Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Updates.


For the past few months I've been spending a lot of time trying to find content for the blog without much luck. Which means a lot of my home projects started backing up.

This weekend Mr S. and I needed to hole up in the house to move things along because a new project got added to the heap. Last week my oven got delivered and it's been sitting in my living room for a week.

You see manufactures find it funny to change the design of stuff. They basically gave us a 9 inch by 9 inch cut out for electrical. And of course I was not in that range. So Mr S. and I spent the weekend moving the electrical box exactly 8 inches North. Also my house was a previous flip so the box wasn't recessed. And you really don't have any room behind these things these days.

Normally it would be sort of a pain in the ass. But Mr S. got me this palm nailer last year and I had never gotten the chance to use it. And this was the perfect project! I saw one of my contractors use one of these once and I was like - oh yeah. You are going to be mine.

It's the size of a girl fist. And it hammers in nails with air. It gets in places where swinging a hammer will make you go insane. Like inside of a cabinet. Nails go on the right side that looks like a ratchet. Air on the other. OMG I love this thing.

Tomorrow my oven gets reinstalled. 

I am also the prowd owner of moving straps because we had to take the old oven out to do the electrical. You have to buy those. Seriously. The old oven weights like 160 pounds and strapped made that so much easier. We would have stuck in the new oven if it weren't for the glass on the front. There are a bunch of warnings.

I sort of wanted to do it just to say I could because it weighs 220 pounds. And I'm getting older. And I'm a chick!

6 comments:

  1. It's not something you use often, but when you do - it's worth it's weight in 20 contractors.

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  2. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 16, 2021 2:26:00 PM

    "... I've been spending a lot of time trying to find content for the blog without much luck ..."

    Everything's so ratcheted right now because of That One Subject Everyone Just Has To Talk About that it makes finding anything that isn't it harder.

    "Which means a lot of my home projects started backing up."

    So do that instead, right?

    Make it interesting, don't make it uninteresting?

    Yeah.

    Different people, different stuff though: those straps for moving things look super-painful.

    I have an extremely strong back and strong legs, but my forearms were shredded because of an accident decades ago and they never recovered fully.

    Part of why I turned into "Swole" Non-Italian Guido Looking Guy is that I needed to build strength in my upper body in order to compensate for all of the muscle and nerve damage. So the last thing I'd do is to pick up stuff where I'm having to balance it in a way where my forearm tendons would get to bitch and moan about it.

    I like the palm nailer, but in the past I've used a compact right angle drill to place wall anchors for screws. It takes more time, but you can do it with wide screws that aren't as long, and adding a bit of sealant or plaster in the wall anchors definitely helps.

    But you won't usually find stub drill bits at Lowe's.

    I'm just happy that all of the rechargeable stuff like the right angle drill had universal power adapters.

    US is 120 V/60 Hz, Switzerland is 230 V/50 Hz.

    The washing machine, the dryer, all of the fans, most of the kitchen appliances, that all had to be left behind and then replaced.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 16, 2021 2:37:00 PM

    So it's been a bit busy around here.

    Nothing of ours was on the Big Evergreen Canal Plug, so when Egypt decided to do the stereotypically Arab thing of taking the ship and the crew hostage in order to shake down everyone they could touch for lots of money they mistakenly believe they deserve?

    It didn't affect us, but it did affect us.

    But how do you deal with a problem like shipping choke points?

    One way is to fly over them, and so instead of booking shipping containers on ships that travel through choke points, all of that will be arriving via plane from Singapore and KL going forward.

    That gets the base supplies on the way from stable countries with which we already have business relationships.

    The more local assembly we can do, even if it's just final assembly in Switzerland of already assembled component groups, the better this should work out. We'd rather deal with "cottage assembler" companies located within industrial parks than what we did in the past with big integrators, mostly because we can scale it up and down easier.

    Best of all, we no longer will have to deal with the materials having to transit the shipping ports of EU countries, and so this should also mean that we can tell the EU's WEEE Man to suck it when those group assemblies include non-EU compliant manufacturing choices.

    We've also already dealt with the Arab and his tendency to want to take hostages.

    That's why we had that shell employment setup in the US so that the top people including me could hide behind it on business trips.

    China does the same shit, and so we had it in place for there as well.

    Now that The Thing I Didn't Want To Talk About But Can't Avoid has happened, all of that flying into the customer sites went away, and so we now ship assembly kits in custom ATA cases with something other than an attached engineer.

