And the truth will set you free.

The CEO of Quest Communications Dick Notebaert has come out and in a truly amazing turn of events has told the rest of his industry that it "has to accept the fact that we are a commodity," but at the same time recognize that "commodity is not a bad word."

Why? Because Quest is the smallest of the baby bells, and while the others like BellSouth and SBC are blowing their profits in legal battles with the government that in the end will only be futile (anybody remember AT&T and GTE when they tried it?), Quest can already be negotiating deals and grabbing customers and networks when people get utterly fed up and start jumping off the sinking ship.

Not abusing the customer is not a new idea, in fact you've probably been hearing about "Do No Evil" which is one of Page and Brin's company mottos. Hopefully a new wave of honest hardworking CEOs is on its way.

A serious case of double O stOOpid

What do you do when somebody knows the rhetoric so well that you can't argue with them other than to come right out and tell them to stop being a hypocrite and do what they're talking about?

Today's show is brought to you by the letter....

So today's magical words and phrases are a) anal leakage, b) grogan load, c) once you start you can't stop, and finally d) purple.

Isn't lunch among friends wonderful?

Public Power, Private Gain

Okay so abuses of eminent domain are getting worse and worse. Like in San Diego they are explicitly taking away a business and giving it to Marriott for a new hotel. This is not a blighted area. The business is an upscale cigar and coffee shop that had been there for years. The city has not even pretended to say its for a public works, it going to a private business. And the courts have said that its okay.

Current News Report
The previous news report with more detail

If fact when I searched google for eminent domain abuses I found out that there have been more than 10 THOUSAND documented cases of eminent domain abuses, blatantly illegal, that courts have refused to rule justly on.

I'm appalled.

Public Power, Private Gain: The Report '98-'02.
Goldwater Institute Article about the report.

Walmart: One Stop Terrorist Supply

So this evening I went to get some needed supplies for myself (food) so I wouldn't have to go out for lunch again this week. While I do seem to be racking up overtime hours since I seem to be on every project and its bastard stepchild I don't want to waste them on extra lunches. Anyway, to continue my story I went to walmart as well as the grocery store. When I got back I noticed that the things I bought at walmart probably were a set of items that could be used in some fairly effective improvised munitions. While I actually purchased them for legitimate uses I just thought it was rather funny when I got home and thought about what else I could do with them.

Death and Taxes

Okay so this is my view of taxes. If use a service provided by a government entity than I will pay for it. If it is not provided I will not pay for it. In other words I will gladly pay federal taxes for military and government operations because I gain a benefit from being protected and having a stable government. The government is in no way involved with providing me the ability to use IM or buy something from Ebay. I am very angered by the prospect that many local and federal levels of government wish to start taxing IM and user transactions online. Luckily right now there are slightly more sane people than greedy bastards, but I'm sure that will change soon.

Observation Post

So I was at my computer and turned around and looked outside and saw some movement in the woods, which turned out to be a group of deer (I wonder if they have a special term for them...maybe herd?), so of course I had to take a picture. So here it is: Deer.

Quote Time

So its a really long quote but I have always really liked this quote, I think I first ran across it when I was 14 or so. And whenever you read a biography, no mater what the length, Hoover always comes across as very libertarian, and proof that when you get somebody honest in power after a period of corruption you end up with things falling apart. (Hoover came in and the stock market crashed because of government and big business corruption, more recently we had Bush come in and had huge number of business accounting scandals, my only wish is that Bush wasn't so pro large-strong central government).

Engineering ... it is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned....

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by the people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people's money ... but the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professionals may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.

--
Herbert Hoover 31st President of the United States

Hurah! for the dumb liberal media

So while a woman and her husband getting fired for publishing photos taken against federal law and company policy ran as a top story with even more photos from a website under the "freedom of information act" I propose the follow up to it should read "CNN, AP, Washington Post and other liberal sources made another blunder in their overzealous quest vilify the current administration"

The photos weren't of any military personnel, they were in fact the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

I dare you to try to find a correction or retraction from any new sources that published anything to do with the "US Military Servicemen Casket Photos". In fact the original site to post the photos has not even made a whisper alluding to the fact they are not "Casualties from Iraq"

I agree with the policy of not releasing photos quite strongly because I believe the families of those lost still have a right to say whether or not a photo containing their loved one, in any form, is to be released.

