Here we go again. Delta has arrived.

"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck)
10/09/2020 at 19:45 • Filed to: None

We are on the windy side this time around, but the winds aren’t too bad.

What was worse was that one of the garage door support wires snapped and the garage door went all wonky and jammed when I was opening it. It bent one of the support tracks and stuck partway open. It took both my son and I to get the other wire loose and de-tension the springs so I could close the door. A ratchet strap provided the tension to straighten the track enough to get the door closed.

Once the weather clears out, I’ll have fun job of replacing the wire and the bent track, then re-tensioning the torque springs so I can open the garage again. Fortunately, I have some experience with it. A tornado took out my garage door about 10 years ago. Fun times.

DISCUSSION (17)

BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 20:13

Dude. I mean a hurricane is whatever, but there’s nothing more scary than working around a garage door spring. Please be safe.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 20:16

Seeing this post, I realize that I haven’t heard anything from you for a while. I hope you and yours are well. Sounds like you more than handled the garage door thing. When you said ratchet strap, I thought, Now there’s a clever lad . I have used ratchet straps many ways over the years.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
10/09/2020 at 20:58

I had some changes at work that limit my ability to hang out at Oppo. It’s also been really busy for the last month or so. I’m getting a bit burned out, but we have deadlines and the work is important, so I knuckle down and keep working.

One of the interesting things about being back at the office is the number of young, inexperienced engineers we hired over the last 6 months. It seems that they don’t know anything! A good portion of my day is instructing them. I’m constantly surprised at what they don’t know. I must be getting old.

TheRealBicycleBuck > BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
10/09/2020 at 21:01

Yeah, this is the second time I’ve had to release and re-tension that spring. There are actually two of them, so if you accidentally let one go, it has half the energy of a single spring. I use the two pipe wrench method to ease the tension one-quarter turn at a time.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 21:09

Happy to hear back from you. I'm glad things are going well, and hard work... Well... I'd like to hear more over time about these young engineers you're hiring. Are they really less well prepared than any of us were when we entered the job market? Honest question.

For Sweden > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 21:55

The one time Delta arrives on time...

ClassicDatsunDebate > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 22:15

Happy as well to see you posting again. I can commiserate about inexperienced EIT’s. Take care!

HoustonRunner > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/09/2020 at 22:43

Glad to hear you are doing ok. Looks like it is at least moving quickly through.

boredalways > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/10/2020 at 00:21

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Stay safe, buddy!

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
10/10/2020 at 02:46

It’s just strange to have several 20-somethings around. I watch them trying to learn something - whether engineering related or not - that I know just from years of experience. Just yesterday it was a question about elevation models - where to find the data, how to build one if you can’t find one, what to look for in source data, etc. They have bad habits too. This particular engineer dropped the data onto her desktop. That led to a discussion about where to put the data and why. She didn’t really understand what a “c:” drive was or how to map network drives. One of the guys we hired asked about selecting sets of data for export for the third time. He was having problems with the logic behind selection sets. He was also having problems understanding the various computer drives and didn’t get why things were so slow when he was selecting over 50,000 data points from a dataset housed on a server three states away.

Part of it is a lack of computer skills . Part of it is a gap in logic skills. Both are from a lack of experience.

TheRealBicycleBuck > ClassicDatsunDebate
10/10/2020 at 02:48

Thanks! It’s a short reprieve. I’ll be back to silent mode come Monday. If the hurricane did anything, it gave me some time.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/10/2020 at 07:48

Interesting examples. I think about myself and my first real job working as an actuarial analyst. Horrible boring job. The new computer they bought for me to use was a Pentium 133 with 16 megs of RAM. Give you some sense of the time frame we're talking about. But that would be more than 20 years ago. And things like putting something on the c drive or mapping a network drive or whatever, those little things I have done hundreds and thousands of times since then. Repeatedly. So much of what we do with IT I think has to do with repetition. And really, unless you have a hobby, or unless you're a hacker, no one's going to teach you any of that stuff. I know that in my first job, which I was really not suited for, I would have been a total drag to the experienced people working there. That's one of several jobs that I washed out of before I became a teacher. and isn't that how it's supposed to go? Fail at everything else and then become a teacher?

