Can I Get an Upgrade?
Posted 09.29.11 at 02:22 PM UTC
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I almost purchased a new thermostat with programmability and all those other bells and whistles. Cursor hovering over the Check Out button, I decided that "looks awesome" should not be the number-one purchasing decision factor when buying HVAC accessories. The War on Builder Grade found a de-escalation point.

I'm quite tempted to drop the new "Netflix" service, meaning the streaming part only, and pick up the Amazon Prime unlimited video thing, which appears to at least stumble through working with Windows Media Center. With impending "regular purchases of specialized disposable Velcro-supported products," that free two-day shipping could start to pay dividends as well.

Completed Set
Posted 09.29.11 at 02:12 PM UTC
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As of sometime next week, all my yard equipment will say "na na na na na" rather than "waaaaa." Nice gas blower on sale today from Woot/Amazon plus a $30 rebate. Thanks, Slickdeals!

I'm going to attempt to construct a high impedence diffuser fitted to the guts of the current electric blower to make a high-powered garage fan, but that falls pretty low on the ol' priority list in these hectic times.

But man, I could really use a garage fan in these unseasonably warm times.

I Vant to Centrifuge Your Blood
Posted 09.22.11 at 07:18 PM UTC
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We had a blood drive today at work, and as I had hoped they had some pretty rockin' t-shirts for the citizen soldiers who showed up for the fun.

When they see my O-neg type come up on the screen, the blood nurses tend to get a vampiric glint in their eyes. I was encouraged to leverage my extra time on a quiet Thursday to give red blood cells, which involves taking what I assume is up to four times as much blood, separating the red blood cells out into two units rather than the normal one pint sack of standard blood, then re-injecting the plasma or whatever back into the vein so I don't keel over.

Everything was going alright until the little light on the machine flipped over to "Replace" or whatever, at which point I got a burn in my arm around 2-3 on the owwie scale, and I noticed I had a bump developing around the needle that started to look a lot like a white-collar episode of Intervention.

The nurse observed high pressure on the machine's display and asked me if it burned. I tough-guyed it, but I wasn't going to lie. Pretty quickly the machine was turned off and the needle removed. I was informed that the bevel of the needle had rotated inside my arm, apparently injecting the plasma goop somewhat outside the vein, hence the crowning bump. I wanted to re-insert and continue, but they said I was done, at least consoling me that they got a pint of red blood cells out of the deal before we had to shut down.

I am still in the range of time I'm supposed to keep the bandage on. I'm kind of scared to take it off. I said, "That's going to be a bruise." She laughed and said, "I'm glad I caught it when I did, because it would have been pretty ugly if you had gone the next round." Maybe I'll get at least one domestic violence joke out of the deal.

They assured me that nothing in my physiology prevents me from doing this successfully next time. It was just operator error. I knew I was in for it when the tech couldn't find my obviously bulging vein easily.

The nurse who caught the error was clearly disgusted with the needle job, but at least I got to refer her to our fertility clinic while she got me bandaged up.

The Aprons of Silence
Posted 07.28.11 at 02:57 PM UTC
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My favorite poem, "Aprons of Silence" by Carl Sandburg, starts with: "Many things I might have said today / And I kept my mouth shut."

I have a few silly stories to tell that I'd rather not tell online despite their harmlessness. Ask me about them in person sometime.

Silly stories might be my only trade right now. Things are running pretty slowly. My current job is good, but I'm struggling to envision my future at this moment. It doesn't mean it's not there, but I can't completely see it right now.

Aside from it being a significant emotional stress on me, elements of Turkey turned out to be my true calling as far as I can tell. It's hard to find out if the good stuff could ever exist in relative isolation from the uncomfortable stuff I experienced in Turkey. I think it might, but I don't know how or where.

I'm trying to see how a line management track, which is my path now in all probability, would get me somewhere similar to this vision. Again, it might be able to happen. Especially in a big shop, there are lots of corners that can have a weird nexus of opportunity.

