Feel good story of the day

A week ago, I found a cell phone on the bus and turned it into the lost and food. Yesterday, same route, same driver, as I got on, she told me that the guy who just got off the bus was the one who owned the phone. A transit employee who was happy to have his phone back. It feels good to have closure on these things.

Mess is over, for another year at least

I work in a factory. It’s a place that’s kind of away from the public eye, so we get a lot of new immigrants and many of them aren’t too confident in their english skills. It’s not too bad since most of the things we tend to say are rather simplistic, though every once in a while I run into a situation that I just don’t know how to approach. We had one person writing “Fed” instead of “Feb” on our document dates. Yes, someone should do something about it, but that’s one that I’m not touching. At the end of the month, I saw a document with numbered dates, so hopefully we won’t run into this again next year. It’s kind of mean that nobody has told him about it yet. Having everyone kind of snicker behind his back is far worse in the long run than someone giving him a gentle nudge and saying that ‘b’s go in the other direction. I don’t really know him that well, but if I had to guess, I’d say this guy has been in the country for over a year already. Well, if I see this happening again next year, I’m going to ask a supervisor to do something. This is just done for now.
Just to clarify, nothing against immigrants here, but I do look down at management for this. I see supervisors run around checking things out all the time and well, if this is the standard they want to set, than I’ll let them be content with what they have.

Wow spam

It’s been a long time since I logged in here. I kind of miss writing here. Well, I still remember my password. Not sure what to say about what’s happened lately, so I’m just going to skip that. Gotta work tomorrow, so all I’ll say is it’s amazing the amount of spam a dead blog picks up. Like 3000 posts worth.

Angry, Bitter, and Unemployed

I went to bed in the middle of drafting yet another cover letter. Going over old memories and trying to put my qualifications in words.
I almost got a perfect score in one of my university classes. The only thing was, I had a dispute over sign conventions with the TA. I drew my vector in one direction because I knew that it should go there and expressed my numerical answer as a positive in the direction indicated. This was the opposite of the answer key, the vector pointed the other way and had a negative quantity indicating that it should really go in the other direction. I was right and pleaded my case only to be told that I needed to think about the problem rather than simply relying on my calculator to get the right answer. I did think about the problem, which is why I drew my vector in the correct direction. As for relying on my calculator, after sitting through so many reviews I decided that I won’t be needing it on the test, the math was trivial. I never took it out. Despite all this, my second appeal failed and I heard the same reply again, think about the question, don’t rely on your calculator. All the other work I did in the course was dead on.
There was another time where I had a very simple exam. It was electronics for non-electrical engineers. Having completed an electronics course in highschool and played around with several circuits of my own design it was a trivial course for me. I walked into the test and pretty much walked out in the first five minutes since the course was geared towards people with little to no electronics knowledge. After a brief discussion with the TA, he felt convinced that I was indeed deserving of a perfect score and not a trip to the dean’s office.
I also had three courses where my entire set of notes could be written on the back of a business card. One was chemistry, which covered a bit less than my highschool IB class but had one equation that I hadn’t already familiarized myself with. The two were introduction to economics and engineering economics. From all my observations, those two subjects are either ones you understand right away or are simply doomed to struggle with.
There was also a time when we needed a high voltage power supply to do some smart materials testing. Before the study of where can we find such an item and how long will it take to get it concluded, I tossed one together with the parts I had around. Then became absolutely terrified that I was going to give it away to a group that probably won’t have anyone who could correctly bias a transistor.
In my graduating class of aerospace engineers, we had people who could size a control surface, and pick an actuator, people who could design an appropriate structure for the control surface, actuator and air frame, and people who could pick an actuator, and design the control system. I was probably the only guy who could size the control surface, pick an actuator, design the supporting structure, design the control system, and code the autopilot.
For a lot of reasons, many of my friends consider me the brightest guy they know. Despite all this though, I’m the one who’s been unemployed for almost a year. I’m getting sick of writing coverletters and revising resumes, specially with all this talk about the labour shortage, and how this is a boom town. We desperately need people to help stock shelves, wash dishes and get things from point a to point b. I can’t seem to get a job that requires more than simply being old enough to work.

