Got a call at 5pm on a Friday.  Company having problems with a MKD motor rotating backwards on a DKC11.3 drive. Having been here before and being able to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw, I already know the answer to the question I ask. “Is this motor a 3rd party repair?”

If you take a thousand new and a thousand factory repaired MKD motors and attach them one at a time to the same drive, they will all rotate the same direction for forward and backward. It’s one of the things about Indramat Digital drives and motors, the combination of part numbers and parameters always gives you the same results, no matter how many different ones you use.

Third party repairs, are, like the direction the motor will run, a crapshoot. In this case, the motor is running backwards, and the drive is happy with that, so he has TWO things messed up. Then we get to the third thing. He doesn’t have software or a cable. So no backup parameters, no way to change the parameters and no way to look at what the motor is doing.

As my old chemistry professor used to say, “Those who don’t know, don’t know that they don’t know”

It never fails to amaze me when a customer calls without backups. I spend most of my working life amazed, however. Companies who backup their computers religiously, who have the most elegant solutions for document retention, and who even check the desks of people leaving to make sure they retain all their “Stuff”, fail entirely when it comes to having any backup for their equipment programs and parameters.

Trust me, having known good backups are more important than making sure the guy leaving the company doesn’t have a company stapler in his box.

I have seen two companies this year close (yes, the whole company is gone) because they had one machine, and let the program evaporate without having a backup. Obviously, these were companies that were on the edge already, but they were making money, just not enough to be able to spring for a complete control system rebuild, with the accompanying downtime. Usually, by the time they called me, they were already one foot in the grave, so it didn’t take long.

Lest people working for larger companies smile and move on, I will also say I have had Fortune 100 companies take severe downtime hits for the same reason. Add in the cost of having an integrator come in and rework the system, and having to give all the refunds and fines for not shipping product on time, and making those backups seems quite cheap by comparison. If you have known good backups, even if you don’t have anyone who can load them, we can get you back going in a day or so.  If you don’t…

Well, how long would you have been with the company had you made it ‘til Friday?

So, I went to Mayo last week about my Achilles tendon, or my whole leg. I am a big guy, and I have Popeye legs, you need a lot of muscle to be light on your feet at my weight. About 4 months ago, I was in a hurry down the hall of the house, I could hear Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer yelling at horses while trying to unload from the trailer and figured she needed help. Our 19 yr old Siamese dodged right between my legs and kicked her with the left leg right into the back of the right one. There was a instant of pain, and I went one legged. Fortunately, my crutches from my knee replacement were just around the corner, so I was able to get on crutches and get situated (the horse issue did not require my help after all).

The leg swelled up, but the pain was manageable, and with my severe lack of trust of the Drs in the area after my knee, I decided to wait and see how things went. I had already been fighting a problem with a calcified tendon and some inflamation, so I kept on with my stretching and exercising and things eventually got better’ish. After a couple of months though, I noticed that my calf muscle was disappearing, and decided after another week or so (now 3 months or so out from the injury) to call Mayo. To my surprise they had an appointment a week away so I took it. At the same time, however, Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer had a horse fall with her, and went right off over the top, with her helmet grabbing enough mane to flip her onto her back before landing. The upshot of that little contretemps was a fractured L1 and L2 vertebrae, putting her almost entirely on bed rest for a couple of weeks, and with a 3 month timeframe for recovery.  With some assistance for her, I decided not to miss the Mayo appointment, and headed off to Rochester. I had some fear that I had done something major, and wanted to get it looked at.

Damn, I hate being right. The initial X-Ray and examination showed a tear in the tendon, rendering it mostly ineffective. Subsequent MRI showed more of the same thing. So, now scheduled for surgery and planning on staying in Rochester afterwards for care. Unfortunately, this means that I will be doing it without Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer, as she will still be in recovery of her broken back.

This is gonna suck on toast.

Texas. The name gives the feeling of romance and bravado and the call of the west. Just saying the name gives me a chill. It used to be a chill of excitement, now it is the thrill of horror. In the interests of full disclosure, my parents were from Texas and used to say while I might have been born in Oklahoma, I was “Made in Texas by Texans”.