No Way!

Okay so I happened across these things and they are amazing. Go check out the PowerSkip they have videos there, pretty wild stuff is all I have to say.

As to review the day it was one of those days where despite what the world tried to do I was in far too good of a mood to let it get to me thus I managed to blast through everything that needed to get done, which means pushing through 4 different circuit board designs, coordinating part deliveries, and perfectly soldering a 100 pin 15 mil. TQFP. And I even managed to get a little bit of overtime in so if I felt like it I could leave early tomorrow. And when I got home every tree that I can see from my "sunroom" was green and absolutely gorgeous. Mind you two days ago they were still brown and barely even budding. Now all I have to have happen is for the rest of my life to move so well and look so pretty.

I rule...

...something, somewhere, very small.

So today they painted yet again in the engineerin shop. I wonder if they will ever learn. Tim has a more indepth discussion of it from the last time they did it.

In other news because yours truly is a blogger he gets to try out Gmail. Since my yahoo account is sitting at about 50% capacity and I have to make sure the junk mail folder gets emptied routinely so I can still receive emails I think its really cool to have a full GB of space for my email. Ha, you thought I was going to list my email address here. Well if you know me you should be able to easily guess what it is. Or you could just ask me what it is.

Also running still sucks, but this time for a different reason. See back in the day, when I was still fit, running was an arduous task because my feet point outward slightly so my knees would ache after a short period of time. Now my legs and knees are fine but my lungs get sore. Majorly annoying. On the other hand I can do more pull-ups and sit-ups than I ever could before. Go figure. I been finding this getting back into shape after this seven years of college thing is not all that difficult to motivate myself to do whenever I think about the current work state and wish I was actually in Nuclear Power School.

Ow! my TESTis!

So the utter lack of testing finally came up and bit us in the ass again. Not to my surprise except for the fact that the problem landed on my plate. Simply because I helped replace an expensive component with a lesser expensive one (to the tune of $30k a year) and I demanded the ability to test it. So 2 months later I have the ability to test it, and guess what? It doesn't work.

And to add insult to injury I have to stop the production of this item because, well to put it simply, it doesn't work.

All because it wasn't tested. I'm getting fed up with the whole process of rush rush rush, don't test, rush rush, don't test, Nothing works! Its happening on everything and I literally have half a dozen boards on my desk that have gone through this process and are just siting there waiting to be tested and yet they want to put them into production because they are siting on my desk.

So yah I feel like my balls are in a vise.

The end of the world

Ever wonder what an asteroid impact would be like?

Check out the Impact Effects calculator.

I did it for a reason

Okay so the only thing I have to say about today is this: If you change something on a schematic without me approving it I will not take responsibility for how wonderfully it fails. I can do my best to make sure your stupid changes don't make it through but in the future don't ever dare make a change to my design without my approval.

To explain my remarks the following is what happened.

A) An old design was updated by myself to make it use lower cost components. There were several resistors in the design, and since the design had been tested and is working in the field I left them the same.
B) Today I was asked to populate the new board and notice that the values seemed really wrong.
C) The following resistors were changed from my design (and hence the original) by the drafting guy without knowledge of it or approval from anybody else:
R2 was 240 ohms now 5.1 kilo-ohms: difference of 2000%
R6 was 750 ohms now 1.37 kilo-ohms: difference of 82%
R13 was 1 kilo-ohm now 1 ohm: difference of 100000%
R14 was 1.5 ohms now 1 ohm: difference of 50%

So it would definitely never work. And why the fuck did it ever change!? I mean come on how fucking hard is it to use the design I came up with instead of changing all the values. It actually takes a lot more work to change all the values because you have to go into the libraries and change each and every part. I mean the work all already done by me in the first place. So having to correct the print and send it back is really retarded.

Also changing part values is one thing, but lets say on a complex design, if a net were to change on me I would never be able to find it. I mean there has to be some accountablity in this and there just is none and it is driving me absolutely bonkers.

Editor's Note: Replacing the 1kohm part with a 1 ohm part would result in that one ohm part blowing clean off the board in a rather spectacular flash.

