Rant on WT8P's Notes to Self

Logging Amateur Radio Contacts Accurately Is Complicated

Tue, 28 May 2024 22:54:45 +0000

In the seven years since my first radio contacts, I now have a process for logging amateur radio contacts. However, it wasn’t until I started working remotely more that I appreciated how **logging amateur radio contacts accurately is complicated.**This inaccurate logging was the cause of much frustration during the final throes of my completing the ARRL Triple Play where, for example, the Parks on the Air person I worked “in Michigan” would log their home state (not Michigan). I now understand why.

Birdwatch/Community Notes

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 18:46:19 +0000

In September, I was invited to participate in “Birdwatch,” now known as “Twitter Community Notes.” The concept is a misleading tweet can be annotated with additional information or context by the community. wrong the Internet. If I don" loading="lazy" src="https://wt8p.com/images/duty_calls.png"> Image source: XKCD 386: Duty Calls

For example, consider this headline:

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd holds press conference after agency says it seized enough fentanyl to kill 2.7 million people. WFLA, October 21, 2022

Behind the hiring desk

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Some time ago, I’d been in hiring mode for a business analyst for my team and “had a few thoughts” that I have kept in draft form for some time. As this is now an ex-company/team, I feel okay writing about it, but am somewhat lazy about changing present tense.

How I think the process should have worked:

Hiring manager (me) transforms needs into requirements.
Human Resources (HR) discusses it with me then initiates a search.
HR is the gatekeeper, protecting the interests of the company and doing first-level screening. Potentially-qualified candidates are forwarded to the me for review.
If there’s interest, HR will set up a meeting between the candidate and me.
If the results are positive, an interview may be scheduled with an extended group.
If the results are positive, there is a verbal discussion of terms. If an agreement is reached, a formal offer is generated.
Employee and employer have a productive relationship

How it actually worked:

Life to a travel bug: Porcine Aviation: 2009 – 2012

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 06:55:25 +0000

About three years ago, on the way to our summer camping trip to Mt. Rainier, I launched a travel bug:

George is young, enthusiastic, and poor as a student

George’s stated (and optimistic) goal was to visit its eccentric cousin who spends his days in Concourse A of Terminal 3 in Cincinnati’s airport doing street performance art for spare change. The Concourse has had a rough couple of years, being closed in 2010 (because Delta and Northwest merged) before being reopened in 2011 as its sibling, Terminal 2, closed.

I’m Here To Put You Back On Schedule

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:32:25 +0000

My kids were feeling somewhat left out each time I dropped a Star Wars reference in conversation – something I apparently do a lot. Hoping to shore up this gap in their cultural education, I rented and watched all three(*) movies from Netflix with them. Parenting can be tough!

(*I am, of course, referring to A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I’ve heard rumors that there is another trilogy using the Star Wars name, and it even had Samuel L. Jackson asking “ __‘What’ ain’t no planet I ever heard of. They speak Bocce on What?” But the ones I saw were CGI-frenzies. (There’s also rumor of two sequels to The Matrix. Yeah, riiiiight.))

Disruptive technologies

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 05:33:20 +0000

Supercomputing 2010’s keynote was Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (and its numerous follow-ons), whose research, studying the demise of companies over time, is utterly fascinating (to me) and I can’t believe I hadn’t read before.

He has studied the demise of companies over time — think Digital Equipment Corporation (cut up into bite-sized chunks in 1998, the rest of which was eaten by Compaq, which was eaten by HP), SGI (a darling when Jurassic Park came out, but ultimately liquidated in 2009, assets bought by Rackable systems), and Sun (bought by Oracle). He’s observed recurring patterns of market disruption. For example, in the case of DEC, their rise was predicated on being cheaper than mainframes. As they gained more experience, the minicomputers became more reliable, but were still in the $100k range. DEC itself was subject to PCs meeting a nascent market need willing to tolerate PCs being utter crap (early-on), but at a far different price point. As PC technology evolved, it became compelling enough that few were buying VAXen.

Dates

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:28:23 +0000

I’ve been researching date/time formats for inclusion in a software product, and wanted to share some of the thought processes involved.Use case: an engineer or scientist wants to plot something over some time period. All time periods are possible, so we must provide years down to minutes. For example, a coastal engineer surveyed said he:

“visualizes the results of the global wave prediction models we run. I am typically dealing with long term (20 – 40 year) datasets of hourly to sub-hourly model data.”