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
10/10/2020 at 10:01

Those who fail... teach. :)

I went the other way - too much education because i thought I wanted to teach , then an assistant professor, then the private sector.

I guess my first “real” experience with computers was on an Apple IIe. I had fiddled with an older IBM and even messed around with a Commodore 64, bit my education began with an Apple. Back then we were taught all of the major hardware components, drive letters and file systems, and then software and some basic programming.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the young people’s lack of knowledge. The incoming freshmen were awfully ignorant when it came to computers. I received accolades for what I taught them. By the time they left my class, they were prepared to become the sole GIS analyst in their office, whether that would be a small business or a small government office. A fundamental skill in GIS is being able to move data between different software, whether that is a spreadsheet, database, GIS, or statistical package. That requires understanding different data formats, how to copy files, how to copy data within files, how to reorganize data, etc.

I guess I’m most surprised at the narrow focus of the engineer’s education. They struggle with files, manipulating data in Excel (!), and the basic logic behind selecting and processing information. They are being taught formulas and calculations, but they aren’t being taught how to think through broader problems or solve their problems with anything but a formula, pencil and paper, and a calculator.

Most of them don’t even know how to change the oil in their car.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/10/2020 at 10:27

Those who fail, teach...

I love saying that about myself because I think I have been reasonably successful as a teacher. I am too lazy to be an engineer. I also like to refer to teachers as not having real jobs, which incenses my colleagues, because deep down, any educator or academic knows that they are getting away with something. I am not saying that they, we, do not earn our salaries. They conflate the two. But tell me this: if you’re out there earning real money, like a buck fifty or two bucks a year, or more, are you able to take two weeks off contiguously? In the vast majority if cases, the reply would be, “I wish.” And if you are able to take off a solid two weeks of vay-kay, you’ll spend that much time preparing to be gone, recovering from having been gone, and you’ll be answering calls while you are gone. Generally not so as an educator or academic. And to be clear, by you , I don’t mean Buck, I am only speaking rhetorically.

What is GIS?

All that computer stuff. When I began work as an intern actuarial analyst, the first six months of that job amounted to a graduate level introdu ction to Excel, and a somewhat deep dive into Access and even now, I embrace every opportunity to dust off those skills. And I will happily bow to anyone who has more skills in Excel than I do...

It’s good to talk with you; it’s been a minute.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
10/10/2020 at 19:49

Good conversation with friends is always a delight.

I thought I was being smart when I took a teaching position with a 12-month assignment. I was wrong. It did, however, provide me with additional incentive to move to the private sector. You’re right about vacations, though. I did receive a 33% raise on day one and now make considerably more than the dean. That helps make up for it.

I forget that people aren’t familiar with the name for what I do (it’s really just part of my job these days). GIS - geographic information systems. Think google maps on steroids. GIS is the foundation for just about every mapping application you can think of. School bus routing is a good example. Give me a list of addresses for the kids and the location of the school and I can give you the most efficient routes for picking them all up within an hour. I’ve done a wide variety of applications and projects over my career from environmental analysis to disaster recovery. It’s been a lot of fun over the years, but I’m seriously considering teaching again. I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching others how to do the work and not necessarily from doing the work myself. I get bored easily and hate repetitive tasks. If I have to do it more than three times, I’m going to find a way to streamline and automate the task. It’s the only way to maintain my sanity.

I enjoy working in excel and hacking around in databases. I recently built a tool to make it easy to build resource-loaded schedules from a list of projects and the expected level of work to complete the projects. It helped us figure out how many people our client would need to hire to manage their portfolio of recovery projects after Harvey. Now we’re working on getting them funding for those projects. Part of that funding hinges on specific demographics and environmental factors. It’s fun to figure out whether or not a proposed project is going to meet the minimum criteria for federal funding or if it will have to be fully paid for by the taxpayers.

Well, I managed to get my garage door opening and closing on its own again. Now I need to go recover from the day’s efforts.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheRealBicycleBuck
10/10/2020 at 20:41

Very interesting. Regarding school busses, I drove one at 17 years old. I don’t recommend allowing 17-year-olds to drive school busses. I think I was a fairly good driver, but that my judgment was, well, that of a 17-year-old.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
10/10/2020 at 21:43

I’m having trouble letting my 17-yr-old drive on his own. I can’t imagine him driving a bus!