by ·0 Comments

Troubleshooting a particular work device has been complicated by the fact that there is no documentation for the many valves, manifolds, redirection paths, and flow meters within the device and proper flow is impossible to determine as a T-intersection may have lateral flow either because it’s supposed to or because the base of the T is blocked off.  Today, I found the website for one of the valve manufacturers who had been bought and now operated under a different name but no valve diagram existed.  After googling the firm, I found out they had a youtube channel and on a lark played one of the vidoes where I was astonished to find that the diagram I needed flashed by in the background during the closing.  By screencapping the movie when the needed frame appeared I was able to get the basic flow information for at least one of the valves.

Getting the right screen cap took a few tries and I’m pretty sure my coworkers thought I was playing a game as they heard catchy music and me yelling “damn it!” repeatedly.

by ·0 Comments

I’ve been looking forward to simply throwing myself into the tasks of my second job, to experience the simple rush of knowing that hours have dripped by as you’ve been engaged in a battle of wits with a piece of unthinking, unfeeling silicon or stitching together the work others in a novel way to solve a problem.  Instead, I descended into a world of obscurantist one upsmanship.

The first iteration of the software I was using had a detailed but broken setup that clocked in at about 4 pages.   The main page had a “use this instead” link that led to a piece with 2 pages or so of instruction.  This page also had a “windows users, get the latest and use this” which led to a page with another piece of software with a 1/2 page of instructions which wasn’t too revealing.  I did some Googling and found an update for that suite which by far had the best documentation: A text file with four lines of text, of which 2 referred to folders that didn’t exist in the download or that referred to a file not created as part of the operating process.  You win, French programmer’s documentation guy.

by ·0 Comments

My new boss showed me a process today and I documented it.

Me: How exact do you want this?
Him: As exact as you can manage.

–20 minutes later–

Him: Ok, read back the last few steps.
Me: Remove the pegs from the alignment board, remove second piece of backing paper flip over the stack and apply second film.  Curse loudly at realizing you shouldn’t have flipped it.  Declare that this is a stupid material and start over.
Him: Sounds good.

by ·0 Comments

If I were to have some sort of ninja CAD skill, it’d be documentation.  I take screen shots, use outline formating, make captions and tables of contents, and even include examples.  My time’s worth 1/2 of those who’d do it otherwise so it simply makes sense for me to do the leg work.

I applied a patch to our servers and generated nice documentation to support it, nice enough that my boss didn’t change it when passing it on and submitted the work as mine.  I was CC’d on the discussion.

Receiver: Please provide title for  “Terry Robinson”.  My only search yielded “technician”.

Boss: Whitepages citation did not include appropriate title.  Entry updated.

Receiver: Update received.  That should suffice.  Thank you.

I checked our company white pages to see my new title.  I don’t recall being promoted to “Chief Method Development Master Consultant” but with a title like that I imagine it was quite an annointing.

by ·0 Comments

If I were to have some sort of ninja CAD skill, it’d be documentation.  I take screen shots, use outline formating, make captions and tables of contents, and even include examples.  My time’s worth 1/2 of those who’d do it otherwise so it simply makes sense for me to do the leg work.

I applied a patch to our servers and generated nice documentation to support it, nice enough that my boss didn’t change it when passing it on and submitted the work as mine.  I was CC’d on the discussion.

Receiver: Please provide title for  “Terry Robinson”.  My only search yielded “technician”.

Boss: Whitepages citation did not include appropriate title.  Entry updated.

Receiver: Update received.  That should suffice.  Thank you.

I checked our company white pages to see my new title.  I don’t recall being promoted to “Chief Method Development Master Consultant” but with a title like that I imagine it was quite an annointing.