How far behind can you get in a week?

I was out of the office last week. While I am not a workaholic by any means, I hate to be out of the office. When I get back to the office, I have not only the work for this week, but also the work from last week. I will be getting caught up little by little over the next several weeks, unless I am out of the office again.

In The Land Of Cheese

The week is winding down. I've been in the French Alps for the last week, unfortunately on business instead of vacation. Tomorrow I am flying home and I have that nice long plane flight to look forward to. Where are the supersonic airliners we were promised back in the 1960's, along with the flying cars?

poltics and goverment

In the USA, most middle class people with jobs and homes vote Republican, most poor people without jobs and without homes vote Democrat. It seems that Congress is doing it best to make Democrats out of Republican by taking away our money, our jobs, and our homes.

I certainly am no lawyer, but I have always thought I understood the government as it was defined by the Constitution. All financial bills must originate in the House of Representatives. The recent bailout bill originated in the Senate. Doesn't this make it illegal

A Life Cut Short

I got a phone call Saturday night from a friend. "Have you seen the news? Was it Lance?"

A mutual friend had died in motorcycle accident. A White Tail deer had jumped out in front of him and hit him chest high. He was knocked off the motorcycle. He was wearing a Helmut, but it did not protect him enough. He died from massive internal injuries at the hospital a few hours latter. A life too short, but a life well lived. He will be missed.

Safe Guard Government Property

Many years ago I was stationed at Grifffiss Air Force Base in Rome NY. It was a bit unusual in that we had a large number of civilian employees. In our unit the civilians did almost all of the i n shop work while the Airmen did the work on the flight line. 

When working on aircraft you had to carefully inventory your tools. The boxes were to be lock when not in use to keep tools from being "borrowed". If you left a a pair of pliers on the airplane there was a chance that it could end up doing damage during flight. So after every job we checked our tool box to make sure we had them all. If a tool was missing, the aircraft you had worked on were grounded until the missing tool was found. This involved a lot of paperwork and of course you had to notify your commanders.

This policy applied to the civilians who work in shop also. They suppose to check after every job and to lock their box whenever they left their work bench. In practice they only inventoried them at the end of the day and only locked them at night. After all they were not working on aircraft and the group had worked together for years.

A new Lieutenant joined the Squadron. He notice this violation of policy. Instead of saying something to them, he decided to get his point across by taking a screw driver for one of the boxes. At the end of the shift, the missing tool as noted and the procedure of notification was began.  A missing tool notification is a major event and not to be taken lightly. During the ensuing chaos the Lieutenant walks in holds up the screw driver and ask if this is what they are looking for. He then proceeds to lecture them about their "failure to secure government property".

Then next day the Lieutenant come back from lunch and find his telephone, blotter, pen and pencil holder all neatly arrange on the floor where his desk used to be. One of the civilians walks by and ask him "did you secure your government issued desk before you left for lunch?". It took him 2 days to finally find where they had hid his desk.

Slow and Steady

Set up TortoiseSVN on my PC today. I've read a lot about version control, but the programming that I do is done by a team of one, me. Almost all of it is robot applications written in a language called VAL3. A nice procedural language for controlling our industrial robots. I even teach training classes on it.

I found TortoiseSVN to be very easy to set up and use. For a free application it has very good documentation. Based on my reading and all of one day's experience I'd recommend it.