Recently in work Category
on most days i feel like i'm pretty good at my job
but there are exceptions
like today
every day has a long list of things to be done
a litany of big problems
and minor details
but my dirty little secret is
i have to work at it
especially the little things
go figure
you say
no really
thing is i'm just not detail oriented
i'm scatterbrained
with a short attention span
disorganized
and
messy as fuck
while writing comes naturally
[can't you tell]
believe it or not
math and engineering are hard for me
and i am constantly
cleaning up after my own stupidity
success comes only through careful scouring for mistakes
and iterative improvements on stuff that starts off
crappy
[my awesome grades in college
weren't a coincidence
you know]
so when it's brought to my attention
that i missed something
[usually by someone who is a little more persnickety]
it's a nice reminder that
deep down
i'm a fuckup
and i'm fine with that really
maybe if i was actually good at it
i wouldn't bust my ass so hard
and maybe you don't get one without the other
engineers
you know
could be ruling the world
if we cared to
further evidence for this
yesterday we had a rather premature
almost surprise
show and tell
for something that you could tell wasn't quite ready to be shown
two serious
really showstopping issues were evident
today we spent around four hours discussing
what went wrong and how we might fix it
in what was left of the day
we fixed one problem
and halfway fixed the other
but you know
the meetings were helpful
really
space shuttle processing and assembly, via boing boing. looking at those, it’s no wonder that it’ll cost thousands of jobs to retire it. but it’s still amazing, and i still hate the idea that we don’t have anything better than it ready now, the idea that it’s not that important to put humans in space, on other planets. maybe if we are facing recession, or even depression, it’ll be a pretty inexpensive excuse to create jobs that can’t be outsourced, in an area where american expertise is still preeminent. compared with the cost of running a war, it’s a bargain, and leaves plenty of money to fight the disease of the month.
it pains me to say it, but pro/e’s sketcher is just plain broken, and not as good as solidworks’. i can make something more quickly in the sketcher in pro/engineer, but when i click done, it generally ain’t done. in solidworks, after i’ve finished it, i have much more confidence that what i see on the screen is representative of my design intent. in pro/e, basically since early builds of 2001, the sketcher’s use edge and trim functions have grown increasingly more broken. in far too many cases, if you pick a use-edge of say, a circular body, and draw a line across it, then trim it down to a ‘d’ shape, after you click the done button, it will reveal that the trimmed corners are not in fact aligned to each other, and that what you have is not a closed section of two entities, but two wholly separate and floating entities that only look like they’re touching. this was not always so. at this point, the routine is to take use-edged entities after trimming them, and drag them so they’re short of touching, then manually apply a constraint to stitch them up. this is unspeakably annoying.
office 2008 has left me scratching my head so far. i rely on it at work a fair bit considering my ‘new’ computer is only partially functional. it can do CAD or it can print things, for instance, but one has to log in as two different people to have that work. so as with so many other things, i just do it on my lappy. i’ve come to rely on word’s notebook view as a replacement for my physical notebook, in the past few months. basically, i realized that though i might be better or worse at writing things down (this, like so many other things, varied inversely with how busy i was, guess what today is), i didn’t always go back to look for stuff, and seldom found it anyway. maybe those were linked. so far, this is better. a problem, however, is that of how poorly word 2008 plays with leopard. spaces confuses the shit out of it, and this is terrible. i’ve had to chase the document across the screen way too many times, and this causes it to get confused about its window focus as well, like when it’s the frontmost application, and can’t be made the frontmost window until you switch back and forth to another. or when the act of saving puts it behind a safari window or something. seems to me they should have ironed it out by now. it’s also slow to start, slow to switch to, and a memory hog. i want to embrace it, i really do, but it’s not up to snuff right now. maybe evernote (email me for a beta invite) will displace it (voodoopad, yojimbo, and omnioutliner all have tried).
i’ll go to hell for saying this, especially since the month has just started, but between the magnetic ribbons, ubiquitous puzzle pieces, and overcooked news coverage, i’m frankly a little sick of hearing about autism. there are lots of bad things that happen to people. that’s one of them. but at this point, the overexposure has made me feel like, if two people came knocking on my door for a donation, i’d give my money to the other guy, who probably needs the help more. i’m a bad person who likes to kick puppies.
although when i do kick puppies, i would probably toeball them. look the fuck out, bssc, the dreaded toeball is dialed in and i’m dropping it on people’s heads at will. it’s only a matter of time before my erratic aim returns and i shank the ball at obtuse angles again, but for now, people are actually deferring to me on free kicks. which is frightening.
