IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

The Purse Strings - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The following item came in this morning from Merrick Patch: "Suffolk Man Sentenced For Stealing From Nassau Pediatrics Firm".

The article can be found at the following link: Stealing 

In the referenced article, we find the following line:

"As part of his job, he was given unsupervised control over the practice's payroll, 401k administration and hiring of support staff."

Way back when, I took an accounting class in which it was repeatedly stressed that no business should ever be run with just one person alone handling all of the business transactions. For security's sake, beyond having a bookkeeper or whatever other title might apply, there needs to be at least one additional person to provide oversight and checking. You can't avoid the possibility of collusion of course, but NEVER entrust everything to only one single, unmonitored individual.

In this case, three million dollars took a walk. Please let this case be a cautionary tale.

Getting Older, Or Not - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Notes from a card carrying septuagenarian:

1)         The comics.     

When the comic "Little Orphan Annie" was still being produced by its originator, Harold Gray, and it reached its fortieth year of publication, the question arose of how Annie could have had forty years of adventures and still be merely a child. The key was that Annie's birth date was February 29th. Thus, with Annie having had only had ten birthdays, she could justifiably be presented as being only ten years of age.

The comic "Archie" was introduced by cartoonist Bob Montana in the year, I believe, of 1943. If all of the teenagers were then sixteen years old, their birth year would have been 1927. Therefore, all of those teenagers, Archie, Veronica, Betty, Reggie, Jughead, Moose and Midge would all today be more than ninety years of age. How old the adults Mr. Lodge, Miss Grundy, Mr. Flutesnoot, Mr. Weatherbee, Miss Beazley and Mr. Svenson might be is left as an exercise for the student but they all wear their ages well, don't they.

Similarly, in "Dennis the Menace", the little boy Dennis Mitchell first appeared on the scene in 1951 at the age of five which would lead to a birth year of 1946 and a present day age of more than seventy. Ditto, I think, for Charlie Brown of "Peanuts" fame.

Maybe my dates are off a little bit, but not by that much. Except for "Gasoline Alley" and "Doonesbury", cartoon characters do not seem to age. We must, of course, acknowledge the character age reset that took place a few years ago in "For Better or For Worse".

2)         On radio.         

A good many years ago, Garrison Keillor told a Lake Wobegon story about a quack medicine that was said to reverse the effects of aging. It wouldn't actually make you any younger, but the effects of aging that occur in so many cases would be reversed. The medicine was called "Compousine" and there was its derivative "Limousine". When the fakery was revealed, several townsfolk who had used the stuff and who said they felt better sadly came to realize that they couldn't get any more of it.

3)         On television.

The collie dog "Lassie" was on CBS television for twenty years, from 1954 - 1974. A succession of animals made that canine's geriatricity possible. However, the character of Jeff Miller played by Tommy Rettig aged out of the series to be replaced by the younger character of Timmy Martin played by Jon Provost. Similarly, the television version of Dennis The Menace was played by Jay North for four years, from 1959 - 1963 before he aged out of that role.

There are other entertainment examples connected with aging as well, but as those of us who live in a linear temporal environment (never mind Mr. Einstein) simply get older, we live out lives as best we can (hopefully) and we should be content with that.

The File Cabinets - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I once wrote of a company executive director who convened a meeting of that company's top executives to discuss the patent implications of Ohm's Law being wrong. He'd overheard someone's tongue-in-cheek remark to that effect and actually took it seriously.

Please see:  Ohm's Law Is Wrong?

Another incident that happened with this guy (Yes, there were other incidents too.) is worthy of description.

The time frame was the early seventies. maybe 1972, when there was no such thing as a personal computer. All engineering documentation was on paper. There were 8½ x 11 memos, there were prints of A-size, B-size, C-size and D-size drawings which all taken together made up quite a lot of bulk. That bulk had to be stored somehow, and so it was. Everything was folded up and filed in a row of file cabinets which occupied a cubicle that would otherwise have accommodated four desks and some swivel chairs.

Those file cabinets were a little the worse for wear having been around for a long time. They had dents here and there, there were missing chips of paint here and there, but the sliding drawers worked smoothly so everything was okay until one day when that director came along.

The guy decided that all of that ugly stuff would not be allowed to remain in that office and then instructed the maintenance people to take those file cabinets, contents and all, and carry them out to the back loading dock to be collected as garbage. When I came along a little later, I found the empty cubicle where I thought I was going to have a stroke. Of course, that didn't actually happen until almost thirty years later.

I asked some people where those cabinets had been taken and when I found out, I went to that back loading dock from which they had not yet been collected and in the fortuitous absence of that director, I asked that all of those cabinets be brought back to the cubicle from whence they had been removed.

I watched over that process and it was done.

Interestingly, that director never questioned how those file cabinets got back to their original location. I told my immediate supervisor what had happened and what I had done to which his response was a slight smile and a little side to side head shake.  

 

Not Recognizing The Colonel - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

So there were four of us in Bloomingdale's this one fine day. There was me, my wife Judy, her brother Joel and his wife Amy. Judy and Amy were off somewhere looking at some clothing while Joel wandered away somewhere else and I found a bench on which to take a seat. That bench was just across an aisle from a jewelry counter.

While I was there, I saw a man come to the jewelry counter and engage a sales clerk, a young woman, from whom he made a purchase. The two of them were only a short distance away so I could hear both of them quite clearly.

