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12/08/2006 Entry: "Stufforama"

Long time no nuffin'

So it's postarama time!

First off, from lil Toph: New SAM AND MAX game! if you don't know what that means then you are a) too young or b) have a life. Either way, sucks to be you, junior.
Unfortunately, my old card doesn't support direct 3D. Been meaning to upgrade for a while, but I'm busy, dangit.

All the student circles I know (that is, Julie's roommates) have been abuzz with AllUC.ORG. Watching TV shows on demand for free online. The don't host 'em (that's illegal, mate); they just have an awesome index of literally hundreds of shows. Everyone I've told this site about to has cursed me for it just days later -- it's that good.

Julie had a great time in Rome two weekends ago.

In other news, the Bob Dylan tribute show went swimmingly well. Mirko's Lazy Boys did stunning rockabilly renditions of the Master, while C4Space waxed somewhat alternative yet very good despite their techno implying band name.

Here's another story, one a private student told me last week. His company manufactures industrial cameras for robots and Leica and the like. They also manufacture the ID scanners used in airports for a larger German company that in turn sells them to airports all over the world. My student's company uses PCBs manufactured in Asia, who in turn changed their capacitor supplier from one Asian company to an underbidder about two years ago. As it turns out, the underbidding supplier was an engineer who once worked for the former supplier but left and took the capacitor formula with him.

Two years later, about a coupla weeks ago, ID scanners in airports all across the world went defective and my student's company's client threatened an enormous lawsuit. After long hours of backtracking and tracing serial numbers, it was ascertained that the malfunctions were due to bunk capacitors from the new supplier, who is probably now in jail.

Now, his company is faced with the daunting task of repairing all these damn scanners. They are a small company, about 1800 employees worldwide, a turnover of less than 8 million. They have a repair shop in Alabama.

In addition to that jazz, my boy had to greet and introduce the training procedures for Leica microscope cameras to a visiting repair technician from India. He had great anxiety towards meeting the technician, because -- although he was not the trainer -- it was ultimately his responsibility to make clear that the shop environment was very specific before opening the devices. For example, you need a clean room (or at least a flow box) with a dust particle density not exceeding 100 000 per square foot. Normal air contains around 3 million particles per square foot by the way, so that's pretty clean even when shabby in comparison to microchip labs and the like.

So, we wrote a short presentation script together -- one that on his account was excellent, but still left him unprepared for understanding the technician's ensuing questions. But all in all, my efforts turned out to be valuable, leaving me wondering if my work was that of a halfway decent teacher or of a scandalously underpaid consultant.