getting a new computer is always nice (thanks, james). however, the downside of having a dedicated it guy in the office now is that instead of a relatively unshackled windows box, i have one that’s, er, maintained. which means that i get an access denied message when doing basically everything. installing programs, mucking around with the start menu, deleting desktop icons, installing fonts. to some extent this is overzealousness in protecting me from myself (and goodness knows i’m capable of damaging a windows box), but at the same time (wait for it), the division of what anyone can safely do, what anyone can do with careful consideration, what only administrators can do, and what no one should do is handled infinitely more gracefully in mac os x; why? because at no point am i prevented from doing anything that i need to do on a daily basis. it will take some work to put this thing right.
windows is dumb, and people should stop using it.
thursday night, some friends from work and i went to the ica to see design life now, an exhibit about, well, design. a nice night out away from work looking at stuff, that’s well, work. but it’s really cool work. the exhibit had something of an omnibus approach to the word ‘design’, which you could look at one of two ways; either they wanted to look at the individual works in the context of how society thinks of design across many fields, or they wanted to include some crowd-pleasers like pixar models, toys, and wild architecture. i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, although some selections were pretty darned dubious. still, it was really neat to see things in a museum that were not the least bit dissimilar to stuff i’ve worked on. except, you know, they’re shipping.
this was actually the first time i’d been to the ica, which apparently is celebrating its first birthday. i’d parked my bike underneath its imposing overhang more than a few times, savoring a bottle of gatorade and a powerbar, but hadn’t gotten inside yet. the building is really cool, and terribly photogenic; probably will be even more so when it’s not surrounded by parking lots.
and it’s free on thursday nights, too.
i just found out that the project i’ve been working on since february of 06 has been shelved indefinitely.
i don’t really know what else to say other than it sucks.
there’s a really great article at core77 on the relationship between engineering and design, told from the latter perspective, but with considerable sympathy to the former. it’s a really good read if you have the time, although i think this might be taking it a little too far:
“While initially framed as a fight, I believe the more recent tendency of design’s relationship with engineering is that of mutual seduction.”
i mean, i get along well with the people i work with, just not that well. that, and we do fight a lot in halo. and at least there, engineering always wins.
it's most assuredly a good thing to see well-designed products and services making their way into more peoples' lives, but it's wrong to mistake that as something that you can simply promote, like clicking a checkbox in the 'ordinances' panel in simcity (nerd alert!) and have suddenly appear, or turn on like a faucet. design does not create jobs, inherently; job creation (in measurable numbers) is at best a tertiary effect. create better products, more people buy them, company more successful, hire more folks. a lot of stuff has to happen in that sequence for it to work out that way. moreover, the industry's already got a pretty significant presence in the area, which this seems to pay short shrift.
don't get me wrong, it's a great thing to promote (not least for selfish reasons), but to suggest that it's any kind of economic engine is a little bit optimistic.
i decided that i’d get two things done at once today. i knew i needed to put a little time in at work, but i also wanted to get out and exercise. i really didn’t want to sit in traffic driving to maynard, either, so i saddled up and hopped on my bike. the uphill climb from waltham to the ‘nard was rough, having not done so much riding lately, but i got here, and was making some good progress, being a little less fried than i was yesterday afternoon.
and then solidworks crashed, without warning (usually you can, in retrospect, realize that you were pushing it; not so here). so, i’ve gotten nothing done.
i think it’s a sign.
after a ludicrously busy week at work, a restful weekend was exactly what i needed. naturally, it was something less then restful. weird, but hardly restful.
- friday night i was in the bleachers. it was spectacularly cold and windy in row 36 (this is directly beneath the center-field scoreboard), but it was all okay, since i wasn't bad luck for the sox. wakefield got run support, and at long last, dougie went deep! i had my first fenway franks of the year, and a few pints of guinness. it was a good night.
- after that, i wandered the north end digging in trash cans, having been told that this was a good way to impress women.
- nothing i say makes any kind of rational sense anymore.
- saturday i caught the soccer doubleheader in foxboro. the us women embarrassed the mexican team, and the revolution owned toronto fc utterly. it's not every day that you get to see nine goals. some of them were pretty spectacular, too. a treat.
- alas, i left my german army shirt in section 110. dammit, that was the best shirt $3.99 could buy.
- later that night, we went to the buffy the vampire slayer sing-a-long at the coolidge corner theater. this is where i learned that playing 'don't stop believin' on a kazoo is a good way to make friends. is there nothing that journey can't do? other than that, i learned that firefly evangelists are frightening, and that a theater full of people with party poppers and bubbles looks pretty cool. and most importantly, we learned that garrett sings.
- i think that things started going downhill for me when i started wearing matching socks more often.
- sunday i played a lot of guitar hero. my wrist hurts, but i am getting better. not as good as jess, but better. we're also working on getting minh hooked on it.
- i went for a run, too. in the nor'easter. my nike+ipod graph tells the tale of the headwind running east on beacon street vividly. i do not envy the marathoners today.
- and i did some work. boo.
- on the bright side, i got home from work before 2100 tonight. 2045 counts, okay?
