Fancy Free Friday

I've been off the grid this past week. Okay not really, but I have been sort of unplugged and sort of distracted with vacationing. It all started with some insect much smaller than me that's been feasting on my house for who knows how long. Due to financial uncertainties, this was the summer to get stuff done. The last hoorah to buy toys and fix up the place. So I paid a professional to shoot poison through my entire house and skipped off to a locale even warmer than my own to enjoy some time off from MegaCorp. I'm pretty sure I forgot how to be an engineer in the meantime, but oh well I'll worry about that later.

 

TechCat got to spend the week rooming with three dogs and while she got some love and attention she seems to be pretty happy to be home again. Or, I'm guessing that's why she woke us up multiple times during the night to make sure we were still there and she was still there and we weren't going to ship her off to the doghouse again.

 

In honor of my absent design fridays post today, I wrote about Lockheed's HALE-D unmanned airship over at EngineerBlogs. Hope you are all as well rested and even keeled as I feel today (even having to go back to earning my paycheck again). I raise a toast to you and your weekend so we can focus on alcoholic beverages or tasty non-alcoholic beverages and fondly remember days when insects are our worst enemies and having no financial ruin that lay ahead and politicians who we can't tent out of our house. Oh I ruined it already didn't I. Have another drink.

Design Fridays: A Successful Design

Over at Engineer Blogs today I'm talking about the Key to a Successful Design and asking whether confidence plays into presenting your solution and getting it reviewed and approved. Last week I talked about the Army's Biometrics Device they are using in Afghanistan and the week before was compressor design.

 

I'll pose the same questions here; do you think it's more about being confident than having a good design? Does attitude and how you present yourself factor in to whether people will back you? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Future Engineers

A couple of links for easy weekend reading.
A summer camp in San Jose teaching kids hands on civil engineering skills.
Will there some day be a 5-stroke petrol combustion engine that does better than a diesel engine?
Bob Gower CEO of United Memories gives a tour of the place that does chip testing for the semiconductor industry right in Colorado Springs before he retires. They gloss lightly over outsourcing, the quality of US engineers, and the worth of keeping jobs here.

SIBQ - Sorry It's Been Quiet

And sorry I used an acronym for my post title. But hey, I'm an engineer, what'd you expect?

 

I know the posting has been sporadic here at Haus Tech. But at last it's Friday. Part of the lull stems from craziness at Megacorp. My team is being restructured under a higher level individual and this has meant I'm being asked to take on higher level responsibilities to cover the gap. This is usually a good thing. But I suspect it'll be part of some temporary situation where possibly these duties will flow back upwards on a periodic basis, or since the powers that be haven't exactly been formerly notified they may just assume the next guy up is handling them (as he should be). I don't know, I do tend to overthink these things. Like a lot. So we'll see how it goes.

 

Some of my energies have gone into keeping up with my posting schedule over at Engineer Blogs and an effort to now always write about communication or workplace dramas I've been trying to post on technical subjects so last week was on bearings and this week is on condensation.

 

I think I have a partial tendency to avoid writing about technical topics because sometimes I feel like an imposter engineer (which I'm sure doesn't help the confidence issues at work) as well as sometimes the cool stuff I am doing is just way to specific to my field and would a) ruin my pseudonymity and b) get me fired.

 

But on top of all that I feel like as an engineer I was prepared for having to solve design problems. And even though I know there would be a lot of politics and corporate intrigue, navigating them is still a challenge. Probably a greater challenge than doing an analysis on a failing component. Not to mention they are universal issues (I think).

 

So if you'd like to see more technical stuff here, pipe up. If you like the workplace whining posts or hate them let me know. If you want to tell me how your day is going or how the weather is please share that too. You know, whatever you feel like bringing to the table here.

Leave Your Mark

An interesting gallery of John Rennie's engineering legacy. A scottish civil engineer in the 18th and 19th centures he was responsible for design of many canals, bridges, waterways, docks and harbours scattered around Great Britain. When we look at great buildings and wonders we don't always think of the engineer who designed it but they are as much a part of it as the society, labor and technology that went into the construction.

More on the superiority of engineering

Today on Engineer Blogs I talked about interdisciplinary engineering which is the theme over there this week. (See posts by Cherish, GEARS, and Paul Clarke as well). There's other engineering in the news today though, again from the NY Times Economix blog college majors that do best in this job market.

 

A month and a half ago I had a post on some economic news that included the mention of an article about engineering being the best paying college major. You'll notice some discrepancies. The CNNMoney article touting high salaries for engineers says they all had a higher starting salary than $60,000. However the Economix chart is based on earned income in the last 12 months so the median income for someone with an engineering degree employed in a job that requires that degree is...$35,548. Now probably some dinosaur engineers will show up and say that this was quite normal for them and kids these days are too demanding. Probably haven't read any of my numerous posts on inflation.

 

Hopefully the low number is due to people starting their job more recently than 12 months and only having a partial years earnings to report along with maybe some people who are working part time. Still, the percentage of engineering graduates who are employed in a job that requires their degree is 69.4%. That's the second highest after teaching at 71.1%. Higher than the oft praised "business" degree, health, or physical science (which will surprise no one in the sciences). Communications, humanities and "area studies" (whatever that it is) make up the bottom of the list. So while you shouldn't always hunt the money, hunting a degree that leads to more full employment might be useful. Though even the numbers of employed grads in the top fields are abysmally low. More victims of this brutal job market.

Synergistic Cross-disciplinary Trending

I'm inspired. Fluxor wrote a humorous post on some buzz words he heard around the workplace. If you're looking for more than fluff, go over to Engineer Blogs where I talk about subcontracting for dummies or the art of working with your company's vendors on custom products.

