I actually like that blog post title.

For one thing, I’m a fan of Jethro Tull, been to see Ian Anderson many, many times.

The title also refers to the fact that the new season of American television is almost upon us, with new shows and new series and all sorts of stuff.

And just as everyone else is all excited (or not) about getting to watch the shows they have been missing….

I am discovering a show from last season that I dearly wanted to watch, but missed the first episode of.

And once you miss the first episode, you can either try and catch up as you go, potentially ruining the fun, or wait for DVD.

I chose to wait for DVD.

So I requested Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 from Netflix, and last night finally watched the very first pilot episode from the first season.

And there you have the third reason I like the post title… ‘Living in the past’… a show about… oh, never mind.

Yeah, I know. I’m not funny, it ain’t witty, and it’s not original. I still crack me up.

Anyway, I had mixed emotions going into the show.

On the one hand, Summer Glau as a Terminator. I mean, come on.

After watching Firefly and especially Serenity, how can you not buy into Summer Glau as a Terminator?

On the other hand, I had pretty much figured Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines put the nail in the coffin of that franchise. After that ho hum borefest, where would they get life to add to the concept? There were no more mysteries as to what was going to happen. War is here, yadda yadda.

Well, I watched the show anyway. I mean, come on! Summer Glau!

It was pretty damn good.

There were some flaws, but in my opinion they restarted the damn story in a totally kick ass way.

First, they picked up after Terminator 2, and seem to have decided to pretend Terminator 3 never happened. A damn good choice in my opinion.

Sure, it starts with the same old, same old. Sarah and John on the run, being chased by the mean old robot, other nice robot intercedes and saves them. Formulaic, but well done.

You could see they were adding mystery as to what the hell kind of Terminator Summer Glau was, and that added some good ‘what is really going on’ vibe to it.

But then Sarah decides to stop running and take the fight to Cyberdine… and the Summer Terminator provides help.

Help, in the form of a trip to the bank, to visit a bank deposit box placed in trust when the bank was founded in 1963.

And suddenly, you are introduced to a new concept in this franchise. The idea that these people in the future, with time travel, actually have the capability to lay long reaching plans, going back in time to prepare a foundation for things in the present. About damn time. 

Just the idea that someone went back in time to arrange safe deposit boxes of cash or documents or items that might be needed in the future, lays a lot of possibilities open.

And just as you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, that’s a cool idea, I wonder where they’re going from here with it”, the show goes all nutso awesome.

So, I’m hooked. Big time. I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Maybe after that one burst of awesome, it’ll get boring and formulaic again, but I’m willing to watch it to find out.

Last night, while I was watching the first episode of the old season, we were recording the first episode of the new season on Tivo.

It’s so nice to have good television to look forward to!

Mean people suck. Yes, they do. I think I’ll get very little argument there.

But there is another category of people that I am very, very prejudiced against.

Ignorant, lazy people.

First, let me be sure to stand firm in saying, I have long been a champion for the rights of stupid people.

Stupid people can’t help being stupid. We’re born that way. You can’t sit there and just try really, really hard, and get smarter. Believe me, I’ve tried.

God, how I’ve tried.

So if someone, including me, does something stupid, and it slips through, hey. It happens.

There are things I personally do to try and minimize how much my being stupid affects what I do.

I’ll triple check my work before pronouncing it ‘done’. If I’m not 100% positive, after triple checking it, that I’m sure its good to go, I’ll get a second opinion. I’ll study how what I’m doing is supposed to work, I’ll research it, I’ll look for examples and try to understand the why as well as the what.

I’ll learn what I can from other people’s mistakes and suggestions and knowledge, in the hopes of at least making my stupid mistakes be original.

I’ll experiment with techniques, even if they are not the normal way of doing things, just so I know if there are acceptible workarounds before I might need them.

If it was a stupid mistake, but it was original, you get points for it, and a funny story to tell later. So it pays to be original.

But ignorant people… oh, how I hate ignorant people.

Specifically, I hate ignorant people that are supposed to be knowledgeable and skilled, but are too damn lazy, not stupid, but lazy, to actually make an effort to learn how to do something right. And who don’t care if what they do is correct when they’re finished, but just walk away and move on to something else. Just walk away. Time for coffee.

Would you like an example? You would? GREAT!

Take this fine summer morning. JUST as an example.

I walk into work, relaxed and thinking about the Shifting Perspectives article I’m publishing today. It’s mostly done, I just want to polish it, triple check it, and then fire it off to go live. Triple check it? Yep. Because I’m stupid. So I try to catch my mistakes before they go live.

And I sit at my desk, and check my work email. And I read an email sent out by one of the guys on the weekend engineering crew, stating that he ran a production run of a circuit board through SMT that had burnt parts, so he re-profiled it and continued the run.

The tone of the email was, “Some stupid shit profiled this before I got here, and it’s not right, but I was thankfully on the job and re-profiled it, so you should all be grateful you have me here to catch your stupid mistakes.”

The email was only sent to the engineering staff. Not our boss, or the managers, supervisors, production staff, etc.

