this used blueberries, not the freshest but still a blueberry to be proud of.  The batter was poured into a cake pan and the rest has been determined by forensic investigation:

  • 1:12 – Cake batter enters oven, weighted down heavy with blueberries
  • 1:27-The rise in interrupted by the opening of the door to the oven, causing a gust of cold air to blast the top of the cake.
  • 1:30 – The top of the cake solidifies after exposure to cold air preventing the batter from rising properly.
  • 1:38 – The sealed cake top breaks off from the rise of the rest of cake and makes a run for the bottom of the pan.
  • 1:45 – Cake hits boiling point, berries boil and burst, releasing wave of moisture.
  • 1:50 – Cake having just been hit by wave of blueberry burst-induced water vapor beings sagging as foam breaks due to new weight at the top.
  • 1:59 – Cake top has descended, creating an almost perfect spongy square center like some sort of quadrilateral donut.
  • 2:00 – Cake frosting is applied, begins to melt into the central compression where upon the center finally falls into madness.
  • 2:05 – Cake death recorded, given to dog.
  • 2:10 – Dog throws up outside.
  • 2:12 – Cat wants in, confused by dog throwing up outside.
  • 2:14 – Cat salvages cake by spending a solid 10 minutes licking the cream cheese package.

Time to wake up late, hit the bakery, find something nice, slip it into my cake tin and make it look shitty so people think I made it.  I’ve only done this once before, I think people could tell, but they were nice and lied to me.

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I brought in peanut butter cookies today.  A lot of them.  When a recipe starts with “24 oz of chunky peanut butter” followed by “3 sticks of unsalted butter”, it means business.  Anyway, I sent out a blanket email when I bring something in and slowly a trickle of people came through.   A bunch of these folk were from a specific work group and three had a cookie and graciously took an extra cookie for a specific person who was “too busy to come up”.  They should have planned their excuses for gluttony better.  There person for whom they supposedly took cookies is deathly allergic to peanuts.  They’re so selfless.

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Coworker: Gha… Do we have a high-megapixel camera that can focus on just the interference pattern on these two films while filtering out glare from overhead lights?
Me: Kind of, give me a few minutes *runs to car, gets camera, tripod, and polarizer, returns*
Coworker:  Where did you get that?
Me: My car.
Coworker: Do you drive around with that stuff hoping for weird cases where an excess of camera equipment will be useful?
Me: Maybe….Yes.

The photos came out well.  I make inconsistent deformations in thin-layer films with sub-wavelength spacing look good.

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So, after yesterday’s incident I got thinking “why doesn’t this RAM work?”  I checked on-line and the RAM appeared compatible so I contacted their tech support who said the RAM I used was generically non-compatible.  I said this to a coworker who was curious of my methods:

Him: These are high-end machines, how do you know it meets the system minimums?
Me: The systems were top of the line years ago, now they’re nothing.
Him: But how do you know the RAM’s fast enough?
Me: The number on my RAM is higher.
Him: Well then, it’s confirmed: The iron law of technology “higher numbers are better” says so, IBM’s tech support is full of shit.

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Our work computers run up against a performance barrier when running newer versions of our CAD setup so I figured I’d bring in some RAM as a temporary measure.  I popped in the RAM and restarted and the computer ignored the new RAM.  I popped out previous RAM, sawing through layers of dust that saw George Bush re-elected and felt my adrenal glands swell to the size of golfballs as the the “OHNOES!” light went on after switching the DIMMs.  I popped the RAM out, returned the original stuff and the OHNOES!” light still stared at me.  I unplugged the computer, plugged it back in again and the light was still there.  I blew out some dust and the light remained.

Knowing I’d be decapitated if I just admitted failure, I did the only think I could do: I poked the light.  I cycled power again and the “OHNOES!” light was replace with the “OHAI!” light.  There was much rejoicing.

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I’ve returned to the R&D Lab to run some testing to tide the lab over until I could train someone.   It was nice to be back in the lab working with things that actually existed and getting data but with it came some less interesting factors, like work order requesters who don’t understand physics:

Requester: When will the filter testing finish?
Me: It’ll take about 60 hours to do all the filters so probably two weeks.
Requester:  Is there a way to speed up the testing?  Could we increase the odorant gas flow?
Me:  No, we’d be leaving the parameters of the method.
Requester: Hmm… What if we just increase the flow rate?
Me: That’s the same thing.  That’s like increasing the speed of a car without increasing its velocity.
Requester: Could you make the gas… go faster?
Me: Yes, just put the quarter million dollar test rig under a heat lamp and pray that Graham’s Law of Diffusion doesn’t notice.
Requester: Can we do that?
Me: … No.

And he’s the one with the Master’s degree…

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I want to purchase a new laptop and have it narrowed down to a few options.  I’m looking for the impossible backpacking laptop that’ll run CS5, oh well.  Anyway, I wasn’t sure how 3 pounds vs.  3.3 pounds vs. 5 pounds felt so I went into the R&D lab, grabbed a bunch of weights, massed them and started lifting various configs to see if I could feel the weight difference.

In the middle of trying to see if I could hold 3 lbs vs. 5 lbs in my arm pit a coworker walked in:
Him: What are you doing?
Me: Testing a laptop.
Him: Ok.  Break down your laptops and put them away when you’re done.

We’re all mad here…

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I called it an early day yesterday and got 10 hours of sleep.  If I go below 7.5 hours two days in a row I’m useless and if I get more than 11 I’m groggy.  Between the two: magic.  My oven was also replaced and made brownies, so I came into work at 5 AM chipper and armed with brownies like some alternative reality June Cleaver.  This contrasted heavily with a coworker who lives off of 4 hours of low-quality sleep.

Coincidentally, we went out to lunch today and he asked me why I was so chipper and I told him it was due to 10 hours of sleep and his left eye started twitching.  No the “I have a bug in my eye” twitch but the “the previous statement reflects a mode of being I have never occupied nor probably ever will.  I will sleep when I’m dead” twitch.  It was frightening until I realized his decimated cerebellum probably couldn’t muster enough coordination for he to stab me in any reasonably short length of time.  I jokingly offered to replace our luncheons with me driving around New Jersey while he napped in the passenger seat sleeping.  His mouth said “no” but his eyes screamed “yes”.  Maybe one day I’ll replace his Tic-Tacs with chloral hydrate and he’ll get a quality afternoon nap.

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Our offices have name plates near the door with removable plastic strips with our names on them.  As people come and go, the plates change.  One contrarian fellow refuses to clean his plate off despite two of the people on it no longer working for the company.  I removed the two strips for the non-existent employees, threw them in the fellow’s garbage bin and sent him a note:

“<person’s name>

I’ve removed from the nameplate the two employee’s there that no longer work for you.  I’ve thrown them out in your wastebin should you want them.”

Reply: “Thank you”

I passed by the lab after receiving the reply and the name plates were back up.
Me: Did you put the nameplates back up that I threw out?
Him: No.  I replaced them.
Me: Well, they look the same.
Him: Nah… these are bigger.

Indeed they were.