New London, Texas is now a sleepy little town, with little to show that it was the site of a major disaster which changed the way the world worked, and saved countless other lives as a result. On Mar 8, 1937 sometime between 3:05 and 3:20, Mr Butler turned on the electric sander in his shop class. Students had been complaining of headaches, but these warnings to the buildup of natural gas under the building were ignored and flipping the switch on his sander caused the building with 600 students and 40 teachers inside to explode with such force that a two ton concrete block crushed a Chevy more than 2 miles away. Approximately 300 died, making it the worst school disaster in US History and the third largest disaster in US History (behind the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and the 1947 Texas City Disaster)

The immediate aftermath of the explosion and rescue operation is worth reading. It made a huge impression on Walter Cronkite, who despite covering WWII and the Nuremburg Trials said “nothing ever equaled it”.  However, what I would like to turn your attention to is the actions of the Texas State Legislature. Within weeks, as a result of the blast, the Legislature required that all natural gas in the state would have mercaptans in it (the substance that gives natural gas it’s distinctive smell, it it’s natural form it’s odorless). This action was soon followed by the rest of the US and the World and now it is standard to treat natural gas this way so there is no question of a leak.

Texas led, and the World followed.

On April 17, 2013 at 7:50pm, the West Fertilizer Company storage exploded, killing 15 and injuring 160-200 people and damaging or destroying over 150 buildings. Only the fact that the nearby school was not occupied kept the count from going higher.

The result of the explosion? The Texas Legislature has done very little besides rearrange the regulatory agencies responsible, something akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The politicos trot out the usual suspects as to why a company with 4,500 tons of Ammonium Nitrate storage in the center of a major Texas town still has that storage there. “Landowner Rights” to do whatever they want.

So, how do you fix this? There are many proposals, but I back a very simple, market based one. Require the companies with the storage to carry enough insurance to cover the buildings and people inside the blast radius. The West explosion caused over 100 million dollars in property damage and the plant had a 1 million dollar liability policy. A 100 million dollar policy probably would have caused the plant to move further into the country, or would have caused an insurance company loss consultant to visit, or would have required a sprinkler system (or all of the above). A liability policy covering the entire city of Corsicana, TX, if not prohibitively expensive, would move the company out of town at least.

Somehow, I would expect more in 80 years of progress from the Texas Statehouse.

I would be wrong.

So one of the issues I have with my business is that I must stay in touch via phone and the internet. I have landed in Calico Rock, Arkansas(pop 991) and done 50k worth of business while siting in the (relative) coolness of the shade under the wing while online via aircard and talking on my cell phone. So, phone and internet, golden, but no phone or no internet, very very bad. I have, for years, had my company accounts with AT&T, and carry a primary and a backup AT&T phone. As an emergency backup and secondary wifi hotspot (my primary internet connection in the field is an AT&T aircard) I picked up a line through Verizon. Using this setup, I figured I had a backup AT&T phone if the primary went south, and both a backup phone and internet connection if everything on AT&T went down.

Ignorance is bliss….

So while traveling, I had some problems getting my phone to forward. It appeared initially to be a problem with my iPhone (although I later found that it was a problem with AT&T), so I went by the AT&T store to swap sim cards between my iPhone and my Nexus 6p. They very kindly did so, without reprovisioning the accounts to account for the phone changes. So now BOTH phones are messed up, and I can’t forward to the Verizon phone, because phone forwarding is messed up on both as well. Multiple calls to AT&T latter, and with most of the day lost, the phone were finally (mostly) unscrewed. But, this pointed up a hole in my planning, which was with both of my physical business lines on AT&T, the phone company itself was a single point of failure. I should note that I have several different lines I use for business 2 “real” lines and a couple of Google Voice lines, all forwarded into my primary phone. With call forwarding down, I could have called AT&T and had both phones forwarded to my Verizon line (which is not used as a business line), but then I wouldn’t have been able to get the phones fixed. So after loosing more than a few $$$ on that day, I have come up with a new plan. I have been watching Paul Thurrott’s experiments with Google’s Project fi, and have decided to put the Nexus 6p onto a Project fi account. That will give me hotspotting and a phone line through Fi, to back up the AT&T line, and may cause me to eliminate my Verizon line entirely. With one business line coming in through AT&T and one through Project Fi, I will be able to loose one (and forward if able) to a completely different network (and still troubleshoot the down one). If I cannot forward, I can still get half of my calls (or more, as I can change the forwarding on the Google Voice lines).

