IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Rent Demand - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Earlier today, November 28, 2021, I saw this notice taped to the front door of a small restaurant. I have deliberately removed several lines of identifying information.

As of this writing, this document is thirty-eight days old.

This particular restaurant, to my recall, has not been in operation for quite some time. However, on its plate glass window I saw two building permits for alterations, one of which had long since expired.

There was much more writing to the above notice as well. It looked like half-a-dozen or so pages were stapled together. For all of that, the overall picture for somebody would seem to be quite grim.

I neither hold nor offer any particular opinions about having discovered this, but I do take notice of it and I pass it along for that same purpose.

Octagonal Street Signs - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Without being too specific, a good many years ago, I was told about this New England town which got a lot of snow every winter. Of course, that's true of many northern towns across the USA but it bears on a tale of ill considered municipal policy in the one particular place.

Back before there were Federal guidelines for street sign installations, the mayor of this one town decided that all of the street signs in his domain were of extreme importance. They were so very, very important that he decided to take a firm step to ensure that each and every one of the signs would be read by each and every passing motorist, absolutely and without fail.

Every street sign in that town was made into the shape of an octagon.

The idea was that since STOP signs were octagonal, motorists were well conditioned to notice that shape and to pay attention to the message. Therefore, if each and every street sign were made octagonal too, that same "STOP" message attention would have to be paid to every other street sign as well.

Simple, huh?

Winter came and with winter came the New England snow. The cold and the clinging snow deposited an icy  coating all over everything in sight. In short order, layers of hardened snow started to accumulate on every street sign which rendered those signs unreadable. As a result, every street sign looked exactly like a STOP sign.

Traffic flow descended into chaos.

I never found out if those brilliantly inspired octagonal signs were replaced before or after the introduction of Federal guidelines.

Slow IEEE Alias - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I've been using an IEEE alias e-mail address for quite a few years, occasionally redirecting it to this or that destination address. Presently, the destination is one specific address, but when I tried using that alias while sending from my laptop, the message didn't seem to come in at my destination in-box.

I waited a little while, then I waited a little while more, then a lot more and finally I decided that something must be wrong to I sent that same message directly to the destination without using the IEEE alias. Message arrival was nearly instantaneous.

Eventually the first sending attempt succeeded too but the transit time via the IEEE alias was twenty-four minutes. To me, that is a lot of time lag.

"Patience is its own reward, but few are satisfied with it."  -   Egyptian proverb

https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/32/98/172824/Folk/Folk-Arts/Proverb-of-the-day-Patience-is-its-own-reward,-but.aspx

Ahmaud Arbery and All In The Family - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

At the following URL, the opening paragraph appears as shown below.:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/prosecutor-says-defendants-attacked-arbery-because-he-was-a-black-man-running-down-the-street/ar-AAR0vhF?li=BBnb7Kz

The three white men charged with murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery made the decision to “attack” because Arbery “was a Black man running down the street,” not because he was a threat, prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said Monday during closing arguments. 

There was a now disquieting scene in the television program "All In The Family" where Archie and Lionel are seated at the kitchen table in the Bunker household. Archie finds out that Lionel had not been feeling well of late and makes a well intended suggestion that Lionel take up jogging, that the exercise would be helpful. Lionel's response is something like "If you saw somebody who looks like me running in this neighborhood, what would you think?". Archie pauses a moment to consider that and then says "I see yer pernt, Lionel."

That scene between two consummate acting professionals is almost prescient from nearly forty years ago of what has been described in recent news reports regarding the death of Ahmaud Arbery.

It merits some thought.

Was This An Attempted Suicide? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I needed to make a left turn last night at a light-controlled intersection. When the light turned green, I saw two women on the near street corner on my left starting to cross to the far left street corner so I waited for them to get there. One woman was leading a rather large dog on a leash while the other was pushing a baby stroller. Altogether, they were quite visible.

As the two women made their way across, as they were passing the midpoint of their crossing, the driver behind me began leaning on the horn. Perhaps that driver was in an urgent hurry and was therefore urging that I run the two women over.

That was bad enough, but worse was to come.

As the two women successfully and safely accomplished their crossing, I started to roll forward for my left turn. After I had gotten forward a few feet, a third woman suddenly bolted from that far left street corner and ran right in front of my car.

I slammed on the brake and she did not get hurt. The horn blower behind me was somehow long gone, but if that person had been turning left too, I would likely have been rear-ended.

The horn blower acted badly enough, but that third woman's behavior could reasonably have been viewed as an attempted suicide. She looked in my direction with an uninterpretable facial expression and then kept running.

I have been noticing of late, and for quite some time now, news items about pedestrian fatalities on automobile roadways, usually ascribed to speeding and reckless drivers. I imagine most of that attribution to be correct.

This incident last night casts another light on such matters though.

Vanity Plates, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

More folks expressing their personal philosophies in eight letters or less:

Just to note, the ITZABMW is a Toyota.

Wallet-Sized Cards - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This image is my personal collection of "convenient" wallet-sized cards as an example of what one can accumulate.

In there are plant and outdoor society membership cards, museum membership cards, library cards, public media membership cards, my PE license card, my ham radio license and yes, that first card on top is my IEEE membership card. The stack is more than an inch thick.

Imagine trying to always conveniently carry all of these things around in a wallet.

I guess that's just one of life's lesser absurdities.

Whose Office? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We were having lunch at a local diner. We were seated at one booth that was in a row with several other booths and trying to converse. However, neither of us could hear the other speak because there were two women seated in the booth directly behind me making enormous noise.

One of them had set up a laptop, a cell phone, an array of papers and an assortment of stationery items while carrying on LOUD conversations on that phone and laptop whose speaker volume settings were turned way up and whose own very loud voice was filling the room with all kinds of business related chatter.

After a while, I got fed up, I stood up, I went over and I spoke up while gesturing toward that laptop:

"Hey! That thing and you are making so much noise, we can't hear ourselves talk!"

You can try to visualize the astonishment on that woman's face.  "We're leaving." she said to which I responded "You're leaving? Good bye." and I returned to my booth. Peace was restored to the dining area and I caught a couple of slightly smiling glances from other customers.

That woman was commandeering for herself a facility that the diner proprietor offers to the general public thus denying the peaceful use of that facility by other members of the general public. That level of self-absorption, of self-entitlement or of whatever else that might be called, is beyond justification.

If that woman had given me any backtalk, my further response would have been along the following lines:

"This is a public place, If you have business matters to handle, do it in your office. That's what privacy is all about!"

Of course, it didn't come to that.

 

Orchid Octet - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I don't want to convey the mis-impression that I know things about plants. I once got into trouble with a department secretary over that and I don't want anything similar to ever happen again.

No Expertise

Still, we were walking through the orchid display of the main greenhouse at Planting Fields Arboretum a few days ago when we came across this:

There was this one specimen with eight flawless blooms emerging from a single stem in perfect, alternate order, back and forth from left-and-right. Even I, a lifelong non-plant person, just stood there for a while gaping at this thing.

The main greenhouse at Planting Fields Arboretum is, I think, the most awesome place to go if you want to spend some time, even for the likes of yours-truly.

 

 

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The Incredible Shrinking Phone Book - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We just got delivery of a new local area phone book which Verizon calls "The Real Yellow Pages". It's dated August 2021. It's predecessor was dated March 2019. The time span between the two is almost 2½ years.

I couldn't help noticing that the new directory is roughly half the thickness of the old one. It looks like most of the shrinkage is in the white-paper part. The yellow-paper part may be somewhat smaller, but less drastically so.

In any case, this has to mean something, but exactly what, I'm really not sure.

A little food for thought, maybe.