 

In the meantime, the managerialistic my life becomes the more I get involved in this. And even find myself forced to use the same phrases I can't stand in my email correspondence. So here's some crap I get tired of using (and yet, don't know the workaround):

 

-Get on the same page

-Touch bases with that person

-Follow-up on that or bird-dog that

-Lines of communication

-We need to have a presence there

-Go make nice with them

-Rally the troops

-We need to massage the message

-I'd like to close that one out

 

Or...

-Are we reading now?

-Oh now we're playing baseball?

-Like that has ever helped do anything but piss someone off, not to mention who the heck in corporate america even knows what a bird dog is?

-Must be a less cheesy way of saying this

-Pointless postering

-Because we're four now?

-Didn't know white collar workers were exactly like battle hardened soldiers

-Shine the shit

-Well we'd all like to clear off our "to-do" lists so yeah, you don't need to tell me

 

Learn enough phrases and you don't need expertise, you'll fit right in.

Can't we all just get along?

Today over at Engineer Blogs I talk about the age gap in the workplace. What to do when your manager is younger than you, or when you are now the young hotshot boss supervising older employees. Feel free to stop over and pipe up with your experiences with this.

That and $5 will get you a cup of Barley

Ever the overachiever I have stretched myself yet again. Not only am I also writing over at Engineer Blogs I'm also enjoying an exciting two weeks on the Scientopia Guest Blog. Myself and Paolo who is a Natural History curator are contributing our scientific observations to the Scientopia empire. Or is it scientific? In my introductory post there I talked a little about who I amand asked is engineering science? I also just wrapped up a post on NASA's Stardust mission and their efforts of marketing vs exploration. My blog colleague (blogolleague?) Paolo discussed a mystery item from his museum collection (I think it's a skull!) and discussed analyzing it to figure out exactly what it is.

 

My EB (that's Engineer Blogs) buddies have also been busy. Fluxor posted a circuit diagram and asked blog readers to pipe in with where the problem is in Part 1. My eyes kinda glazed over but he gives us the punchline in Part 2. Cherish discusses geological engineering and mapping of subsurface layers. Then last week we all discussed how we got into engineering (Cherish, Fluxor, Chris and me). Our two new guest bloggers joined: Paul Clarke and Michael Barr.

 

With all that great reading you shouldn't need me to say anything groundbreaking or interesting or remotely technical here, right? Good. Well I'll tell you something interesting anyways. Linda O'Brien can sell you roasted barley. You might be wondering, well wth can I do with that, FrauTech? Her husband being a farmer she was experimenting with malted barley and found it to have a coffee-like taste. So she's made ground roasted barley you can put in your coffee or espresso machine. She even drinks hers with creamer.

 

Like many serious coffee drinkers I often wonder what the heck the point is of drinking decaf. Either get over the caffeine, or drink something else. But I think this is an even better substitute because decaffeinated coffee still has small amounts of caffeine in it. So if you're trying to get that same coffee taste without the caffeine I'm now going to recommend you brew O'Brien's roasted barley, or RoBarr. Hopefully if she sees this she'll send me a free sample so I can review it. I've shied away from reviews in the past being only an average engineer and less than average at many other things but if there's one thing I'm damn good at it's drinking coffee.

Treading Water

I have 2-3 test plans to write and several large configuration packages to compile. Then there's school where I have two very large, comprehensive reports to write on experiments. Thank goodness other people are writing good things on the internet.

 

Over at Engineer Blogs Fluxor gives a very clear explanation of the Smith Chart, even a sprocket like myself can understand.

 

Cherish clarifies what electronics reseach is and isn't as relates to an electronics miniaturization office that was shut down at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks for supposedly doing too much research and not enough building.

 

Kaydee over at the Engineering Ethics Blog talks about the changing balance in Scientific American in its portrayal of the sciences and its political bent.

 

Christina Mackenzie over at Aviation Week talks about Eurocopters gradually becoming more and more unmanned.

New Venture

There's a new blogging game in town that I'm quite proud of. Myself and a few other of the engineer bloggers have banded together to form Engineer Blogs. So go check it out.

 

Chris Gammell asks Do you prefer to work on projects on your own? Cherish writes an introduction to metamaterials and Fluxor gives us the long awaited (by me anyways) list of transistor interview questions that he either typically asks candidates or has encountered in his work. I have even contributed my modest writing skills where I talk about where this economy is headed and a government workshop's attempt to outline the future of manufacturing while we struggle to compete with China in What the World Needs Now.

 

I will still write here, but head on over and add Engineer Blogs to your reader or feed aggregate to get the full effect of three fantastic writers (not sure why they invited me). I'll continue to link over there for new posts or when there's a fantastic post you need to run over and read. You can continue to stay and read here for whatever I don't spotlight over there which might still be engineering related, or might be my amateurish economic predictions, discussions on caffeine, or pictures of my cat.

Sprig Cleaning

So I updated my blogroll type links. If you're not on there, and you'd like to be, please leave a comment or email me or something. Yes I actually read all those blogs. I'm open to trying new things so if you read me and think I should read you let me know. If I've fat fingered your URL let me know that too.

 

Yes, that is a dinosaur playset. It's made out of sprigwood, some natural composite wood meant to be safe for kids. I'm not sure it's factually accurate that the little adventure dude has a 4x4, a fedora, and has made friends with some very happy looking dinosaurs (happy because their meals on wheels arrived?) But you have to admit the dinosaurs are adorable. You know you want the set, don't lie to me. Also, it's good inspiration for my personal mission of getting Jurassic Park released to blu-ray.