As with many things in life, you think you have a solution going until such time as it actually gets tested and you find out notsomuch. I have gone through several data backup plans, and have one now that works pretty well, but I have lost data more than once when my “Foolproof” plan was thwarted by someone making better fools. Phones are apparently the same way. One of the things I love about the 21st century is that with phones or computers, using cloud services, you can now loose a unit, walk into a store and buy a new one and in under 2 hours be back in business (don’t ask how I know that). The trick now is choosing the proper plans and providers, so that you have no single point of failure. That is where I went off the rails in the past and will do better now.

I hope…

A chemistry professor of mine used to offer up a fount of truisms and sayings, one of which that stuck with me was “Those who don’t know, don’t know that they don’t know, whereas those that know, know that they don’t know”.  As I have gotten older, I continue to relearn how true this is, both with myself, and with other people.

I live in a rural area, which has several advantages. My nearest neighbor is about half a mile away, and the next nearest is a lot further than that. It isn’t quite as remote as living in Kansas (2.5 and 5 miles, respectively) but it is nicer here without having to drive 25 miles for a average steak. One of the things that is not nice is internet access. Over the course of the years I have used a separate phone line, satellite internet, DSL, Multiple DSL with a load balancing modem, Verizon HomeFusion (which was a joke) and finally my own wireless tower relay to bring 50Mb internet to my home office. I would not have said that “I didn’t know”, but getting significantly faster internet has opened up a new world. My Surface Pro 4 was misbehaving and so I tried blowing away the installation and reinstalling Win10 from scratch. So far, no further misbehavior, but it would have only have been possible with this sort of connection. My desktop machine is on Win10 Insider (Technical Preview), and instead of taking all night, this now updates in a matter of minutes. Ditto for flight updates for avionics. Even writing this blog is now much easier. Between me and Mrs Dr Thinking Engineer, our internet usage has tripled in a couple of months, and is still going up.

This was neither easy, or inexpensive. The cost per month is more than my house payment, and if I was not running an internet based business, I couldn’t justify it at all (justification is still a bit shaky, but there you go).  On the other hand, I have started several new business ventures just on the strength of having this sort of connection. It makes me wonder why cities aren’t doing more about this. The mayor of the local municipality will spend time, effort and money on some quixotic wind farm that will generate “Millions of Dollars” without ever explaining how, and yet the one thing that he could do relatively simply to generate new business and tax income is something he hasn’t even thought of, put in a high speed internet system in town. It’s a relatively small town, it is entirely possible that you could hit 90% of it using wifi off the same tower I am using. If that gets 900 people, and 10% of them have an idea for a business and 2% of those make it, then that is 18 business and money coming into town that wasn’t there before. For the rest of the town, quality of life goes up, and their children have a leg up on the future.

It’s a lot of money. But it is already worth it, and we have had it a very short period of time.

Mrs Doctor ThinkingEngineer has a PhD of Chemical Engineering from the University of Arkansas. It is a shining achievement, a jewel in her crown that she was able to go back 20 years after a BS in Biology and get a PhD in a very nearly unrelated field. Because of the requirements of the time (they have since changed), she had to take very nearly every undergraduate engineering course before she started the graduate work. We figured at one time that she needed 6 additional hours (all in Freshman courses) to get a BSChE to go with the MSChE and the PhD ChE. My admiration for her in this achievement knows no bounds. There is no way I could have done what she did.