Got Milk

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 03:15:34 +0000

There are a variety of milk-based products available in the store. Just sticking to cow’s milk for the moment, here’s the periodic table of viscous milk products, ordered by decreasing fat content:

Butter – 81% milk fat. A stick of butter (8 tablespoons) has 97.2 grams of fat (880 calories!), which breaks down into 62% saturated and 25% monosaturated. Trivia: West of the Rockies, butter sticks are 3 1/8″ x 1.5″ x 1.5″.4
Heavy Cream – 36 – 40% milk fat.
Whipping Cream – 35% milk fat. It’s used to make whipped cream. Obviously.
Sour Cream – 16 – 21% milk fat. Like buttermilk (see below), except it starts from cream instead of milk. Low-fat sour cream has thickening agents like carageenan or corn starch. (I was surprised at its fat content.)
Light Cream – 18% milk fat, used for pouring into coffee.1
Half and Half – 10% milk fat, also used for pouring into coffee. Its fat content is insufficient for whipping.
Evaporated milk – 6.5% or more. Liquid obtained by the partial removal of water (only) from milk[5]. 1 C condensed milk is equivalent to 1 C evaporated milk plus 1 1/2 C sugar.
Whole Milk – 3.5% milk fat3. After drinking skim for a few weeks, this tastes soooooo creamy.
Yogurt — 3.3% milk fat.
Lowfat Milk – sold as 2%, 1%, 1/2%. Sometimes it’s fortified with skim milk.
Skim Milk – Usually “0%,” but it’s technically less than 1/2 gram per cup. Sometimes protein is added, making it more viscous. ****
Buttermilk – usually non-fat; “traditional” buttermilk is the tart liquid leftover from churning butter. 2 It can also be made by adding 1 tablespoon white vinegar to 1C low-fat milk, letting it stand for ten minutes.

These amounts are squishy, so your mileage may vary. However, to put the fat content into perspective, a cup and a half of whole milk would be equivalent to a tablespoon of butter. (1.5 cups * 240g/cup * 3.5% fat = 12.6 g fat; 1 Tablespoon butter = 15 g * 0.81 fat = 12.2g fat)

Price trends

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:59:31 +0000

I don’t drive as much as I used to, but yowza, $54.87 to fill up my gas tank today. For some historical perspective, the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy who publishes weekly gasoline prices. Here, they attempt to explain gas pricing, best summarized as:

World crude oil prices reached record levels in 2007 due mainly to high worldwide oil demand relative to supply. Other factors contributing to higher crude oil prices include political events and conflicts in some major oil producing regions, as well as other factors such as the declining value of the U.S. dollar (the currency at which crude oil is traded globally).

Time capsule

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:11:41 +0000

Inspired by Spring being officially upon us in the northwest (while the rest of you in North America are having “summer”), I went on another cleaning rampage the weekend before CROC, this time focusing on the garage. For the most part, this involved coming to acceptance that the 17″ piece of baseboard, fractional container of petrified plumber’s putty, sourdough incubation chamber, and various other home improvement remnants Are Not Going To Be Used. Ever. Throwing out all this stuff freed up a lot of space on my “workbench,” formerly known as The Horizontal Surface On Which Crap Is Dumped.

Close, but no cigar

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:24:14 +0000

I felt great when I rolled into Greenwater, the point geographically farthest from the start of Saturday’s 200k brevet. I got my card stamped inside the store, reloaded my water bottles with the unnatural blue sports drink, and chomped away on a slab of vanilla ice cream surrounded by two, chewy chocolate chip cookies. I reckoned the remaining forty, mostly downhill miles would be easily doable within the five hours of time remaining. All the steady winter riding had finally paid off. I’d complete my first ever brevet.

Don’t have a cow, man

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:46:16 +0000

Last week, I read a story about 143 million pounds of beef products from California-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Company being retroactively recalled to February 1, 2006. Questions that came to mind:

Does beef keep for two years?

I’d always worked from the conventional cooking wisdom that meat could be stored for up to two months in the freezer. The charts 2,7 suggests this is true for ground beef. Steaks and roasts can be kept for 6 – 12 months. Still, that’s a year shy of the retroactive recall date. Only canned beef products have a 2-5 year shelf-life7. Conclusion: most of the beef has already been consumed. Perhaps this is done for shock effect or litigation purposes?

Love is like Nitrogen

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:52:34 +0000

The high-level observations for today:

“Invited” speakers tend to be better than those that are… not invited. I do not have enough data on quality of uninvited talks, but I see an opportunity for a great practical joke.
If the invited speaker isn’t working, you can either wait it out or go to the alternate bloc of presentations. (You do have one, don’t you?) Or, tour the Poster Hall.
Nearly half of today’s presenters were confounded in some way by the remote control. It seems people think “right click” means “forward one slide,” not “select some stupid menu that I’ll need help exiting.“

I woke up from a weird dream that involved being approached by a panhandler of the worst kind:

Trick question

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:22:00 +0000

Costco called last night to let me know the tires I ordered were in — not that I expected to wait long for a set of all-weather radials compatible a 2002 Subaru, especially in this neck of the woods. I drove today, anticipating I’d be able to escape work early and have them mounted.

On the way in, I saw a cyclist, his blinkie was barely visible. Issaquah-Pine Lake is a terrible stretch of road to drive on. Biking is even worse because of the disappearing shoulder. I made a deliberate effort to give him sufficient berth. As I eased back into the normal lane position, I saw the cars in front of me were making sudden stops. I did my Fred Flinstone, feeling the pulse of the anti-lock system working its magic. Even with well-worn tires, the car held steady, and I stopped in time.

Fomplicated

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:30:30 +0000

I’m coining a new term, fomplicated, to describe a product that requires deliberate intervention and expertise from a customer beyond what any sane human being would consider reasonable. The word is a contraction of a well-known English expletive rhyming with firetrucking and the word “complicated.”

