by ·0 Comments

Work held a holiday part today which is the first to which I’ve been invited in the last six years.  Turns out the giant tent against which I railed as the emblem of anti-snow was for this gathering.  The setup tables each represented the food of a different culture and had three dishes served by an awkward team of a kitchen staffer and an executive.  The plates were about six inches across and the serving sizes were “fun sized” a la the diminutive candy bars dispensed during Halloween requiring six or seven individual trips to create something along the size of an appetizer.  There were two exceptions: The shrimp, which were the size of a man’s fist, and the desserts, which included cupcakes the size of a baby’s head.  I’m pretty sure that the bread pudding was served in shot glasses which was convenient as one doesn’t have enough hands to hold both a beverage and any sort of foodstuff.  Each station held the highlight of world gastronomy: fried starch, which is always appreciated.

I don’t know if the coordinator planned this but the best food was dished out by the most intimidating executive.  The #1 at the company guarded the shrimp, and the #2 monitored consumption of the prepared egg rolls.  This also synced somewhat with the ethnicity of the executive.  I’ll have to see how this tracks from year to year.

by ·0 Comments

The “smash brownie” phase has drawn to an end where I’d take one foodstuff and shove it onto a brownie.  This included:

  • Crackerjack brownies
  • Butterfingers brownies
  • Granola brownies
  • Cookie brownies

I tried to make s’more brownies today which consisted of brownies covered in chocolate covered in marshmallows covered in graham crackers.  The idea seemed reasonable and I took the brownie out at the 2/3 way point to add the marshmallows and graham crackers.   I tried a piece when all was done and I’m glad I use Eggbeaters which aren’t subject to salmonella.  The top parts were perfect, though, so I thought I’d just pop it back in for 15 minutes or so and finish the bottom.  No dice.  I was afraid of overcooking the marshmallows so I decided to try to finish the brownie portion on the oven top.  The pile eventually finished such that the brownie came out like fudge cream but the marshmallows could remove bridgework.  A coworker described it as one of the tastiest choking hazards he’d ever had and another said it was a reminder that he’d need to visit his dentist.

by ·0 Comments

Being poked in the eye is the common comparison I use to convey the dullness of a presentation. Today, there was a presentation on how to fill out our new timecards. It’s actually a simpler system than the one currently used with an AJAXy interface and radio buttons. The presenter went on to do a rundown of the system in possibly a single 10 minute breath and asked for questions.

At first, I thought that the event assumed we were idiots and thought we needed to go over a trivial change in stupid detail. On second thought, I think it was a test: anyone who sees a presentation on something that simple and then asks a stupid question should be culled from the employee pool and be fired… out of a cannon… into the sun.

by ·0 Comments

There are an unusual number of silicone experts at my workplace so I asked one of them if my dream of using silicone ice trays to produce brownie-fists was reasonable.  Turns out the answer is a qualified “yes”.

Coworker: Silicone is silicone.  If it’s a true silicone ice cube tray it’ll take several hundred degrees C without a problem.
Me: What do you mean “true silicone”?
Coworker: Well, some just use a silicone backbone, so they’d have a low melting point.
Me: I think I’ve dealt with that before.
Coworker:  What are you trying to do?
Me: Trying to create a silicone tray to make single server brownies.
Coworker: We could make our own.  I asked Dow for some sample silicone and they sent me 70 kilos that’s body-safe.  We’d just need a sample shape.

I’ve been avoiding learning our CAD design, rapid prototyping and thermal simulation software.  I think I now have a reason to.

by ·18 Comments

The first question that was asked in my undergraduate organic chemistry course was as follows:  What is the melting point of bread?

Normally, I wouldn’t insert a carriage return there except that such a statement has such aneurysm-inducing levels of stupidity within its words that I fear it may spread if not properly contained.  Today I learned an interesting diagnostic for differentiating between an engineer and a scientist by asking each the above listed question of the damned and gauging their response.  The engineer will look at you like you’re a moron, say “that’s a stupid question” and laugh.  The scientist will look at you like you’re an idiot, say “that’s a stupid question” and glare.  It appears to all be in the eyes.

by ·0 Comments

Normally, there’s a few people at work in dumb Halloween costumes.  Today, I saw none.  There was recently a wave of firings.  I wonder if I discovered their decision criterion.  I approve.

As a Haiku:
No costumes at work/
Wave of wrath may be the cause/
I approve of this.

by ·0 Comments

Today marked the six year anniversary of me starting to use the precision fart generator at work.  Later I walked into some technicians holding the door to the hotroom (environmental chamber held at 40°C/75% relative humidity)  open while passing pouches in.

Me: Why are you holding the door open?  Just lift the cart in and put up the pouches.  It doesn’t require three people.
Tech: But it gets hot in there.
Me: Hot! You’ll be in there for five minutes.  When I was your age I spent hours putting up hundreds of pouches.
Tech: That sucks.
Me: I was thankful for it, because <coworker> spent his days in there testing adhesives.
Tech: Oh.
Me: Kids today.

I’m 25 and I just had my first “you kids, get off of my lawn” moment.

by ·0 Comments

My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon.  We had n f*#$ing clue why.

We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs.  We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%.  We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%.  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.  The only way we were able to kill it?  By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting.  Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.

by ·0 Comments

Once every few months I have to defrost the ice machine at work as someone has invariably left the door open turning the storage chamber into a frostblock.  I unplugged the ice machine, opened the door, put a catch tray under the machine and placed a sign on the door saying “Ice machine defrosting – please leave door open.  Thank you”.  I came back to recheck the machine an hour later and the door was closed and my message still present.  I reopened the door and checked back a few hours later and the door was again closed.  This time, my note had a note on top of it “To who ever leaves the door open, please close it”.

Really?  You physically put your note on top of my note declaring the opposite of it?  My first response was to overnote their note but realized this would simply cause a note arms race but I steeled myself: instead, I placed a shim in the door preventing it from closing.  Anyone too dumb to read a sign probably couldn’t master the usage of the opposable thumb sufficiently to dislodge the plastic tab I used to prop the door open.

by ·3 Comments

I got an email today with an attached video simply entitled “balls.wmv” from a non-company address. The comments were:

  • Wow, that was fascinating
  • How did they get all of them?
  • Someone’s very talented
  • I don’t think I could ever safely do that

I forwarded the potentially NSFW video to my home email address and found that it was an animated film previously covered by Snopes.  I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed that someone sent a video named “balls” to a bunch of work accounts or that they failed to identify an obviously rendered video.