The “from the University of Arkansas” is a bit more problematic. The UofA is a land grant school, and as such, I have certain expectations of them. I should say that I graduated from a land grant school (along with Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer), the University of Missouri at Columbia. The UofA makes Columbia look like Harvard. The single most important thing with the UofA is Athletics, Football and Basketball. Basketball has taken second seat lately, while neither of the teams is great, Football makes money even when it isn’t doing well. What I expect of a land grant school is that the tuition and fees are reasonable, that they have relatively small classes and the labs are stocked with equipment that works.

What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is Thermodynamics classes with over 80 students in them taught by a first time graduate student instructor. What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is an Engineering School that just BARELY scrapped by its ABET accreditation, so close that the seniors put the near failure of the school into their senior skit that year. What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is a Chemical Engineering Department without a permanent Dean, for YEARS, because none of the candidates who were offered the job would accept. What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is a Chemical Engineering Department that isn’t allowed to replace retiring professors, despite the fact enrollment is high and tuition is at an all time high. Where is all that money going??? What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is laboratories that are stocked with broken equipment. I had to get Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer numerous pieces of Lab Equipment, simply because waiting for the school to replace the equipment would have cost her additional YEARS of time.  Yet the fees (in addition to the tuition) at the University of Football at Arkansas just keep going up.

Having graduate Engineering programs should enhance the entire state of Arkansas. However, when the Engineering programs are being starved of money, when they lag behind on the most basic quantifiable areas, is it no wonder that the graduates tend to move out of state instead of staying to help Arkansas? What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is very little help with post doctoral work, or with help starting a business. The Genesis Center, the new company incubator is currently merely providing state sponsored space to several companies that no longer fit the term “startup”. If you can’t afford your own space after 3 years, you need to get out (or at least be forced to show an upward trajectory). If you get bought out by a larger firm, you should have 30 days to pack your bags.

What you get at the University of Football at Arkansas is a 120M bond issue for a nearly 200M project to put 3000 more seats in a stadium that is rarely sold out. Those are 3000 “high value seats”, that the university is spending more money on for use about 14 times a year than they do on students. Former Senator Pryor made a blazing statement against the expansion, as did five former members of the Board of Trustees (including Springdale’s own John H Tyson). I salute these men of courage and principle, coming out against a football proposal in Arkansas is like standing in front of a Tidal Wave with a 3″ umbrella out of a beach drink. People say that it will be paid back by Athletic Funds, but they always say that, yet the fees keep going up. If the Athletic Department is such a moneymaking proposition, why do they have a budget from the University? Is the best thing that we can say about the University of Arkansas is “Thank God for Mississippi”?

I don’t know what the solution is. Obviously, college athletics rules the roost (or hog pen as the case may be). What I do know is that the University of Arkansas has lost sight of it’s mission. What I do know is that to get through the PhD program, we had to contribute much more than I expected to get the lab space up to a level where the work (that was expected for graduation) could be performed. What I do know is that I recommend to anyone who can afford it to go to a better Engineering School than the UofA. But, Mrs Dr ThinkingEngineer has her degree. While we might have some additional dealings with the University, there is one group that can stop with their mailings.

It will be a cold day in HELL when I donate any more money to the University of Football at Arkansas.

There are a few things that engineers mostly agree on. The three laws of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy and gravity. They also agree that Lt Cmdr Montgomery Scott pretty much ruined engineers for life on Star Trek, as he would report to Kirk that it would take weeks to repair the Enterprise, and then when the Captain shouted “You have 20 minutes!”, he would simply go “Okay” and manage to save the day. I cannot tell you how many plant managers I have met that have felt that raising the volume of an unreasonable demand would result in Scotty’s “Okay” and they could go back to the corner office and dream of green women adoringly staring up at them in various stages of undress. Informing them that this wasn’t the Enterprise, I am not Scottish, and they sure as hell weren’t Capt Kirk did not seem to help matters any.  It would be finished when it was finished and while I could probably tell them a probable date, it would depend on other people doing their job too, people who I had no control over. So there was always some margin of error in the estimate, and I would typically pad the estimate with 10% for unexpected delays and 10% more for unexpected, unexpected, delays. Usually this came out about perfect, or gave me a bit of room to be a hero.

