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My Almost-daily Journal |
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| About I love trying out new things, especially when it comes to internet technology. I never really kept a journal, but it's something that I've always wanted to do. Now, everybody will get a chance to look inside my twisted, and somewhat-warped mind.
I've also subscribed to Audio Blog, so a few times a week, I'll leave actual voice blogs. Very cool!XML Newsfeed  |
Sunday, November 30, 2003
More Farmer Jacks Espionage Tips & Tricks Here's some more Farmer Jacks espionage tips and tricks: 1) Do some "vicarious" shopping- By this I mean pretend that you're stocking up for WWIII. Take two carts if you must! Go through the isles and just start stocking up! Meats and produce are the best choices for this tip. Be sure to place produce at the BOTTOM of the cart. When one or more of your cart(s) fill up, pretend you left your wallet at home and abandon the cart(s). Then go to Kroger. 2) Decoration al la ice cream- Have you ever wondered why they still package ice cream in square containers? The worst thing about the square containers is that they leak if the ice cream ever melts. Melting ice cream is the them with this tip. Grab a Stroh's vanilla cube and place it deep in the back above the spice rack. Better yet, throw a few in the 2 liter pop racks. 3) Test those fragile fruits and veggies- Bruised fruit and vegetables... who likes that? You know why veggies get bruised? It's because 23 other people were handling them prior to your visit. Tomatoes, kiwis, and bananas are especially prone to bruise damage. Go to the produce section and man-handle every piece of fruit and vegetable. The higher the price/lb, the better. 4) Eggs- Nobody buys broken eggs. Catch my drift? 5) Milk and other perishable goods expiration rotation schedule- This one shouldn't need too much explaining... you go into a store to buy some milk. You notice that the milk in the back expires later that the ones up front. Re-rotate the milk! Consumers want fresh goods. Put the older stuff in the back. The same goes for cheese, yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese and etc. 6) Shopping cart demolition derby- Can't afford a real demolition derby? Then go to Farmer Jacks with your friends! Fill your carts with fruits and vegetables, then place heavier items like family packs of Tide, 8-packs of Coke, etc., on top. Then pretend you're shopping with your friend and hit everything in site, pretending that you're clumbsy. Hit your friends cart too. 7) Shrimp Jerky- Packages of frozen shrimp are usually pretty high-priced. The jumbo shrimps are the key here, where a bag can cost well into $25 or more, depending on the count. Find the family packs of jumbo shrimp and move them to a better location (e.g. behind the canned Cambell's Soup). Come back a few days later to make sure that it's still there. If so, do it again. 8) Returnable cans & bottles mania- I used to chew tobacco... it was a nasty habit. Bottles and cans usually served as spitters for me. I would just throw them away. If I chewed now, the full cans of tobacco+spit would be depositted into their returnable can crusher/sorter. I don't have tobacco+spit now, but there's all sorts of fun liquids and bodily fluids you can place in cans. Be creative. 9) Lettuce recall- Buy a head of lettuce. Save your receipt. Put the lettuce in the microwave for a few minutes. Leave it outside overnight. Then return to Farmer Jacks customer service and demand a new head of lettuce. When refused, demand to speak with the store manager, and if given a hard time (hopefully), demand to speak to the regional director. If it's too easy to get a replacement, try a different Farmer Jacks but instead buy 23 heads of lettuce. 10) Pet store shopping spree- If you really feel mischievious, go to the pet store and make some ala carte purchases. For sure, buy a few rats (at least four). If one of them is female, there's a 44% chance that she's already pregnant. If not pregnant, she will be. Gestation time for rat pinkies is pretty quick. Let them loose in the store, preferably in the back. Do the same think with crickets or grasshoppers. Put a few hundred of those in the produce area. Live blood worms and brine shrimp are great additions to a live lobster tank. If you feel really frisky, add a packet of green dye to the water. 11) Handcream fun- Accidentally explode white handcream or white shampoo all over the Trojan rack. 12) Don't squeeze the Sharmin... OK to squeeze the Wonder Bread- Go to the bread rack and pretend you're a bread tester. A loaf or Wonder Bread can be squeezed into a 4" wide tube. At least that's my record. What's yours? More Farmer Jack tips and tricks will be posted regularly. Be on the lookout for actual video footage of this pilgrimage. posted by Dino at 6:10 PM (permanent link) Boycott Farmer Jacks and All A&P Companies Boycott Farmer Jacks and their holding company, A&P. Don't ask. Just boycott. Boycott forever. If you do find yourself in a Farmer Jacks, feel free to drop a few glass jars of pickles, or move perishable items (especially ice cream, milk, yogurt, and sour cream) to warmer shelves. posted by Dino at 2:49 PM (permanent link) Pinnacle Studio 8 I already posted this article on my forums/fora, but I figured it was important enough to post here as well... OK. I'm not an expert in storyboards, video editing or video production by any means of the imagination. I know just enough to get by and be dangerous. Back in 2000, I used Adobe Premiere 4 to create this video for work. I wanted to clearly illustrate how engineering at Decoma could possibly become paperless using on internet-based tool called NexPrise. Decoma is still using the tool today, I'm pleased to say. My new fetish of the year is FULLY capturing my 8mm, Hi-8, and Digital-8 movies to