Now, this particular engineer is pretty new here. And he has made mistakes before, of the ‘I didn’t really bother checking too hard to make sure it was correct before approving for production’ variety. I’ve asked him why, and he’s told me, “I’m new, you’re going to have to expect mistakes.”

And when I explained that it is our job to make sure that we don’t make mistakes, and that being new is no excuse when you have two other engineers available for a double-check of your work before pushing it live as production ready, he blew me off. After all, I’m not his boss.

So I’m reading his email. And I’m scared.

Why?

Because while I have certainly made mistakes before, the job he is talking about is one that I personally profiled just last Wednseday, and it was one that I had anticipated for two months. We knew it was coming, and I had worked my figures on it in advance so as to miminize downtime for the profiling process step. We have thousands of these boards coming, and we needed it nailed right, and fast.

 And I know that son of a bitch was profiled freaking PERFECT when it was done last Wednesday, and on top of it, we ran it for production all day Thursday. All day. Perfect. Every process variable freaking nailed.

So, if it was perfect, and I mean omigod perfect, and ran all day Thursday, what the hell are you talking about? WHAT DID YOU DO? What ‘burnt parts’?

Surely he couldn’t possibly mean the two shields that become discolored through the reflow process? Nah, he couldn’t possibly. Those were specifically addressed in documentation. The lead-free temperatures and process necessary to nail the reflow of the solder discolored two shiny RF shields. A slight discoloration does not affect the electrical characteristics of a freaking RF shield. It was signed off on.

See, designing a reflow process for lead free SMT parts using solder paste is a fairly straightforward proposition, it’s not rocket science.

This particular board is pretty tricky, because it is a high mass dual sided panelized board with routed cutouts, a lot of very small 0201 parts on it, some plastic thin walled connectors, and some massive solid transformers right in the center. And under heat, with the weight of the transformers, the board has a tendency to warp.

Getting a profile nailed down that reflows all the parts with good solder fillets, including the high mass ones, while not burning or melting the small sensitive components, or letting the board warp or sag is, well… it takes skill and art, and damn it I nailed it.

And now this arrogant little prick is saying two parts were burnt so he reprofiled it and ran it? What the hell?

And as I’m looking at this email in rising terror, trying to imagine how he could have successfully profiled the board so as to NOT discolor those two parts while still getting good solder quality… I get the first visitor to my office.

“I need you to look at the profile on the Oven for this job, it looks… wrong.”

“What job?”

Can you guess which?

I go out and look, and sure as hell, it is totally wrong. Just unbelievably wrong. Like, I’m looking at it and plotting the reflow temperature curve in my head based on his numbers, and it just…. what the hell was he thinking?

And as I look at it, I decide that I should trust myself first and get them back up and running. I find my backup profile, load and restore it, and say “Okay, back in business… resume production. Now, can you show me where the boards they ran this weekend are?”

“Sure…”

And I pull the first board off the cart and throw it under the microscope.

And I see cold solder joints. Hell, cold solder my ass. Unreflowed solder. Grainy, sandy unreflowed solder without a hint of flux, and without any possibility of a solid connection.

And I look up at the operator, and ask, ‘How many of these did they run this weekend?”

“123. A full two shift run, three days, tops and bottoms.”

Are you shitting me?

So.

I ask, “Did you see any signs that a new profile had been done?”

“Yes, they scrapped out a board this weekend to connect the thermocouples for profiling. It’s on top of the rack.”

I look. Sure as shit, he attached thermocouples to the two shields that were discolored coming out of the oven. And he ran a profile using just those two shields as his reference points for a proper solder flow. He ignored the actual solder joints of any parts, high or low mass. Just the two shields.

Now, we have a process. If there is a problem, there is a customer engineer that is supposed to be called in. You don’t just decide that a shield isn’t shiny, so you’re going to scrap a $1500 board to re-profile, and even if you did, it is absolutely unacceptable to leave the boards with that kind of crap quality and just walk away, la la la.

So I look at the cold solder, and I look at the scrapped board, and I mentally add up the rework time we were going to have on 123 $1500 boards due to ship this week, plus 1 scrapped as a loss.

And I know that there are now going to be a stream of people coming to ask ME why the run was screwed up.

So I go back to my office, and wait.

And the first person comes, demanding to know why my profile was all screwed up, and why the weekend shift had to fix it.

And then the next person comes demanding to know why the boards the weekend shift ran were all screwed up, and why my profile was wrong.

And then someone comes asking why I didn’t profile the boards in the first place, forcing the poor overworked weekend shift to have to make one from scratch.

And etc, etc, etc.

And each person I have to look at, and say, “I had a profile done. The profile was perfect. It was used in production all day Thursday for 100% yields.”

“I do not know why the weekend engineer is an ignorant son of a bitch. I do not know why, after being fully trained, and having other support personnel available to ask for second and third opinions, and after having a perfect profile that has run for several days and has been signed off on by everyone in the chain, with documentation and clearance, and had cleared in circuit test and functional test, he decided to shut down production for three and a half hours to lone ranger redoing the profile to make the run SUCK.”

