Just in time for the Fourth.

So for today I managed to do two things of great significance

A) Call my boss stupid to his face by accident.
B) Get a burning circuit board on video.

So background on both of these incidents. My boss and I were having a polite discussion about several options about how we could possibly get around a certain company and their really annoying (illegally obtained in my opinion) patent of which they have come out and tried to strong arm us by saying they would vigorously defend their intellectual property (they obtained the patent by not disclosing approximately 10 years of prior art to the patent office). Anyhow my boss made the comment that perhaps we could license the rights to use their idea and have them make approximately $10 worth of harnesses for us. I said this sounded like a really stupid idea because of how poor the CEO of the company has treated us (the largest producer of our product). The response to this was, "Well don't go saying that cause it was my idea".

I am not all that particularly worried about this issue because so far every idea that has gone out and come back eventually comes back the original ideas I had set forth and implemented, and had later had to change. This so far has been a large waste of my time and the company's money. These ideas and changes have, of course, come from above both my boss and myself so we both feel equally annoyed and stressed by the lack of foresight our superiors seem to survive on.

So for the second item on the list I actually have several things to show. The story is that this is the only power handling board on my current project and since this project is being forced out of the door faster than I have time to work on it, occasionally I don't get a chance to go through it with a fine tooth comb. Also because there is no pin length associated with ports on a hierarchical block in OrCAD Capture there can be a line between those two pins without it being visible to the designer. Thus what has happened here is the output of two relays were tied together unintentionally, one of which is normally at battery positive voltage, and the other at battery ground. Hence flames ensued.

My coworker of course noticed that things started to sizzle on the board as soon as he plugged it in and was fast enough to pull power before any damage was done. So the first photograph I have is of the internal power plane delamination due to excessive heat because of the current being passed through this trace (approximately 100A to begin with).

I, feeling somewhat irresponsible this afternoon decided that we should connect it back up to the battery and see if we can clear the fault so I don't have to cut into the board to remove the offending trace. I also of course remembered that my digital camera had a video mode. Thus I present you with:

Board on Fire (505kB Windows Media)

And no I have not seen the movie Man on Fire, despite wanting to. And I meant no copyright infrigement by labeling my short snippet similarly. Perhaps I will buy the DVD when it hits Walmart's $5.50 bin.

Just for comparison's sake I also took a photograph of the same board after significant charring

I feel accomplished today.

Quiz Again

Funky quiz time. Hrm, doesn't really make much sense but oh well. Boston is cool though, for a city.

Take the quiz: "What Part of America should you be from?"

North East
A little snobby yet sleek is very you. You take things slow and steady and dont like change. You can be very stuck up but are nice most of the time.

But the alternative if I change my color is:

Take the quiz: "What Part of America should you be from?"

North West
You are the great person everyone loves. You hate the spotlight but love people at the same time. You are generous and loving.

I just don't particularly have any favorite colors. So I blame the choices on randomness.

Movie Grosses

Too bad a few more people didn't go see White Chicks on sunday keeping the moment from saturday. If they had it would have outsold the Michael Moore chunky hurl Fahrenheit 9/11. As it stands White Chicks took in $19.6 million against Fahrenheit 9/11's $23.9 million after they tallied in another $2 million (that for some reason wasn't tallied in?).

Oh well my keyboard is almost dead and I need to find batteries for it so I must stop here...

Invitations

So I've discovered that as a gmail user I can invite others to join up as well.

So I guess to share the love, so to speak, leave a comment if you want one and I will send you an invite.

Warning Signs

This is a warning sign that I came across today:

Warning: Some experts report that prolonged use of any *DEVICE NAME DELETED* could cause serious injury. Please refer to usage statement in user manual.

Take a wild guess what device this sticker was found on?

Ready?

My new keyboard. Yes a computer keyboard can be hazardous to your health.

*Editor's Note* I need something to scream at me whenever I post without using verbs. For those who read this post before I edited it, I appologize.