The Pains of Recycling

Some people don’t like recycling because it costs money instead of bringing in money. Other people don’t like recycling because they think it’s troublesome. Well, I’ve got a new one to add to the list.
The way recycling is handled here is actually pretty reasonable. There’s a fair number of recycling facilities around the city placed at various locations that people go to anyway, like grocery stores. Toss your recycling into the appropriate bin and away it goes. It’s a bit of an extra step to get it out there, but compared to the cost of sending trucks all around the city, I like it.
Yesterday when I went, they were in the process of emptying the bins. I recycled some glass, followed by some newspaper then it was time for cardboard. Cardboard was on the end, so I stood there for a moment to figure out where to go. There was someone working there trying to clean up the area, which was a complete mess. All the bins were full and people just left stuff where the wind could blow them around. After spotting the tag I walked over and mummbled, “Ah cardboard here. Looks a little full.”
The guy looked over at me and said, “Leave that on the ground and I swear you’ll be sorry.” I looked at him funny for a while and he added, “And you’d better pick up that paper that you dropped.” So I looked behind me, and yeah there was a mess but none of those papers were mine, I was being falsely accused. I also had no intention of littering and I was being threatened. So I turned and started to walk away. Then he changed his mind about me and told me that if that’s all the cardboard I had, I could just toss it in the truck.
I understand being angry because people made a mess of your work place, but still, lashing out at random people is inexcusable.

Game Shows Sadden Me

I’m just not sure how to react to this. I was watching a game show earlier, 1 vs 100, where I’m not going to explain the rules of the show. One of the questions about half way up the chain was about static electricity and whether or not you had a build up of excess protons, neutrons or electrons when you cause a static shock. Notably, only one person was eliminated and he claims he pushed the wrong button by accident, but nonetheless, the game show felt this was a particularly dificult question and so did the participant who had to get help on this question.
Anyway, this teaches me that if I’m going to operate a somewhat effective science website, I need to really begin a little more basically and go a bit slower because not everyone that made it through highschool remembers middle school that well.

Next Website Page to Finish

It feels kind of strange, I have a partially finished article on total internal reflection that I was meaning to put up on my website and while visiting at an aquarium I got the perfect picture for illustrating the effect. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the setup that produced the effect. Oh well, a sketch is going to have to do. It probably isn’t all the spectacular, I mean any picture should do, but it has personal significance to me since I was far from home at a very neat place. This of course means nothing to the casual online reader.

I need a washing machine washing machine

I opened up a washing machine today. My mom was trying to clean it and got a cloth stuck so we opened it up to try to find it. As it turns out, our washing machine was quite a bit dirtier than what was visible. We had to take it appart and then scraped what had to be about three cups of dirt out of the thing. Putting it back together was a pain too. It was quite the interesting experience, though you kind of need to be mechanically inclined to pull something like this off.

Another Smooth Election Day

For some reason, every time the USA has an election, I wind up with people emailing me about who I should vote for and various things. Then I get a few reminders to go vote on the actual day. This year, things went rather smoothly, with only three reminders to vote and nobody emailed me about anybody. Maybe it’s because it’s not a presidential electino this year. Usually when I get emailed, it’s the presidential candidates they want me to support. This all started with Ralph Nader in 2000, somehow someone got my email address and sent me some Ralph Nader information. Then the Bush and Gore campaigns caught up and emailed me too. Ever since then, people have been asking for my support in elections that I can’t legally vote in. It’s a little funny and a little sad at the same time.

Making headway on my web page

After much deciding and a box of smarties, I finally decided on a color scheme for my webpage. There’s now an index and some general look and feel. Seems kind of odd, after all this, I can finally show off some of my content. I don’t know how the convention usually goes.
Surprisingly some sort of logo wasn’t too hard to design and I think it looks ok. Graphical design really isn’t my strong point. I can’t draw very well and creating something nice gives me a bit of difficulty. Photography though is a stronger point for me, so I took a picture of a neon light bulb that I have. Then I just kind of wrapped my text around it in a way that felt natural. Before long, I had a logo. It looks a little blurry though. Maybe I should replace it with one of my moon shots or something. Right now, the color fits nicely because the bulb is a redish orange and I picked a redish orange. Oh well, it’s not all that important.
Anyway, I accidently overwrote a few things when I made my new index, I’m going to have to copy the code for the counter and put it back on there. The thing needs to be reset anyway. I don’t know any sane reason not to store the number of visitors as an integer but for the sake of my curiosity, I put in a few digits after the decimal place. Allowing it to display negative values is an interesting twist.
I can probably start promoting my site by the end of the week. Who knows, maybe it’ll catch on somehow.