“I do not know why. I assume he is both ignorant, AND arrogant. Best guess.”

“No, I do not know what he was thinking. And, since I am not his boss, I am going to refer you down the hall to the person who IS his boss, there to demand these answers. And I hope you use the exact same tone of voice to him that you used with me.”

“All I can tell you is, I have restored my profile, I have run three test boards, I have consulted with my fellow engineers, and we are all agreed that we are back in business with 100% perfect quality solder reflow.”

“Thank you, and have a nice day.”

And now I get to wait for the next visitor, and the next, and the next…

Had a few conversations in vent with Wulfa and Grandorr and others, over the last couple weeks, and wanted to mention it here.. to help them find the books if they so desire.

There are some science fiction I truly think is epic quality, that has sadly faded from view. They can be quite hard to find, although used bookstores and online retailers have opened up the possibility of successful searches more and more.

The first series I would recommend to those that love Science Fiction is the Sten Chronicles by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch. (Holy cow, they’ve been re-released! Amazon carries them! Woohoo! I know what I’m getting for Christmas… a second set of the books as backups!) Probably my favorite schience fiction series of all time, it blends serious military experience, wild imaginings, fun recognizable story settings, humor and awesomeness together in one perfect jewel. Plus, it has recipes for barbeque and beef jerky. How can you go wrong? By far and away I would recommend this series to anyone that loves military sci-fi, or science fiction in general. In fact, I think it is fair to say that this is, in my opinion, the greatest, most entertaining science fiction military high adventure series of all time. Yeah, I went there.

Next, a stand-alone book, Armor by John Steakley. (Link from Amazon) In essence, it takes the alien bug versus armor suited infantry concept of Starship Troopers to the next level, with a cynicism and idealism mixed together that I found amazing. It is not only a very powerful book in terms of action, but also in it’s emotional pull of how much someone can possibly take of the horrors of war. The balance of the first half to the second half, although jarring, ends the story with such a satisfying conclusion that you literally scream for a sequel. It really is that good of a book. And it’s still in print!

Next, the Timewars series by Simon Hawke. (Sadly, this is NOT available new, and that’s a crime). This was a series of 12 books in the mid 80’s that still reads very, very well. The entire theme concerns time travel being made real, and then the battle that explodes as Temporal Soldiers try to maintain the stability of the flow of time as terrorists try to make serious changes by interfering with already established events. 

The series has incredibly solid history, mixed with historical fiction taken as real events. If you are shaky on your grasp of history and are unfamiliar with historical romances such as the Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Prisoner of Zenda, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and the Mysterious Island, and other such novels, it can be very hard to keep straight in your own head what was real and what was playful fun by the writer…. but if you DO enjoy your history and your fiction… oh boy. Is it incredible!

One last one, which is techically not just Sci-Fi but Fantasy as well.

Do yourself a favor, and read Grunts! by Mary Gentle. (Link from Amazon)

I won’t ruin it. Just read it. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll pee yourself.

I consider all of these to be on my ‘must reads’ list… and also would be on a list of books I would HAVE to have with me on a desert isle.

You already know about my obsession with Terry Pratchett, so my work here is done!

Since I was so mean to Star Wars earlier today, I thought I would show you the flip side, and reveal what I am excited about taht’s coming out soon.

When this game comes out, I assure you, my WoW playing will take a severe downswing for a while.

Oh yeah, come to papa. Me LIKE!

We had a good time on vacation, but I think we’re all glad to be back.

There was one cute little thing that happened, that I wanted to share real quick.

We had a nice hotel room, it wasn’t a fancy suite or anything, it was one room, but it had a king size bed, a ‘transformer’ couch (that turned into a bed; Alex was very excited at sleeping in a transformer bed that masquerades as a couch), and in the same room, a jacuzzi whirlpool bath.

We don’t have a jacuzzi at home, of course, so this is a new experience for Alex. He was quite excited at taking a bath in the big tub that makes the bubbles.

So our very first night, after going out to the indoor pool so Alex could swim and slide until the place closed, we started the tub filling with water, with Alex cavorting around in the tub, splashing water and wanting us to start the jets.

As soon as the water filled over the jet outlets, we told him we were gonna start it, so to be ready for lots of bubbles. And I hit the button.

Alex got nailed from every direction by high force jets of water, and water exploded throughout the single room, spraying every surface.

Cassie and I lunged for the shutoff button, getting drenched in the process.

Fortunately we were still in our suits.

It turns out that the last people using the tub had angled all the jets to point straight up, as far as possible.

And had cranked the power controls to max.

So when we hit the button, the jets sprayed water clear across the room, soaking the bedding on both beds, and hitting the sliding glass door on the far side.

Alex, fortunately, enjoyed the spraying.

We had a bit less fun trying to sleep, as the replacement linen we got from the front desk was for a single, not a king… and the pillow cassie brought to sleep on was also soaked good. Boy, it was cold with Cassie hogging all the covers!

But, it was certainly an exciting moment of surprises and adventure!

I hadn’t seen on the brochure that the hotel was so exciting, they brought the waterpark right into your very room! Woot!

Now that’s entertainment!