Hyphenation does not mean inheritance

Quite often people of minorities blame the “majority” for creating and marketing racial stereotypes. I admit that even I will generalize people under certain circumstances. However, I have known people from all walks of life. I have a great respect for many of them and their differences from myself. I don’t believe in racial stereotyping. I don’t make judgments based on a person’s appearance. I do judge them on their actions, verbal and non-verbal. I judge a person based on their opinions. And most of all I judge a person based on what group of people they choose to identify themselves as a member.

If a person says to me I am an American. I will associate those ideals that America was founded upon and apply them to my understanding of that person. I will assume they believe in freedom from tyranny and oppression. That they believe that all people should have an equal voice (though to clarify an equal voice does not mean equal influence, there should always be the voice of justice to remind people of what freedom for ALL means). This applies to everybody. I knew a guy that didn’t even have US citizenship yet and still called himself an American. Not Mexican-American. Yes he did later obtain full citizenship, and still the last time I talked to him consider himself only “An American”.

In 1968 there was the black glove incident of the Olympics. Many people will remember it in their own ways, I personally believe in the original concept that rejected all politics in the favor of celebrating the individual. Anyhow, George Foreman was one of the athletes that the organizers of this civil disobedience exercise tried to recruit. When he won the gold in the heavyweight match instead of grabbing the Black Glove, he grabbed an American flag and declared “I AM an American”

Okay so now here is the reason for my title. When somebody hyphenates something onto the word American it does not mean that the new amalgamation somehow has all the features of the word American with a few added ones. That would be contrary to the word American.

Thus when I hear African-American, I remember that 1 in 3 African-American Men has or will see the inside of prison. Or if I hear Arab-American I will remember that the teachings of Islam do not necessarily always condemn the violence we see in this world.

So the point is if you associate yourself with a group that certain generalities apply then do not be surprised if those generalities are applied to you. I am not racist. I do not assume you associate yourself with a certain concept, but if you willingly declare yourself a member of said group then you are embracing those generalities that the group does not reject, or in some cases embraces.

I am an American, and all Americans are my brothers, white, black, yellow, red, short, tall, smart or dumb.

Six Sigma

This is mainly dirrected to those whom have a slight understanding of what six sigma is "supposed" to indicate. I’ve just gone through several days of class and have two (and I think a third is on its way) “Green Belt” project, after completion of one of those, I will be a certified Six Sigma Green Belt. Whatever that means, at least it looks good on a resume.

Now here are my three biggest problems with the system:

a) Six sigma does not mean failures beyond six standard deviations from the mean. It means about 4.5 because of a built-in 1.5 standard deviation fudge factor.
*hand waving* “You see it has been observed that systems tend to drift 1.5 standard deviations after initial gauge R and R measurements”.

b) The only thing people pay attention to is one metric, or variations of it. That metric is CPK or PPK. Which is basically the probability of any failure occurring in your process. It takes some numbers from empirical data and others from a FMEA. That number from the FMEA is how many things can possibly go wrong with the process. That means the more possible failure modes you can make up the better your CPK/PPK becomes without actually improving your process at all.

c) A high degree of hand waving and dependence on pre-made "tools" that ignore important hypothesis testing methods from statistics. This means the likelihood of you creating a statistic with no meaning is very probable.

Something to think about

Important Reading

I stumbled upon this article while I was doing some work on an embedded test system here that is in dire nead of some form of glitch rejection because everytime we power on products they screw with the test system. And of course modifying the test system to reject electromagnetic interference (or even rewiring the thing to reduce the number of incidents of tightly bundling high current and signal wires together) is out of the question. I hate it when I have to do something in software that would have been better done if the thing was engineered properly the first time.

Oh well. At least I found an interesting article that really does illustrate a lot of the things people really need to be aware of when working with digital systems. Its all to easy to reboot, ignore, or mask through some other means an incident that could be of significance in the long run.

OMG!

There is nothing more annoying than somebody going nuts with the canned air ALL DAY LONG.

I mean come on people, its not all that beneficial and how much dust can you have in one PC anyway? And if it has that much why in heaven's name are you doing inside the damn office?

Arg....

Well thats discuraging

So I ran some excel calculations on the cost of ownership of a hybrid right now.

Turns out comparing an uber modified hybrid (made myself that would cost about $8k) that would get me close to 150 MPG and not counting electric charging cost would take 6 years to pay for itsself (at $4.5 a gallon for fuel, which should take a couple years to get there I would think)

In fact the amount of money it would save per week versus my SUBURBAN is less then the amount of money that investment cost would earn me per week in investments (Right now I've been averaging $20 per week on $2000 invested)

The conclusion. Don't run out and buy a hybrid. Wait till you need to buy a new car and have your old one converted (assuming its something that isn't insane... like an SUV... pick a vehicle that is light and has low frontal area and doesn't have a massive amount electronics. I'd say like a late 80s camero, cugar, golf, jetta, escort, etc)

Pwned!

Motorola/Freescale: ~20
Bryan: 0

Microchip: 1
Bryan: 0

Reason for pwnage: Undocumented features/errors.

Reason for the post:

Today I experianced my first problem with a microchip product that I had to call support and talk to for a long while only to not get an answer from them other then to try the latest version of their development environment. For some undocumented reason, it worked.

Editor's Note: Motorola/Freescale will kick your ass into the next century. When working with one of their products make sure to have a nice comfortable phone. If you think you know electronics prepare to be pwned! (anybody remember the three magical NOPs required to make spi work without random glitches every once in a while?)

Ah...... logic...

So this is a follow up to my previous post about the logical nature of VB (heh)... this example is really cool:

foo = 1
bar = 2

if foo and bar then
do something
end if

Question: Will you enter the if statement?
Answer: Absolutely not. Because 0x0001 and 0x0010 evaluates to 0x0000 which is hrm.... not true.

The correct form would be

if foo <> 0 and bar <> 0 then
do something cool
end if

And in other news the very last corner of the Sandwich I am almost done consuming has a small speck of mold on it. This disturbs me, luckily this was the last of the loaf anyway.

What do you do .....

When you have a code base that has a magic number needs changing?

When the power goes out and you have a chance to modify that number?

Do you ninja code change or wait to release documentation?


Bonus points if somebody can guess what I did today :)

VB is Not Logical

Ah the joys of VB.....

Not is VB for both ! and ~ operators instead of one of them. That
creates a weird problem when it decides to do bitwise instead of
logical negation on you.
Mod is VB for % and is the modulus operator

So you would think:

Not ( (1+1) Mod 2 ) would evaluate to 1 right?

Actually it evaluates to -1

So what about Not 1? It evaluates to -2

And if you guessed thats because VB is storing things as numbers and not actually booleans you guess right.