Changing Gears

It's been almost 14 years I've been at my job, and for the most part I've been doing pretty much the same thing. The work is fairly straightforward, but is pretty physical. Four or five years back, I finally got on the weekend shift, which is nice in that there's less people around, so it's easier in that regard, less drive time traffic, and there's a little bit of a bump in pay for it. A few times I've been asked by supervisors if there is another department or position I'd like to be in, but nothing has ever materialized. I even had tested for some electronic correspondence customer service at one point.

A month or so back, (we are an essential service, so there's been no stop at my work, although almost all of the sales and support staff are working from home) there was a meeting time blocked out on my daily schedule. Hmmm... I meet with one of the heads above my department, who I've never had any interaction with, and she tells me that they have combed the employee bios, and saw that I had been formally trained in Surfcam, as well as having self-taught AutoCad, BobCad, and Solidworks. For a while, I did a ton of work in Solidworks, because it renders very realistic looking designs, and once you've created them, you can make a pretty good drawing of the part fairly easily. Turns out, Solidworks skill is just the sort of thing they're looking for!!!

They set me up with a couple of the technologies they use, and gave me a half day or so to mess around in Solidworks, to get a feel for it again. A couple days later, they gave me a couple test parts to design and generate drawings for. Apparently, I did well enough for them to offer me a position on the team coming up with the files. The down side is I'd be off weekends, the up side is I'll be working from home!!! I'll be saving money on gas, and saving an hour to an hour and a half of commute time a day, so I'm good with it, as well as being able to use some long dormant skills. Last week they gave me the equipment to bring home, and a day to set it up. The project is supposed to go for around 9 months to a year.

This has been my first week, learning how the process will go. There's a lot of new stuff, which I don't think will be too tough, but I've been on Central Time for the learning, so I don't care for the hours, but that will get better. First time I've ever had a dual monitor set up. I used my old desk I had my home desktop set up on (which I mostly only use for the printer connected) and cleared out a spot in the corner, by the windows. Using the suddenly very popular Zoom any time but early on, I'm terribly back lit, but apparently it's not a big deal. Since I'm much more sedentary, I've been walking a couple miles every afternoon.

Oh, and the design there is something I did in the practice day. It's a rough representation of one of those Saturn Ion rims.

Random Triple Shot

A few things happened. Thought I'd do an instant post and cover them a little.

My uncle on my dad's side came to town. It think it's been about 45 years since I've seen him, when we'd gone on an epic family road trip hitting about 7 states. He hails from Colorado. He remembered me from before that, probably 48 or so years, when he'd visited us and I was playing dinosaur and was eating my food off the ground. Anyway, his wife of decades just recently passed, and he was out visiting my parents.

This was the front left brake line on Scruffy. I bought all the flexible lines to replace, but thus far this is the only one I've replaced. Also, it was the only one showing visible wear, so, priorities. Eventually I'll get to the others, but I've got rear brakes for Jade and rod ends for 3 (as well as that transmission temperature plug!!!) to put on, still. I've got an extra transmission fluid filter, and it would probably be a good idea to change the fluid on both of those sometime, too.

Alt 98.7 was hosting a test of new voting machines last weekend. Menace and Greg Gory were at one local to us. It was going on while I was at work, so my wife and younger went over. Now his count is 2 Menace meet ups and one Ravey, to my 1 Menace and 2 Ravey. He saw but didn't get to meet Greg. The boy isn't old enough to vote yet, but he's registered now for when he is, a young Republican. They had a bunch of sample questions for Southern California centric questions, best beach, most instagrammable, worst freeway. Favorite sports team was the Dodgers (who just this evening were knocked out of the playoffs) who took more than 50% of the vote. The two basketball teams followed, then the two football teams. I was a bit surprised that the carpetbagger Chargers had more votes than the prodigal Rams. Anyway, I see no possible way that an electronic voting system like they are rolling out could possibly have any fraud or tampering or hacking!!!

New Toys

I should have made this post yesterday. Not only was that the day that I got this delivered in the mail. Additionally, yesterday was 5-12 and this is my 512th blog post!!! It's a pretty good one, I think.



My wife thought this was pretty cute, so she pulled out the camera and took this picture. The big boy laptop I bought at the very end of last year, just before the sales tax increased. It's a Toshiba with an AMD dual core processor, with 3 gig RAM and a 250 gig hard drive. It also has some advanced video hardware, not real common in laptops. It is running the Vista operating system. It is neither as bad as you may have heard, nor that much improved over XP that it seems to have been necessary. I got it for $499, I haven't seen too many priced and equipped as well since I bought it. I've been quite pleased with it, but it is a little bulky. My original thought, before buying a laptop, was get as much screen as you can, probably a 17". Ended up with a 15.6", and it seems larger than I really needed.



Prior to buying this, I'd been kind of looking at netbooks. They didn't seem to be quite enough, but the prices were better. Last week I got an E-mail for this little beauty. Less than half what I spent on my Toshiba for an Acer 8.9" netbook!!! Intel Atom processor, 1 gig RAM and 160 gig hard drive. It also has a few things I would like to have had on my laptop, a built in webcam and microphone, as well as a card reader that works with the media from my camera. The webcam does amazingly well in low light conditions, but the audio doesn't seem to sync quite properly with the video. I've only had it one day, but so far, I'm rather liking it better than my laptop!!!