It just turned out that my IT bent, which I always knew to be my love in life, might be a bit more commercializable than I originally thought. I got a taste of a kind of IT divorced from both the disgusting corporate bureaucracy and the pure technical (which I love but don't know if I could do for a living, a reservation I've had since high school).

Kind of like being a COBOL programmer, the Grand Canyon will probably touch magma before this type of trade dies out.

My education path never implied that I would find a stable career path, effectively nurturing a Jekyll and Hyde yin-yang between technical and finance (which is also technical in my eyes). But my preference is to be stable. The fact that I can't get this off my mind says it should probably stay there.

Project, Phases 1-2
Posted 06.08.11 at 04:46 AM UTC
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My network music player briefcase project rolls along. While I await my speakers, amplifier, and cabling, I went ahead and did the power switch modifications to the laptop board (allowing for an external switch, shown in the upper-left of the picture hooked up with green and yellow alligator clips). That switch will be panel-mounted on the top of the case, near the handle.

The white USB cable has been chopped at the device end, pulling out the 5V DC supply coming from the USB port and using it to power an LED indicator (bottom-right), which illuminates when the laptop power is on. The breadboard in the bottom-left just handles the hookups for that and currently houses the resistor for the LED.

I picked up some tiny pre-etched circuit boards at Radio Shack today that will ultimately contain all the electronics to drive the switching and LEDs. I also have the panel mounts to attach all the lights and switches. The 1/8" stereo jack is ready to go, which will take an auxiliary input and pass it through to my speakers.

Later this week I can drill out all the panel mounts and go ahead and mount the switches, lights, and audio jack onto the metal plate.

The Egg Actually Is the Chicken
Posted 03.31.11 at 03:08 PM UTC
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In Excel, there is a difference between a blank cell and a cell with no value. It is impossible to force a cell to be blank via a formula, because the presence of a formula makes the cell not blank.

This might seem like an asinine thing to worry about, but blank cells can be important when doing certain gambits like special pastes that avoid writing over labels on rows and columns, or values that come from another source and should not be destroyed. These non-blank empty cells steamroll anything standing in their way, contrary to the perceptible logical state of the spreadsheet.

If you put the formula ="" into the cell, that's saying, "This cell should be blank." If you copy and paste values only (destroying the formula) into a new unused cell, despite having nothing in it (no detectable sign you did anything in that cell, unless you just remember), Excel still sees this as a non-blank cell... because you pasted nothing from a non-blank cell. It's tainted. The only way to clear it out is to press the delete key while on top of it.

So, it's basically hopeless. You're squarely in macro-land to solve that problem. And you don't want to be in macro-land for such a dumb reason.

I found one workaround, assuming you leave the ="" (or more complicated derivative) formula in place. If you highlight the area, do a Go To Special, select Formulas and only check Text, it will highlight all the non-blank blanks (assuming all other values are either hard-coded or numbers), which you can then just press delete to clear. That's a very risky workaround, though. It would be pretty easy to delete something you meant to keep in this scenario. If you had a desirable ="HELLO" function, it goes away in this method.

I can stomach that a formula returning "" should be considered a non-blank. I do not agree that a pasted-values "" cell should be non-blank. That's a bug in my view. Maybe if you split the concept to Values-Blank and Content-Blank, where a "" cell would be Values-Blank only, and a totally cleared cell would be Content-Blank. But that's definitely busting core functionality and logic for a silly edge case. It's a pity.

The job is going very well. I realized toward the end of Turkey that my job lacked stability on a lot of vectors. A lot. This job basically has stability on all vectors. This means the job can be very challenging and busy and still not be the kind of gut-twisting strain you would see in a volatile environment. Just being back home with very like-minded and highly qualified individuals makes everything easier. The state of things currently is very similar to what I inherited at the refinery, maybe even in better shape. So, it's kind of a smooth glide into a moderated challenge. Things are organized.

An "easy hard job" was the concept I formed up this morning. In Turkey, even an easy job would have been hard for many reasons.

The Odyssey: One for the Books (Part 3)
Posted 01.04.11 at 03:03 PM UTC
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Just realized I never tied this story up, and before I forget anything I wanted to get it on the record.

