IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

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

In light of the tragedies, twenty dead children plus additional adult victims, of the day of this essay's composition, December 14, 2012 in Newton, Connecticut:

Please compare these two photographs.  The parallels between what Jared Loughner did and what James Eagan Holmes did is too much to ignore. This nation continues to foster the environment, the atmosphere, the unsavory circumstances that made and continue to make these horrors possible.

Mosquito Bait - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We are told that some people are more prone to attracting mosquitoes than other people are. I am one such mosquito attractant, so much so that my wife and I have decided that I should be called Mosquito Bait.

We often take walks in various public gardens in this area. We frequently go to Planting Fields Arboretum, Clark Garden, Old Westbury Gardens and to Bayard Cutting Arboretum. We've been known to appear at Bailey Arboretum on occasion.

Each of these bucolic, Long Island places has some place on the property, at least one and often more, where mosquitoes congregate. When we arrive, I get swarmed while she gets left alone. They're so interested in siphoning off some of my hemoglobin that they ignore her completely.

An Absurd Job Description - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

An absurdity from a recent employment ad:

"Job Description: The job will perform moderately difficult tasks that require limited judgment and minimum supervision, but shall confer with technical leads on unusual problems."

In other words, it's not some human being, it's this job that the company wants to hire as an employee and it's that job that will have to accept a W-2 form each tax year. Also, this job must have limited judgment with not too strong an ability to independently evaluate anything and this job will need to be able to confer with wires, presumably of any gauge.

As we sometimes hear it said on "Car Talk" with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, "Does anybody screen these things?" or was this ad written by someone "unencumbered by the thought process"?

Applications for College Admission - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My wife teaches in high school. Many senior students ask her, as well as other faculty members, to write letters of recommendation to colleges where those students intend to apply for admission.

For deserving students, she does indeed write them. Then I type them. It's a workable system.

The protocol is that the student provides a stamped and addressed envelope so that the mailed letter comes not from the student him/herself, but from officialdom. Sometimes though, I find that the provided envelopes are poorly prepared. I can't help but think that students' cases for admission are rather compromised by that.

Please consider these two examples: 

I hope they get in!

Public Speaking - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I took a public speaking class way back when. (The summer of 1966.) It was a really good thing to have done. I was reminded of that class when in a Chinese restaurant the other day, I found this: 

Twinkie’s are gone by Stu Senator

Years ago, in the last century, I worked for the company that made the mixer that added air to the Twinkie creame. It contained no milk product so hence the final e (or so I was told).

 We also made the twinkie injector that added the white stuff to the baked product.

 I had to fix a faulty design of this injector. It had to move horizontally with the baking pan as it went vertically down into the baked product, inject the white stuff with a piston, suck back the piston to prevent spill over on the top of the backed product (the white stuff had compressed air mixed with the fats and sugar so there was expansion). Then rise up and do it over again.

 I did my job and had to go to a factory in NJ to observe the machine in action. The revised machine worked well.

The production line consisted of the baking line and the filling line. I only observed the filling line. This was after the baking and cooling of the product.

 The white stuff that is the filling started as a cube about 12” to 15” in size with the ingredients written in 2 point letters and they listed all sorts of (at that time) palm  and other vegetable oils, sweet stuff (various sugar types) in addition to all sorts of chemical preservatives. This was put into a mixer and oils and other stuff was added to make a thick white liquid that was pumped to the machine our company made. This was a high shear mixer that put oil free compressed air in very small or fine bubbles into the mixture. This gave it uniform texture. This mixture was then sent to the injector that I worked on. After the injection the tray with the stuffed baked product was flipped to remove them from the baking tray. This was why we had the suck back, to prevent left over filling on the outside of the flipped product from sticking to the conveyer belt. The finished twinkie was then sent to a packing area to be sealed and boxed.

 After observing (and smelling) this operation up close I never had any desire to eat one of these. (Not that I was regular consumer of them)

Stu Senator, Consultant, Mechanical Design

Municipal Malfeasance Again - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This broken telephone pole's location is at 125 Merrick Avenue  Merrick, NY 11566. It is October 24th at this writing. This pole has been broken since last June. It is directly across the street from The Roland Chatterton Elementary School. 

Getting Banned on LinkedIn - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

In the course of the last two years, I have been posting essays on the weblog of The IEEE Consultants Network of Long Island and then selectively announcing those essays to fifty LinkedIn groups. At this writing on September 29, 2012, I have posted two-hundred-twenty-five essays on that weblog.

I say "selectively" because not all of my topics have been suitable for every group. For example, the topic "Coil Shielding Choices" did not get announced to the "Long Island Business Group". It would clearly not have fallen within that group's range of interests. Similarly, the intentionally humorous item  "Skeletor's Virtues" did not get announced to the "RF and Microwave Community" group. I felt that it was way too far off-topic.

A One-Man Legislature - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Once upon a time, I got caught up in a bureaucratic snafu regarding a change of my automobile insurance company. That is a story unto itself.

 In the course of seeking assistance, I wrote to Congressman (name withheld) and got this letter back:

 

Seeing this letter, I find it unsettling that this guy still actually holds an elected position in the Federal Government.

Nail Polish - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

As a teenager, I worked as a delivery boy for a local pharmacy. It was also my duty to sweep the floor and to keep all the glass counters clean, so I spent a fair amount of time in the store itself.

One day, two women came into the store and stopped to look at a chart of nail polish colors that was taped to one of the glass counters. It was a chart something like the one below, but with all of the colors in various shades of red that were very close to pink at one end of the chart and which very gradually changed from one sample to the next to a very dark red at the other end. It was a one-way color progression.