Location, Location, Location...

[Apologies to anyone who notices, but this post was apparently hijacked by the internet gnomes. It is my sincerest hope that you, the reader, is not unduly inconvenienced by these happenings. The person charged with guarding my blog against said gnomes has been... replaced. As an effort to keep you, the reader, happy, your check for the 100% money back guarantee is in the mail.]

So I'm currently working on a project turning an old gravel pit on the river into a breeding ground for some stupid endangered fish.  Besides the fact that this fish is so dumb that it can't survive unless enviroweenies spend lots of money on it, and that it doesn't fill any particular niche in the environment that other species can't cheerfully and willingly fill, this project bugs me (and my boss) because basically letting the river flow into a shallow and wide pit will just cause the pit to fill up with sediment in a season or two.  But the customer is always right, and more importantly pays with shiny money.  But all of that is beside the point.  While I was looking around the area I came across this house, on the other side of the river from where our gravel pit is: 

Now how do you like that? Built on another old gravel pit, right next to the river, so lots of water, with your own lake... a field that you could grow your food on, if you look close you can see that the big shop has solar panels, and only accessible over that nice narrow spit of driveway.  I immediately thought: Zombie Survivalist Outpost.  Oh yeah. According to my boss, there's a DuPont house around there somewhere, I wouldn't doubt it if this is the one.  It's got some of that type of flair.

So, I wonder how you make friends with a really rich person who lives on an isolated spit of land out on the river...

Wheeee...

So now in addition to HEC-RAS, I'm installing ArcGIS and HEC-GeoRAS. Because if ever there was a program cobbled together from decades of DOS command lines even more than HEC-RAS, it would be ArcGIS... should be fun...

Note to Self

It is possible to crash a fancy new computer with 8GB of RAM by trying to edit a 80,421KB JPEG in MS Paint...

Signs of the end times

My boss cleaned off some of his 10-year pile of junk, and is finally upgrading from his Windows XP machine to Windows 7.

I feel like someone punched me in the nose! What's happening?  Who am I?  Where am I...

Friday 13th

So far today I have already had to restart my computer 5 times trying to get my antivirus re-installed. It seems to be working fine for now... hopefully the malignant aura of today has worn off, or whatever. Also, hopefully you don't have any problems at all!

Watershed Moment!

Finally, finally, we have all of the pages of this big report I've been helping my boss out on, ever since four years ago when I started working for him in the summers doing soil testing. Since last May or whenever it was I came back to work for him, I've since compiled all of the data I found in the lab, crunched numbers, made figures, mapped coordinates, edited hours of video, translated my boss's chicken scratch handwriting, edited, numbered, and now, printed off hundreds of pages (three reams of paper, or about 1500 pages) for this report. Today will consist entirely of punching holes and binding... and punching holes and binding...

It is awfully nice to have a finished product after all that work!

So Hard to Concentrate

Boss not here...

Just finished one of my tasks that I've been working on for the past couple days...

Mother just texted a picture of a plate full of Christmas cookies...

Stay strong! Must... stay... strong...

I'm impressed.

I managed to skin my elbow despite wearing a sweatshirt and a carhartt jacket.

I guess that's what sliding down 20' of concrete embankment will do for ya'.

Typical Government Effectiveness: an Analogy

So at work I've been using a free program made by the Army Corps of Engineers, a super-duper double-effective government bureaucracy if ever there was one.  This program, called HECRAS, is sort of a standard in the industry,  apparently, used for analyzing river hydraulics.

Let me just say that this program is the perfect representation of our government.  It works, marginally, at what it was designed for, but is so incredibly frustrating for a person to work with that you often want to throw your computer across the room.  The provided documentation is extensive, yet hard to understand, and seems to leave out a few key points for basic functions.  The user interface leaves something to be desired, and, the best indicator of all that this program was designed by a government bureaucracy, THERE IS NO UNDO BUTTON.

Who else would  make a computer program that deals with hundreds of cross sections, each of which having hundreds of points, where if you screw up and delete the wrong point you can't undo it?  Only something that has never met an agency it couldn't grow, and doesn't know the meaning of the word "cutback".

Alone... so alone...

My boss is on vacation the rest of this week, so I'm going to have to fend for myself here at the office. The hardest thing is going to be staying on track without goofing off on the internet too much... feel free to yell at me if I start posting a ton of random internet trolling things. "GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BUM!"

Civic Duties

This time, my boss gets to do jury duty! He just breezed through to check some stuff over the lunch break; turns out he was one of the lucky few to be selected. So I get to be on my own for the rest of today and tomorrow... I wonder how many disasters I can create?

Stealing from work

Well, OK, "stealing" is probably a little harsh. What I'm actually doing is dumpster diving from work.

This is what I found:

No idea if it works or not; I'd guess not as it was out in the rain and such. But it ought to have all sorts of gears and motors and such on the inside, and be fun to take apart...

You learn something new every day

Did you know that you can use a regular old crock pot to melt down the sulfur capping compound used to test compressive strength of concrete cylinders? We've got three out there just bubbling away in a brimstone flavored haze (ok, not really a haze, but it sounds cooler than "it stinks"). I keep wanting to go out there with a witch's hat and start reciting Shakespeare...

Marketing FAIL

A lady just came in the door of the office trying to sell something.  She then saw the view...

...and said, slightly peevishly, "I'm guessing you don't have any need for janitorial services?" Then she walked out the door.

Some people.

Cool

Got the new monitor.

I've never had a screen wider than a full size keyboard before--I think I'm going to get lost trying to find everything.

I'm tempted to hook up the 15" CRT as a second monitor, just for the 15-year juxtaposition of technology...

Your Morning Nuttery

A V-8 Powered Barstool:



What would your boss say if you drove up to work on that?

In other news, "Labor" day is gone and now it's back to work. Another full day of tracing contour lines in a CAD program, I expect.

Monitors

It wasn't that hard. All it took was mentioning that I saw some inexpensive LCD monitors on the internet, and my boss (who is an ebay addict) promptly went and found a 22 inch display for just over $100. It's on its way, and soon I'll have something than early 90's CRT technology... then, THE WORLD!

New Addition!

At work I've now got a Windows 7 machine (with a 15" Gateway 2000 (!) monitor, just like we had back in highschool), in addition to my little laptop and the ancient Windows 95 desktop.  I can actually see pictures in my CAD drawings now!

Little by little, I am drawing my boss out of the early 90's...  next on my list, does anyone have any good recommendations for inexpensive LCD monitors?

I really need to sweep the office floor more often

Of course, "Once every 5 years" would be more often than what it's been getting.  Personally, I thought this was pretty good considering that it's one room over from a soil lab.

A brilliant product idea!

At work right now I'm digitizing some old contour maps (read: tracing using a computer), a process that involves clicking on the mouse a whole lot.  For example, one medium sized line is roughly 1000 clicks, and on this one map there are probably a couple hundred contour lines... and then there are about 9 map sections that will need to be done.  You do the math.

But I got to thinking, and realized that all this clicking is just too darn easy--you don't burn any calories or build up any muscle tone.  What someone needs to do is make a mouse that has a 10-pound button, that way, every time you click you're doing a rep--soon you'll have the beefiest index finger out of all your friends!  You can call it the EXRMOUSE! Just think of the commercials--a mouse beating up a cat, or some skinny guy doing pushups using only one index finger!

Should I apply for a patent? What do you think? Sure to be a best seller, eh?