I wrote Part 2 in Leeds on Sunday. We spent one more night in Leeds and got up Monday morning to get onto a bus. The bus took about six hours to roll into Heathrow considering traffic and bad roads.

When we got into Heathrow almost everything was shut down as far as flights go. It was really eerie in there, I described it like the hum in a football stadium when a player is down with an injury.

The general instruction was to leave the terminal and try to either call or get online to "rebook." It was not extremely clear what it meant to rebook. Earlier, the communcations implied we just needed to wait until the scheduling people found us the proper continuing flight given the disruption. As the chaos scaled up, it became clear everyone was out for themselves, just trying to slip onto an already-full flight to get home as soon as possible.

BA continued to be good to us throughout, with the one exception that they KNEW the phone and internet options were totally hopeless. It unfortunately became more important for them to clear the terminal than it was to provide people with realistic solutions or news. The phones were completely full (you couldn't even be on hold) and the internet tool just disabled rebooking for all the cancelled flights. This was borderline unethical communication from them, in my view.

BA, at least, was giving out hotel vouchers. This made things very nice, except that the standby lines opened at 4:45 AM the next day (there was no available customer service by the time we got in on Monday). The trains do not run that early, so it was tempting to sleep in the airport to make sure we were in a good position in line.

We opted for the hotel and decided we would catch a taxi to Heathrow early in the morning to get in line. That was a good call, especially since...

There are no lines in Heathrow.

The whole thing was structured to remove the advantage of staying in the terminal overnight. The waiting area was the shape of a wedge, with multiple entrances, essentially preventing any sort of line from forming. A lot of people only found that out when they woke up in the morning and discovered they were not in line.

It's a good thing we got in early, because -- line or not -- the flight to Turkey was the first flight that morning to be posted on standby. We were two of the last people to get onto the flight, which allowed us to get back to Turkey and get a nice flight to Houston via Chicago.

So that's the story!

The Odyssey: One for the Books (Part 2)
Posted 12.19.10 at 05:49 PM UTC
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It was hard to do an update when everything started sucking, which was relatively soon after I wrote Part 1. Now things are looking clearer.

We in fact did not get a flight into Heathrow today, nor did just about anyone else in the world. They may just now start letting a few long-hauls take off. We could have made it to Heathrow via a very expensive train ride directly from Leeds (the station is across the street from our hotel), but my feeling is that those long-hauls taking off today are about clearing the airport rather than fixing our problem.

The BA website's flight status suggests an early-morning flight to Heathrow tomorrow morning (based on prior experience the website gives a "best case" view that the crew/hotel/support is generally not willing to offer to the real people). I think it's reasonable to foresee a morning to mid-afternoon flight to Heathrow, a shot at a long-haul in the evening, or a strong possibility of escaping Heathrow Tuesday that we can probably hang our hats on.

We'll see...

The Odyssey: One for the Books (Part 1)
Posted 12.19.10 at 07:44 AM UTC
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Let's start by saying I am writing this using Free WiFi at a very nice 3-star hotel in Leeds, Merry Olde England.

"Kar geldi," as the Turks might say, the snow came.

For cost and timing reasons, we actually broke our Star Alliance fealty and flew with British Airways. The captain knew we were hosed, but there was still hope we would catch a window and land in Heathrow. We were a little late getting off the tarmac in Istanbul (but hey, it's Istanbul).

Breakfast was a little "dodgy" (let's switch to British now). That's not complaining; it's part of the story.

We did a holding pattern near Heathrow until the fuel situation got impractical, then we dog-legged up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and landed. Newcastle's airport is pretty small, but there were several Emirates and BA 777 jumbo jets parked on the tarmac, doing what we did. The airport filled up with parked airplanes shortly thereafter.

We sat on the tarmac for six hours.

This was originally a trans-European flight to the hub, so that dodgy breakfast was the only food the crew had available. We were already coming in a bit late, so lunch came and went.

