Automated Doors and Stuff

I'm sure we've all had isues with automatic doors or paper towel dispensers or faucets not working optimally. Doors seem to have improves a lot in the last few years - the used to be either too slow at opening or so sensitive that they open when you're just walking by 20 feet away. Paper towel dispensers have worked well for awhile - you just have to know where to wave your hand and accept that the paper towels come at a fixed size. It is very annoying to me when I see someone try to pull the paper while the machine is dispensing it. That's how the machines get screwd up or how they get mis-calibrated and later on give out inappropriately-sized paper towels.

 

Automatic sinks still have significant improvements that need to be made. Maybe they are harder because the background to the next object is so close - only a foot or so from the sensor to the sink wall and therefore it may be harder to judge whether someone's hands are there. You wet your hands, then you reach for soap and the water turns off, you pull your hands back an inch or two and the water turns off, you try to wash your face and the water turns off. Additionally, it is hard to find how to control the water temperature, if that's even a feature of most automatic faucets. I think I would like a job designing automated things. What companies do such engineering?

 

Today I found an automated toilet that really got on my nerves. I was stuck on the toilet longer than I 'd like to be and 3 times the toilet flushed automatically and I jumped up each time to keep from getting my whole butt wet. It got to the point where I was jumping up even when I heard a neighboring toilet flush. It was totally not good at predicting when I was done. A slight movement forward or re-adjustment triggered a flush. I don't even think automating toilet flushing is a very useful thing. I mean, we are all washing our hands afterward so it's not saving on getting out hands dirty by touching things, which I consider to be one of the main benefits of automatic doors and paper towel dispensers. Next time I'll wait for the handicapped spot, like I usually do, which does not have the automatic flush feature.

Que Queue?

It really bothers me when professional people misspell words in professional documents. I was in one of the first groups to take a class this newly required 1 day course on Lean. It was a class on efficiency and assembly lines and generally how to use common sense. I felt like the class should be geared toward lower-level management or quality assurance people, but there were 2 engineers from my office and 20 or so blue collar workers, mostly laboring on aircraft maintenance.

 

Anyway, at some point the instructor started an exercise in which we pretended to be people in a production environment trying to improve efficiency on an assembly line, so the word queue came up a lot. Now, the instructor said the word several times and used it in proper context ("The man at station 4 had a long queue so it might be a good idea to balance the work more evenly so he doesn't have a queue so long that drags down the overall efficiency.") The problem was that he had sheets of paper with "QUE" written on it for where each person was supposed to place their items when passing to the next one in line. I was the last one in the line, the quality control person, and I was defiant and turned the piece of paper over. Que is not a word, at least not in English, and it is painful for me to look at it. The assistant instructor comes over and turns the paper right-side up and I immediately flip it back over, while pointing out that the word is misspelled everywhere. No one acknowledges my comments and everyone goes on with the exercise.

 

Was I the only one to notice this gross misspelling or was I just the only one who knew or was I just the only one that cared? I have seen people make this error other times lately (leaving off the second ue on queue) but I had always thought this was a fairly common word. Some of the engineers I play scrabble with have recently tried to use "que" in our Wednesday scrabble games and I cringe every time I see it. I know engineers aren't supposed to be great at spelling (and neither are assembly line workers) but the guy teaching should definitely know better. Presumably, he at least typed this into MS Word and should have noticed the squiggly red line underneath the word indicating that it is wrong.

 

Que is Spanish for what.

Queue is an English word for a FIFO (first in, first out) line of people or things waiting their turn.

Get it right.

January Blues

While I generally like the idea of having a big holiday season with lots of giving and visiting and being nice to the people you rarely see, it's not something I get to actually experience much since most of my family is so far away and no romance I've had had happened to be going on December. But the college bowl games and New Year's regional bridge tournament in Charleston or Myrtle Beach keeps me happy. But then January hits and there's not really anything to look forward to for awhile.

 

Last year, thanks to db, the January blues didn't hit until March but there weren't any lifestyle changes between 2009 and 2010. This year, there are definitely some changes taking place with the coming of the new year, and I'm hoping/expecting these changes will lead to a more active social life in middle GA and/or more of a sense of purpose at work. If not, I'll jest be getting the January blues late again this year. The days of residing at Northrop Grumman with next to no official responsibilities on a project are over and I am back on base full time, supposedly awaiting work on a new project.

 

One exciting part of January is that we have to submit leave plans for the year. For the first time, I have available to me about as much annual leave as I want, so I just submitted my plan for the 23 vacation days I intend to use in 2011. This includes taking a Friday off for 7 bridge tournaments - Louisville, Gatlinburg, Greenville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Seattle, and Myrtle Beach - 8 work days off for the summer nationals in Toronto (with a side visit to Montreal), and a week for a trip to Europe in May. Of course, it's all subject to change, but I am looking forward to a year of more excitement at work, a return to a more regular local social life, and about the same amount of bridge as last year.