    There's now a card inside each case with instructions to connect via voice over IP to an engineer who will talk the recipient through the install, no international calls required unless you're in a heavily Internet filtered country and have to use a phone network gateway. The voice over IP system supports H.264 video calls, although bandwidth can be scarce out in the field, so we don't require video to be active.

    It keeps the engineers safe and happy where they are so the Arab and the Chinese can't take them hostage, plus they don't have to deal with all of the current drama involving flying.

    Like this new special hell: do you have three grand to dump into staying in a "government approved quarantine hotel" for two weeks before you're given passage into the country?

    Now imagine having to do this bullshit every time you want to deliver a product that requires significant installation effort and at least one of your engineers.

    But thanks, Suez Canal Assholes, for making cargo airlines profitable again! :-)

    "But Mr S. got me this palm nailer last year ..."

    Because Mister S cares about you and wants you to be happy with more than just bread. :-)

    It's hilarious that you've moved on to puff pastry.

    I'm waiting for you to move on to choux pastry so you can make beignets and eclairs.

    And then you can do to Mister S with eclairs what he was doing to you a while back with loaves of bread!

    EMBRACE THE DARK SIDE OF THE ECLAIR
    PUT CHOCOLATE ON BOTH SIDES

    :-)

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  4. "So the last thing I'd do is to pick up stuff where I'm having to balance it in a way where my forearm tendons would get to bitch and moan about it."

    Good news Ren! They have ones that have back straps. I wanted the forearm ones because it seemed easier for me to control the load since I'm short. I think they mostly help because you don't have to use any natural handholds. The straps give you freedom!

    "One way is to fly over them, and so instead of booking shipping containers on ships that travel through choke points, all of that will be arriving via plane from Singapore and KL going forward."

    Isn't that more expensive? Though, I bet you do have mad local assembly skill there. It's all I imagine 16 year olds are up to there. 3D printing stuff.

    "Now that The Thing I Didn't Want To Talk About But Can't Avoid has happened, all of that flying into the customer sites went away, and so we now ship assembly kits in custom ATA cases with something other than an attached engineer."

    Now this is interesting. I'm excited to see how our new world is changing. The creativity really makes me smile in a very deep way. Those engineers didn't really want to be on those trips anyway. It's a win win honestly.

    "PUT CHOCOLATE ON BOTH SIDES"

    MIND BLOWN. Yes.

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  5. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 23, 2021 1:02:00 AM

    "Those engineers didn't really want to be on those trips anyway."

    Some of the engineers loved those trips, not because of being on-site, but because of how we had relaxed policies involving when and how they had to get back.

    One engineer developed a London shopping habit that meant we needed someone who knew how to navigate several shops in Knightsbridge, Canary Wharf, and The City. He got some contact details out of that and seemed to be happy enough with a personal shopper he'd hired.

    Another engineer had a favorite bake shop in Paris. They deliver internationally, and he'd got me hooked on their stuff years ago, but he preferred to drop in.

    And I had a medical treatment habit that took me through Singapore.

    How did all of this work?

    Our flights booking policy was that we'd permit extra legs or layovers provided they did not greatly affect the ticket price (as in more than half), and that flight miles were personal.

    We'd allow two extra business days to get back from on-site work and be hugely flexible about vacation time if someone's spent a lot of on-site time. This sometimes included bonus days, especially if the customers were ecstatic about the results.

    And so Dubai to London via first class on Etihad? Sure, if you have the points for the upgrade, or if the customer was happy we'd occasionally spring for it.

    I had so many points flying into and out of China that I'd make sure to stop in Singapore.

    New management wasn't particularly thrilled but also wasn't particularly against this policy.

    The Swiss have a thing about not eating lunch at their desks, so they eventually got it. If you have the time and there's no rush, why not look around? Flying back immediately was just like eating lunch at your desk.

    I saw it as letting the engineers take a victory lap for a job well done.

    Now that doesn't happen, and I know they're missing it.

    It's not a win-win at all, it's just change.

    And everything's more expensive now, but getting taken hostage by bureaucratic insurgency undermining your supply chains, that's a cost we're not willing to accept.

    Oh, yeah, so what did I do with my US airline points?

    I donated them all away to the kinds of charities that take care of people getting medical procedures done, mostly because it felt appropriate given why I'd fly through Singapore.

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