Here's where the heroism started. First, the captain lobbied and got permission to let people leave the plane and terminate their trip at Newcastle. Checked baggage was a problem, so the captain offered to climb into the hold and extract baggage, a proposal eventually signed off by the security/customs people at the airport.

People were getting hungry. The captain informed us that catering was not much of a possibility, since the other jumbos would have cleaned them out by now, and planes normally carry round-trip provisions when heading to Newcastle because it's so small.

The captain left the plane again and completely bought everything available in the shop at the airport. Incredible. He picked up around 100 sandwiches, little finger cake things they call flapjacks, trail mix, apples, chips, etc. We were randomly one of the last rows served, so they were out of sandwiches, but we still got a decent snack thanks to the captain taking time to care.

We had a few kids on board, who heroically didn't cause a fuss the whole time.

The captain lobbied hard first for one of the coveted slots to land in Heathrow that afternoon (if there were any at all), then they tried to set up coaches for a convoy to London, but the roads to Heathrow might have been worse than the runways.

The crew requested an extension of every non-legal restriction on their service time, but we were up against a hard 9:30 PM legal stop-work for the crew. There were no available hotel rooms in Newcastle for us, so the captain announced we would fly to Leeds. This far north, the sun goes down around 4:15 PM or so, so this was a night flight. I can't remember exactly the timings at this point, but we were in the 7:00 PM range when we took off, I think.

Short flight to Leeds, then more tarmac time to rally the ground troops. They lined up two nice coaches at arrivals (everyone including the Turks had to go through border control, including those without visas; not sure how that worked, maybe they had transit visas) and bussed us to this great hotel.

Dinner was served at 10:15 PM. Roasted turkey, roasted potatoes, vegetables, and gravy. They set up a little buffet in the airport lounge restaurant. We didn't have our camera, but there was this great "WELCOME PASSENGERS OF CANCELED BA FLIGHT" sign outside. We got two complementary cokes, and I'm sure a lot of our fellow passengers went up to the 13th floor Sky Bar and helped them recover whatever cost they didn't get back from BA.

We're about to go down to breakfast now, which is also complementary. As of right now (a trademark phrase), we have a 2:00 PM flight to Heathrow according to the website. Unless we're on another airplane later on, tonight might not be as good of a night. They are starting to cancel "new" outbound flights, including the "Sunday version" of our Houston flight yesterday scheduled on 2:20 PM. Maybe that's to help clear the way to let some of these backlogged passengers out. BBC News is saying "few" flights will leave today, but I think that may be partly to manage people's expectations.

BA's transfer desk will help us find our new itinerary. Snow seems to be abating, and I trust they will do as right by us today as they have done so far.

Let me heartily recommend BA, post-strike, post-cloud, as a stellar, top-notch airline. I doubt we could find this kind of generosity from another airline.

Out of the Rabbit Hole, or Fox Hole?
Posted 11.03.10 at 11:38 AM UTC
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The last two weeks have been pretty crazy. We made it out for another trip (the picture captioning backlog is now epic, poor Kristin), but the bread of that vacation sandwich has been very difficult. We basically have the books closed now for the first time in the new system, and from the financial side things look really good. We have to get some people problems fixed, though.

You don't have to look too hard to see the outpourings of a desire to come home. From the weird foot removal dreams (signifying perceived inability to move, according to Dr. Internet) to the sudden desire to clean out my desk just now, my mind is wrapping things up a lot sooner than the company is getting around to it.

I think feeling the project begin to unwind is a big part of all this. There is still work to be done, but it's responding work rather than anticipatory work. I was enjoying the planning side of things, and I feel like any responding work I do is taking the opportunity to learn away from someone who will do it after I'm gone.

That's a hard thing to communicate here once you get a measure of experience and knowledge. The role of 'Trainee Fire Fighter' does not exist; you go from 'Idiot Who Can't Extinguish Fires' to 'Expert on Fire Fighting', and they'd rather use the Expert while he's here and start over with an Idiot at the last possible moment.

We have a pretty exciting two months coming up, which eases a lot of this unease.