I have been dealing with a aircraft detail and paint touchup crew lately. They are based on my field and I have been having them do a clean and polish of the plane for about a year. I then had them do a bit of paint touchup, and some sort of paint coating for protection. The results weren’t bad, but they missed the delivery date by a week, without telling me. This caused me to miss a flight after heading up to the airport. Many apologies and free cleanings later, I decided to give them another go with carpet and some interior work, along with doing some paint work on an area that they hadn’t had access to the first time. I impressed on them that I would need the plane back when they said it would be done. Once again, they missed the date. When it got to the revised time that it was supposed to be done, they brought it over at the end of the day. Like with shipping, getting a package at 5pm doesn’t qualify as getting it “that day”.  Having the airplane show up at 5-6pm in the hangar doesn’t do much unless I am willing to do a test flight at night. So, got the airplane back on a Monday, and then it rained all week. Friday, my instrument instructor came up with his airplane (or his employer’s aircraft) and we talked about going up while the aircraft was being worked on. Decided not to as 1) ceilings were persisting in staying quite low, and 2) my plane hadn’t been flown after getting it back, and breaking into 400′ ceilings as you discover you have some sort of airframe or instrumentation issue caused by the work is not often survivable. Being cautious (and still alive) pilots, we decided to wait for a day either better in conditions or (more likely) after I had flown the aircraft in visual conditions. Today was a perfect day, little wind, few clouds. I pulled the plane out after a thorough preflight, and got in to start boring holes in the sky as a Jr Aviator, only to find the pilot’s seat stuck at the full aft position.

I don’t think they are going to get a recommendation from me….

My father spent 25 years in Industrial Relations, back when it meant negotiating with unions for contracts that spanned many plants across the country. One benefit of this for me growing up was that I got a chance to see how the business world worked. Another was that I got to meet a whole passel of pilots, astronauts and assorted engineers as they came through on business tours. Dad figured out pretty early that instead of taking them out to dinner at a nice restaurant (on a trip undoubtedly full of nice restaurants), he would offer them the choice of coming home with him to a home cooked meal (with me in attendance). It was, a great way to grow up during the space program, and one of the many ways that my father was truly the best father a boy could ever have.

Another interesting part of growing up was that I continually heard how horrible engineers were as managers. The other side of it was that professional managers could rarely get engineers all headed in the same direction (the phrase “Herding cats” comes to mind), because they were not really respected by a group of people where your standing was based on your technical and project completion skills. When my choice of careers became obvious to me (in the second grade, after my first Tom Swift book), I resolved to do better than my average compatriot.

I succeeded, but to a great extent because it was a pretty low bar. My average compatriot had little or no idea how to run a crew, shop or plant. It wasn’t part of their schooling, and honestly, most engineers are a bit introverted to start with. I, at least, had the benefit of 20 years of my father’s work environment. Even then, I found working with folks who were a lot older, and with a lot more experience, rough. Most of those problems went away as I got older, but as far as mentors went, most of my superiors were worse at managing than I was, in some cases, horribly worse.

The final straw came when at the staff level, I was tapped as a plant manager. I wanted to be a plant manager about as much as I wanted open heart surgery without anesthetic, so I took that as a sign from the universe as it was time to get out of the business world and into running my own company.

My point is, most engineers don’t like the idea of being managers, don’t want to be managers (no matter what the pay) and will, therefore do a lousy job at it. The ones who do well at it, often are sneered at by their compatriots as folks who couldn’t make it as an actual engineer. Finding an engineer who can manage well, and has the respect of his peers is like the guy with the beard and the lantern looking for an honest man. Most companies make do with what they find and wonder why things blow up after awhile. I don’t know all the answers, but I do know if I had a pretty good engineer who could also manage, it would be worth a bit of training. Send him to some week long classes on management theory and such. It’s a situation where just trying to hire the right candidate probably isn’t going to help, you need to build him on your own. You will probably loose him after the training (or within a few years) because HR will not keep up on salary, but that is a whole ‘nuther issue…