Although it’s applicable to a variety of things, I’ve been seeing it a lot related to my computer. For example, this morning I had a minor fomplication. While poring through some mailing-list email, I saw that KMTT 103.7FM has an online stream. The Mountain Music Lounge is great stuff, but I don’t get good reception indoors. I had an unsatisfactory experience with a pay-for service that claimed to have the station, but really only played a pre-selected “best of” 20 songs. (Cancelling that service was unnecessarily fomplicated, too.) KMTT’s option would not only serve it live, but would also be free. And it claimed to run on my Linux and Windows machines. Score!

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 21:58:40 +0000

Last December I was lamenting the industry analyst forecasts were all over the map. One particular analyst, Analyst Bravo, had unbelievabily optimistic numbers. Here’s a better chart depicting the market predictions of four analysts for hard-boiled eggs (HBE), soft-boiled eggs (SBE) and Jewel-encrusted eggs. Everyone acknowledges the hard- and soft-boiled eggs market is declining while deluxe, jewel-encrusted eggs are the future:

You don’t have to be an analyst to see that Analyst Bravo thinks the hard- and soft-boiled egg market is going to remain strong. Last month Analyst Alpha, who only reports on total boiled eggs, adjusted their 2004 and future “forecast” down about 20% from where they were last year. Their estimates are similar to Analysts Charlie and Delta. I’ve also manually corroborated the estimates with the third quarter financial reports. Much like the dry Pancake Mix market, four major players serve 90% of the market. In the next two weeks, I’ll have another set of annual reports to pore through and I don’t expect a miraculous upswing in the market: after trying jewel-encrusted eggs, no one goes back to mere boiled. Switching among boiled egg suppliers is very easy as there’s little practical differentiation. (Sure, some paint letters on the eggs or dye the shells or even use paper cartons. Customers see these features as gravy.)

Magic Quadrant Me, Baby

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 12:06:24 +0000

One motivation for the exercise last week in reviewing 10-Q/Ks was to come up with some forecasts on the marketplace. We also use an array of industry analysts who are ostensibly better connected and do this stuff all day, but the numbers I’ve seen are all over the place. Consider the following chart:

  Dozens of Hard-Boiled Eggs Consumed per Year

(I know this is busy, but I had to take out the PII because I don’t like talking about specifics of my employment. If it helps, assume that I’m just a simple data farmer.)

Status reports

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:30:38 +0000

I had a weird dream last night. In the dream, I made a gazillion dollars because I wrote a program that automatically generated wholly truthful and accurate status reports. (This is especially funny if you ponder the irony of designing software pointing out software ironies.) It was based on MadLibs, rendered in a template like this:

This project is adjective ( doomed; not dead yet, but coughing up blood; dead).

Important Person (VP, CIO, customer) verb phrase (is still withholding information, has been meddling/changing requirements again, won’t make up their mind), marketing verb phrase (hasn’t finished the specification, is too busy playing golf/doing field research, doesn’t have any use cases, gives us specifications relying on 23rd-century Star Trek technology), the developers are excuse (pulling dates from their imaginations, playing Doom III, still trying to work out the answer to the moving Mt. Fuji interview question),

Corporate Then versus Corporate Now

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:02:53 +0000

In June, a New York Times article said there were fewer complaints about cubicles from job seekers. It seems people are now less likely to worry about whether their workspace is equipped with walls, doors and Herman Miller chairs.

Well, Duh. As the market pendulum has swung from seekers to employers, it’s not a stretch to say people are so thankful to even have a job, they’re less concerned with petty luxuries. Today, I’m going to reflect upon the “then” (when George Bush was in office) and “now” (with George Bush in office).

Schedule chicken

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:33:24 +0000

What is the game of “Chicken?” In the movies, two hooligans with something to prove settle their differences by racing their cars towards each other. The first one to turn away, averting certain collision, is the “chicken” and loses face among his cohorts. The other player, referred to as the “winner,” gets bragging rights and the fickle heroine.

If no one turns — which is a theoretical possibility, but in practice, never happens in the movies (dramatic license and all that) — the game is officially a draw. A rematch is unlikely, but both participants are automatically entered as co-nominees for the Darwin Awards.

Truth in the Workplace

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 14:55:25 +0000

Director Mitch pointed me to an article on the interview twists and turns some HR people will inflict upon candidates. (Further commentary is available on Newmark’s Door and Just Procastinating. Guest blogger Dr Bob makes some general HR rantiness.)

I decided it might be fun to spend next week blogging about some of the bizarre workplace rituals I’ve seen from both sides of the desk. For example, I already have something written on the concept of “Schedule Chicken.” I’ve been hoping to work this in some way. 🙂

Ted is not 100% human

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 03:13:57 +0000

The Seattle PI recently wrote about the disappearance of “A day in the life of” blog from someone named “Ted” on my employer’s recruiting site. Among the more interesting revelations was a quote from an unnamed sources that the tone of Ted’s writing was
“not 100% human.” To assist with the investigation, I’ll answer some questions based on my special knowledge …