Feed My Frankenstein

Subtitle: The Great Linux Experiment




As you may recall, my oldest boy got many computer upgrades for Christmas. This resulted in a rather large pile of old parts. A couple of weekends ago,I decided to apply some trickle down (or, if you prefer, trickle up) technology upgrades. The younger's comp is rather sluggish, so I decided to upgrade it's hardware. One of the old memory modules bumped it up to the coveted 512 range. The old video card also gave way to better things. I did both of these at the same time, and was rewarded with no video signal. After much trial and error, things worked right, with one exception: Windows decided that the changes were significant enough that it could be a whole new system, and demanded re-activation. OH yea, as an added bonus, in the course of these changes, it lost the network card and sound card drivers. Long story short, (or short upgrade long) it took several hours to do a relatively simple upgrade.

After all that, you'd think I'd have had enough. Not so, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided that there was more fun to be had with leftovers. I think it may have been the fact that it was a rainy afternoon. Still having a perfectly viable motherboard and processor as well as extra video cards and smallish hard drives without number, I ventured into the basement storage area. From the dank depths, I retrieved a computer I had trash picked a few years back. Primarily I had got it for the case itself, as well as the A drive, which I never seem to have enough of, even though they are almost never used. Having acquired it from out of the rain and never done a thing with it, I first connected it and fired it up. Worked just fine, although it was an interesting history lesson. It was running Windows 95, which I have no experience with, and featured ISA type cards, as well as a passive heat sink on the processor. After a bit of snooping to see what was contained therein, I unceremoniously yanked out its innards, and was shocked at how well the motherboard fit in its place.

For an operating system, I selected a free downloaded Linux version called Ubuntu. You download it and burn it to a CD, insert it into a CD drive before the operating system has started on any computer, and it runs "live" without being fully installed on the hard drive from the CD. I've been wanting to try this for a while, and here was the perfect opportunity. It takes some time to start up, but it was an impressive and quite different experience from Windows. Upon starting, it immediately recognized the video and network cards. The sound card, I know worked at least once, but not having any media on this computer didn't have much chance to explore. Many idiosyncrasies that I have yet to completely work out, such as not seeming to be able to access the A drive to save or retrieve pictures (Or any other) files from, and the pop-up blocker that came on when I attempted to add a picture to this post. Also, Java and Flash would need to be installed. Since I'm running it from a CD, there is no point in attempting this right now. A lot of the things that it comes with work remarkably well, such as the spell checker, which tells me every time I misspell a word.



Running from a CD causes some delay in running. I have attempted several times to install it on the hard drive. It acts as though it installs fine, but every time afterward, it gives a message of boot drive failure. Don't know why. I'll try the users forum and see if anyone has an answer. After I see if this will post from Linux.

Technology Meltdown

This is the tale of my New Years Eve. First thing you should know is that I had to work New Years Eve. There wasn't a lot of work going on, but I had to be there. I made a mistake the previous Friday, but it worked out OK. It was slow on Friday, too, and the supervisors came around asking people if they would like to go home early that day or Monday. I immediately said Monday, my logic being that I would prefer to get a little earlier home on New Year's Eve. Just a little after I'd told them that, I got to having second thoughts. Firstly, I was on the later shift on Monday, and being on the road an hour earlier would mean potentially being more in the midst of traffic. My second thought was that, while it was slow on Friday, it was likely to be even slower on Monday, so they might still send people home early that day, even if they'd left early on Friday too. As I said, it worked out, just a bit after I'd articulated this thinking to one of my co-workers, a supervisor came up to me and told me I was leaving an hour early that day, Friday. OK, all's well that ends well.

When I got home quite early that evening, I put my older boy's computer system upgrades in. For all practical purposes, it's a brand new machine, the only things remaining are the case and the CD and floppy drives. I have to say, it was the easiest computer I've ever built.

As I has predicted, it was even slower on Monday. That worked out as I had hoped it would, too. Actually, even better than I'd planned. A bit after morning break, one of the supervisors told me that I only had to work until the start of my lunch break, something they were doing for all the people with good attendance stats. Whoo hooo!!!

I had been planning on scouring junkyards over the weekend. The Benz is running great, except that the transmission doesn't want to shift right. Since the engine is different than the chassis, I'm looking for what is called a "change over valve" that is proper to the year of the chassis. Since I was done at 1, I called up my dad to see if he wanted to go. We did, to two different yards, but had no luck finding the valve.

When I got home is when the title alluded technology meltdown happened. As I was attempting to get some dinner together, my older boy starts calling out, asking what to do when his screen goes upside down!!! I go out and take a look, and sure enough, his screen is displaying upside down!!! Huh. Flip your monitor over, boy. I have no idea how he did it. I remembered some years ago seeing a little joke program you could send your friends that would do just this when activated, but I couldn't find anything like that. I messed with it for quite a while, then gave up on it for a bit.

My younger boy tells me that his new keyboard "does numbers when you do letters". Huh??? I type a few letters. No problem. He types a few farther to the right, and sure enough, it does numbers. Huh??? I'm thinking that his new keyboard has some crossed wires from the factory, and grab the box out of the trash before it goes any farther. I can't figure it out at this time, and finally sit down to eat.

While I'm eating, I happen to look at the digital photo frame that I gave my wife for Christmas. The front of it looks like it's been scribbled on!!! I'm a little upset by this and ask a bit loudly what happened. My younger boy says, "I'm sorry!" Once again, I ask what he did to it, and he repeats "I'm sorry!" Two or three more times we go through this, and I finally have to explain, "Yea, I got that you're sorry, now WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT???" He tells me that he was drawing on it with his finger. Fortunately, it cleaned off with no negative effects.

On my older boy's machine, my wife had the brilliant idea that, since he's now using XP instead of 2000, he could use the system restore. One day back, and everything is fine. I discovered a bit later that his display driver has a built in rotate function. If I'd known sooner...

Sin City came on at 10:00, and it is one of those movies I'd always kind of wanted to see. I turned it on and laid back on the couch. Twenty minutes later, I was out.

Happy New Year!!!