The clerk asked him if he lived locally and he replied no, that he would like to live here in New York, but business matters demanded that he reside in California. When he finished his credit card transaction, he picked up his package from the counter and turned around to leave. Just momentarily he faced in my direction and then he stopped. He looked at me as if he was expecting me to say something, but I didn't and so off he went.

A few moments later, Joel came over and asked me if I had said hello to "Colonel Klink". I had no idea what Joel was getting at. Joel then asked if I had recognized the man who had just left. He was the actor who had portrayed that character on the TV show "Hogan's Heroes". It was Werner Klemperer.

No wonder he had looked at me the way he did. He must have expected me to recognize him but I didn't.

Joel and I decided to double check if we were correct about the man's identity. We asked the sales clerk if the signature she'd just gotten read Werner Klemperer and yes, it did!

"Oh my God!!" she said. "I just waited on Colonel Klink." She hadn't recognized him either.

Still, all five of us had something by which to remember the moment.

Surnames - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A little harmless whimsy:

Is it pushing the concept of coincidence rather to the extreme if we notice so many stage personalities, fictional characters and real live people sharing the same surnames? Please see the following.

I think there are plenty more too, but I think I've spent as much time on this as I care to.

Circuit Studies, Living Analog, Part 7 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This lecture will be held at the LIU-Post Campus, Lorber Hall, 720 Northern Boulevard, Brookville, NY 11548 on January 3, 2019 starting at 7 PM.

Please come early to meet and mingle and to share some light refreshments.

CEU arrangements (2 PDH) have been requested for this lecture.

Please see the Comments section below for a summary of the specific lecture topics.

 

A Little Eye Candy - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Seeing this or that when one is here or there can sometimes be almost eerie. Consider these few examples.

Example 1:

There are two office buildings in Mineola which are joined by a corridor. You might think such a corridor would be located at the ground floors but it isn't. This corridor is on an upper level and is enclosed by blue tinted glass. I find the visual effect is just a bit disconcerting. (Paging Rod Serling.)

Example 2:

We have a tendency to sometimes see things which are not really in the state we perceive. Consider the colored areas in the image below.

It looks like there are two shapes, one red and one yellow which seem to overlap in the orange area, but is the yellow area semi-transparent and placed on top of the red or is the red area semi-transparent and placed on top of the yellow?

Neither is true of course. There are really three areas, the red the yellow and the orange and no interactions are taking place among them. Still, our perception persists and dissertations have been written about this effect which is that most people see the warmer color of yellow preferentially on top of the cooler color of red.

Example 3:

I once tried an experiment with my wristwatch. I placed it on the glass of my scanner and ran the scanner across the watch dial very slowly. The second hand left some interesting traces in the resulting image.

When I drew radial lines from the center of the dial across what looked like a slanted row of dots, I could see that the angular steps taken by the second hand were not all of equal size. Some were larger than the others.

The watch keeps very accurate time so there's no issue there, but the irregularities of the second hand's movement do exist even though they go unnoticed in normal service.

A Missed Business Opportunity? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Some while back, the sign on the left in the picture below appeared on a utility pole asserting that an apprentice in the real estate business could earn $20,000 per month which would be $240,000 per year.

Wow!!! 

Some time later, a second sign appeared plastered on top of the first sign.

Well, I certainly don't want to "die broke", do I?? I better respond to this offer right away, right?

The last time I looked, both signs had vanished.

I'm glad.

An Assumption of Insecurity - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I got two bogus phone calls today, robocalls apparently from the same villain(s), one on the house phone and the other on the cell phone. Take a look at the times shown on these two caller ID displays.

These two calls came in quick succession, first on the house phone and then on the cell phone. They bear the same spoofed caller ID, as weird as this one happens to be. That means that these bad guys, whoever they are, acquired the phone records of some office or business with which I have had legitimate dealings via which they have managed to associate and target my two very different phone numbers.

Who knows. Maybe it was a doctor's office. I've often provided both phone numbers to such. The key point of this experience is that someone's contact list, someone's database, got raided and that no such contact list can ever be trusted, either by thee or me, to be secure.

Phone numbers plus any and all other personal data, no matter where stored, no matter how stored, no matter how ostensibly protected, must always be assumed to be insecure. Never mind any assurances that anyone may offer to the contrary.

Just a cautionary note.

Alco Locomotives - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I found this picture hanging on the wall in a local diner the other day. It is a draftsman's rendering of two locomotives that were built in 1914 by a company called American Locomotive Company (Alco) that was located in Schenectady, NY. It's not such a great photograph what with my unsteady hand on my phone's camera and the unavoidable glow of an incandescent lamp reflecting in the center, but the original drawing itself was very much a work of art.

This drawing being over a century old, it was created entirely by skilled hands. It was created using straight edges, a compass and a French curve by a highly skilled draftsman. All of the lettering was done by hand and there is even a missing period in one of the notes for the lower locomotive.

Nobody is perfect, right?

What really fascinated me though was that these two locomotives were exactly alike except for one thing. The distances between the rearmost drive wheels and the trailing wheels are just two inches different.

That two inch difference carries over to the Total Wheel Base, the Over Couplers and the Over All dimension as well.

I would love to know how that difference came about. Even though they were built in two different shops, I would have thought that the goal would have been to make them exactly the same, but maybe someone made a mistake of some kind.

Nobody is perfect, right?

I guess that's true, but stand in awe Oh Ye of the AutoCad Generation and admire the work of a true master.