The state of blogging

So when I started blogging I had the choice to go with a livejournal or to use blogger (or for that matter misc other systems). I chose blogger even though I knew fewer people using it because the people behind it seemed to be on top of things. That stated I will say the following:

I am going to stop reading all LiveJournals until LiveJournal gets their act together and stops being retardedly slow with massive DNS problems.

That means I will shortly be changing links back to folks that also use alternatives (Yes I use my own blog as a bookmark for all other blogs/journals I read).

I'm a-l-i-v-e!!!!

So today we had our health screening at work. I learned that I don't have high colesterol, I'm 5' 10", 179 lbs, and 15% of me doesn't do anything.

And I have a sore finger where they squeezed out more blood than what would, of its own will, come out.

So a co-worker has writen a nicely writen amusing monologue about our new Wellness program so I won't go into it here because I doubt I could do as well a job. However, I have one thought:

When will they put valves on our chest so they can let out our blood when they feel like it?

(Yes Nate, I was thinking dune)

Guadalcanal Epitaph

And when he gets to Heaven
To Saint Peter he will tell.
One more soldier reporting, Sir
I've served my time in Hell!

The author is always listed as unknown.

For some reason it seemed rather fitting for the events of late.

The State of Our Economy

I am very confident that the United States economy is recovering. I am both happy about this and very afraid. Happy because well a good economy is good for us right? Afraid because Price Inflation is ready to raise its ugly head.

Why?

Because electronic components I used to be able to get in 2 weeks in September now will take me 30 weeks. Some of these are commodity level items. This frightens me. At this moment chip fabs averaged out are all above the 90% usage mark. New plants start getting built around the 85% mark. Not many new plants have been made, thus I think the price of parts will rise, and then inflation is evident.

And then we have a job problem because people's salaries don't go up with inflation. I am confident that our fearless leader of all things money, Allen Greenspan, will not let inflation out of control. But 30 week leadtime parts become a huge headache for me at work.

In other news I've receive several responses from recruiters of a resume I posted to monster over a year ago. Scary. Why? Because one of them was from an insurance firm for a sales position, in which I learned that insurance companies do buy people's souls to sell more insurance. Starting salary for an insurance salesman with absolutely no experience whatsoever was 75k + benefits.

Too bad I actually care about my soul.

Things of Late

So I've been working on MildlyRetarded.com and it's gradually turning into something. I got moveabletype installed on it today, now I just have to modify the blog to my liking.

*There was an interlude during the writing of this blog post that involved me going to the gas station because my keyboard ran out of batteries*
(Wireless is good for some things... I'm starting to wonder about its use in computer peripherals)

Anyhow, I also had to move over swmuseum.org from where it was pointing for the couple years because my registrar for it had locked it to keep it from getting transferred fraudently. Thankfully, illegal domain transfer happen far less frequently than when they first deregulated the process. But all I had to do was send them an email. Pretty simple really. Just unexpected in my mind, since I was thinking of how much information they should have been asking me for.

A friend has also asked me to host their domain on my server. Thats right Kim, send me an email so I can do the nitty gritty details. See movabletype works!

:)

Hump-Day

So today is Wednesday, halfway done for this week. Not that is any consolation to me, since we have the stupid wellness stuff going on (maybe I'll elaborate, maybe not). But one of the things that has really begun to get on my nerves are these "Time sheets". See while we're paid hourly and must still clock in, engineering has these printouts from MS Project that we must log our hours on.

Well there are several problems with this. I work on so many different projects in one day I can't keep track of which 5 minute block of time I spent where, so I just guessimate the number of hours on some random project and put it there. This is the most common method of filling out these timesheets. The second problem is that the project actually in MS Project is a total abomination. Its a series of functional requirements and random misc tasks. There is no structure to it whatsoever and thus putting hours into anything is totally worthless because you still can't find out what you're supposed to be working on and where you're at.

Jaded

So was the world always this stupid and we've just grown up to notice it or have things really been getting out of hand lately?