Monday Night Football: Falcons-Saints

As the last and by for most unproductive work week of the year begins, I am looking forward to Monday night football more than ever. Not only is it a chance for the Falcons' chance to clinch the division title in the spotlight against New Orleans, but it's the last week of fantasy football. My team is in the finals and is trailing 135 to 67 with only the Falcons-Saints and Vikings-Eagles games left. The good news is that my opponent has only one player left to play - Eagles receiver DeSean Jackson - while my four best players have yet to take the field. But I will still need big games from Matt Ryan, Drew Brees, Marques Colston, and/or Percy Harvin to overcome this deficit, but it is totally doable. I won the regular season title outright with an 11-2 record and just squeaked by the first 2 playoff games. So here's to hoping Brees throws for 300+ yards and 2 touchdowns to Colston but still loses.

Which to Bury, Us or the Hatchet

When things go badly, I like to put a song on full volume and put it on repeat for awhile, and I have a few regular songs that I listen to for such times. Do you have a sort of ritual like this for dealing with anger? “Collide” by Dishwalla, “Schism” by Tool, and “Which to Bury, Us or the Hatchet” by Relient K are three of my favorite songs to blast while I try to get unangry about something. These three songs all talk about hurting a loved one and vice versa. The first two make it seem like it’s inevitable that things would fall apart ("Doomed to crumble unless we grow, and strengthen our communication" and "When I came here there was more. Now I've come back to destroy and I've got nothing left"). The main message of the Relient K song is “know I’ll always love you but right now I just don’t like you cause you took this too far.” Look these up next time you need some good sympathetic music.


Communication is hard, apparently. Many of us suffer from having a hard time telling people “No” or not giving them an explanation or discussion that they are entitled to. Yes, if your feelings toward someone who has been an important part of your life change or your circumstances require that to change, you do have an obligation to talk to them about it. Talking about the issue honestly is clearly a superior way to handle things than to ignore the person, lie to him, lead him on, pretend to not know what’s going on, or otherwise be unclear. And if you aren’t ready for a talk (because you are too confuzzled and don’t know what you want), tell them that and give them a timeframe for when you will be ready to talk. I know I’ve written about this before but in so many failed relationships and friendships, this is a common recurring problem and I'm definitely not entirely blameless.

Being Reminded of the Past

Do you have certain places that always bring back memories of a particular event or person from your past, even a non-significant event? Maybe something like driving by a particular hotel chain reminds you of a person or driving by an exit on the interstate reminds you of that one time you took a trip down that road.


I have found myself being reminded of some rather inconsequential things just by driving by. Whenever I drive by exit 233 on I-75 I think about going to the state Science Olympiad in 9th grade. We stayed at a Hampton Inn there, but the competition was actually at Georgia Tech. However, I never had recollections of the Science Olympiad when I was at the same places as a student at Georgia Tech. When I go to the downtown Atlanta around the Hyatt Regency Hotel, I always remember the Beta Club convention when I was in 11th grade, and I remember the drama between Sharon, me, and others that weekend much more so than actually winning the math competition.

When I drive by the Atlanta hostel on my way to Chipotle on Ponce, I can’t help but think of Dana, dropping her off there on a late Saturday night, and still wondering why I didn’t kiss her and whether that had any effect on what transpired over the next couple of months. When I drive by exit 3 on I-475 around Macon, I always have a brief recollection of Casey Michael and how we used to meet at a McDonald’s there after he moved from Valdosta to Dahlonega when we were about 10 years old. When I go to Cheddar’s, a place I go quite a bit, I am reminded of the first time Hillery and I met intentionally. And now a particular bar in Columbia will surely remind me of Brittany and the silliness that has gone down there and around there in the last couple of months.

I’m sure there are lots more things like this and I guess these are good kinds of memories to have. They do correspond to happy times in my life even though the Science Olympiad one doesn’t fit in because it wasn’t a particularly memorable trip and there’s no person from that trip that sticks out at all as ever being particularly important to me.

Final Regular Season Asbury Rankings

The regular season is finished, all the bowl matchups are set, and not surprisingly, my computer still does not have Oregon at the #2 spot as every BCS computer and every human poll has the Ducks. My computer, however, is slowly approaching reality as they moved up to #6 but still behind TCU and 2 teams with 2 losses.

The SEC championship game turned out to be a rout as South Carolina sadly squandered its first and probably last chance at an SEC title for years. The ACC championship game wasn't much closer. Virginia Tech is looking like one of the best teams in the country now, very much unlike the team that started by losing to Boise State and James Madison. I'm as interested in their Bowl game against Stanford as much as any game this winter.

Here are the Asbury rankings headed into bowl season:
1 Auburn 13-0
2 Oklahoma 11-2
3 Ohio State 11-1
4 Arkansas 10-2
5 TCU 12-0
6 Oregon 12-0
7 Boise State 11-1
8 Stanford 11-1
9 Wisconsin 11-1
10 LSU 10-2
11 Virginia Tech 11-2
12 Alabama 9-3
13 Missouri 10-2
14 Oklahoma State 10-2
15 Texas A&M 9-3
16 Michigan State 11-1
17 Nevada 11-1
18 South Carolina 9-4
19 Hawaii 10-3
20 Nebraska 10-3