*peon voice* Work Work Work */peon voice*

*Editor's Warning: Herein contains a rant, it has not been edited for content, colorful metaphors, or for the correct use of spelling and grammer

It will never cease to amaze me, the amount of work I do in two hours when there is nobody around is more than what I get done in a full work week with everybody there. With the paging system going off every two seconds because people are too fucking lazy to look at the ONE PAGE phone dirrectory that is in everybody's cube. And then theres the constant retarded banter from the drafting area, which is starting to get majorly annoying because thats where the bottleneck is so I just have to sit in my cube bored to tears because I did everything before anybody even asked for it because of this constant problem.

So excuse me for being proactive and finding problems then coming up with solutions and implimenting them before anybody even things about maybe asking if maybe this one thing isn't exactly right. At this point in time I just can't find enough stuff to even keep me looking busy because I'm getting held up on the slow drafting folks.

As for that thinking of things before hand the typical one is when I get asked if ______ controller could be put in ______ vehicle. Well I of course say that it was specifically designed for that vehicle. So then I get told to make up the harnesses for them. At this point I understand where the conversation is going so I stop, take a deep breath, count to 5, and let it all out. It went something like this: "The harnesses are already done, the harnesses are released, they have been tested, they even have earlier part numbers than the harness that are in there for what we are using now since the controller was designed for that specifically in mind and while we were distracted by putting in _____ other vehicle, everything is complete"

Of course what I was thinking was this: "Well duh! the only reason the current harnesses exist is because of a stupid cludge of a controller that we had to come up with so the manager of engineering could push out his dumb pet project that simply took away from the market share of our own product instead of the competiors and it should have waited till now because this controller was designed from the ground up to do the correct thing"

Retribution

So the question for today is: If somebody can't get the right information to you, or gave you misleading information, do you decided to spend an extra dollar* to go with somebody else that will?

Sales reps annoy me to no end. I know it's their job to whore themselves out to get business but they need to learn to give me a freakin' straight answer the first time before I wait for two weeks for samples that never arrive forcing me to look for alternative companies to sell the $4 part. And then they come back and say "We didn't ship you the samples because the fab is starting full production items in two weeks" to which I have to reply with "I'm submitting a final BOM to a CM in two weeks for 45k units a year and I only have two samples to work with and I need at least three simply to do basic testing."

Okay so then he says "I'll call you back first thing tomorrow then and make sure you get your samples". Well great dude I've already made phone calls and am about two steps from getting more than enough actual production parts in less than a week. Would it have been so hard to have told me months ago that the parts weren't actually in production yet?

Sorry I make judgments fast, but its a fast paced world and I don't doddle when it comes to choosing what deserves my time and what is a total waste of it.

Editor's Note: *BTW thats one buck per device.....we'd use 45 thousand.

Huh?

Okay so just out of curiosity I decided to look over what I eat naturally and see if it lines up with any sort of diet. So this is the general daily set of meals:

Breakfast: Poptart and a coke: 111g of Carbs, 12g of fat, 540 Calories
Lunch: (Can't really quantify it right now, normally involes two slices of potato or oatmeal bread and something inbetween: pb&j, or misc meats. Sometimes dinner leftovers, and always a yogurt and a banana)
Dinner: Normally 1/2 lb (prior to cooking) of pasta and a tomato based sauce, a clove of garlic, and about a tsp of olive oil. Other times about a 1 lb of beef (in steak form), a baked potato. I do know that a 1/2 lb of pasta has 500 calories and 160 carbs and a 1lb of beef loin is about 1700 calories and mostly just protein

Of course there are others but this is about the most "unheathy" set of meals I can think of right now. So it looks like that in general I eat a low fat diet, but I don't care about my carbs, in fact when I cook my own food normally I have a lot of something very starchy. If I don't eat any fast food I slim down to a little smaller than I am now (6' tall, I wear a 42" coat, 32" pants, and weigh between 175-185lbs).

So yah about all I can say is avoid fast food and things heavy on greese, and actually thats been the general understanding for many many years. So ya I'm not all that impressed with the atkins thing, it seems like people are removing the nutrionally valuable things from food and just leaving the taste and fat, in that case why even bother eating it to begin with. Oh wait I forgot people eat for the hell of it these days.