DVD. The task is pretty daunting, since I basically have all three mediums listed above. Standard 8mm and Hi-8 tapes hold 120 minutes of video, while pure DV Digital-8 tapes hold only 60 minutes. DVD's can hold 60 minutes of high-quality video or 120 minutes of standard video. I know... WTF? To complicate things further, a pure DV capture of a 60-minute Digital-8 tape will yield an avi file of 13 GB. WTF? DVD's only hold 4.7 GB. I hardly understand it, and I really don't know how it's feasible to store 13 GB of DV video onto a 4.7 GB DVD. It probably has something to do with MPEG-2 encoding. I'm still learning. I'm an infant newbie when it comes to this. I hardly feel that 13 GB of raw avi video captured from Digital-8 is the same quality when encoded to fit onto a 4.7 GB DVD. Call me silly. To me, that's a third LESS quality. Perhaps it has something to do with the resolution that S-video can output. Anyway... when I used Adobe Premiere 4 in 2000, DVD burners where a pipe dream. The year is now 2003 and DVD burners are a reality. Capturing analog and digital video and storing it to DVD is also a reality. To me, there's really only a couple choices in creating DVD movies: Pinnacle Studio 8 and Adobe Premiere 7. I just happened to jump into Pinnacle Studio 8. My experience with Adobe Premiere 4, back in 2000, definitely helped. I'd like to try Premiere, just to have something to compare to. Pinnacle Studio 8 is awesome! I can't believe they only charge $99 for the software. Chalk it up as a "best buy" for 2003 if you're a software consumer. In one try, I was able to fully capture a 60-minute Digital-8 tape, create chapters, and even create a DVD menu screen! I'm utterly amazed at how easy it was to use. I didn't even use any wizards to do it. Right out of the "box", I was able to create an awesome DVD. I didn't even get too advanced like adding audio dubs or manipulating the audio portion of the movie by moving it around (called J-cuts or L-cuts where you transition audio from one clip into the video of another). The possibilities were endless. I enjoyed it so much, if I lived off of a $5M trust-fund, I would definitely spend the rest of my living years just playing around with video production. Here's some nice screenies of the fun I had: Storyboard view showing Hollywood FX transitions  Timeline view showing title blocks  Timeline view showing the menu-creation interface (just drag a clip into a menu box and it become a navigatable chapter)  This is the menu template creation GUI. This is where you can add your own background picture and active objects and navigation controls. The chapters shown actually are moving video in each box. Very, very sweet! I now know how movie companies make SWEET menus for their production DVD movies!  This is a text view showing the "make movie" interface. This is where the raw 13 GB avi is encoded to whatever standard you wish: VHS tape quality, compressed avi (Divx, xvid, etc.), mpeg (all sorts of flavors), streaming video (Windows Media wmv or RealVideo rm), a gay "share video" option that stores videos on Pinnacle's site, a DVD quality.  I've just tipped the iceberg with my first creation. I can't wait to learn more as I go along. The challenge is going to be to figure out what I'm going to do with analog 8mm and Hi-8 tapes, played out of a digital DV camcorder. Hopefully (and I doubt it), the 120-minute long videos will only be 13 GB. Oh... a cool thing about Pinnacle Studio 8 was that it recognized when the camcorder stopped, and it actually broke up the video into clips automatically. I think that definitely has something to do with DV video, and the way it uses DV timecode. These are exciting times. I sure wish I had a $5M trust fund. If you're interested in reading more, here's the Pinnacle Studio 8 manual (3.65 MB), compliments of Pinnacle: studio8-manual.pdf You can access this article on my forum by clicking here! posted by Dino at 2:36 PM (permanent link) Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Program Management I can honestly say that I'm pretty happy with my new program management position with Decoma. I've been a program manager before, so managing multiple "issues" is not new to me. However, working for a competent OEM, and "mentoring" under a competent program manager is new. The Decoma way is usually sink-or-swim. Decoma only hires seasoned veterans when it comes to engineers or program managers, and they expect people to pick up the ball and run with it, with little to no questions. This concept just adds to the stress of performing your day-to-day duties, since you're usually spending most of your time trying to understand a new system, a new OEM, etc. I've never been one to admit that I'm ever "under someone's wing", but I'm actually happy that someone is looking out for me. It's actually a nice match, since I'm the youngest PM on the GM account and I have no idea how GM operates. The stress levels are subdued because we're actually both working on the same issues together. I miss the IT side a little bit, and I especially miss strictly managing the day-to-day activities of the development center. The reason is that development work and IT work is not usually a production environment, where you're "in-the-face" of the customer 24/7. I especially don't like getting calls by GM at 7pm on my cell phone when I'm at home taking a bubble bath. There are advantages though... PM's are the front line's and first contacts with the OEM's, and we're the ones that make all the sourcing decisions, as well as negotiated piece price and tooling costs. That's a pretty powerful position, and suppliers are always trying to do something to sway your sourcing decision to their company. I will miss the free time that I usually had between coffee breaks and bathroom break where I could jump in and log into dinofilias.com to debate a little about pacifists and lemmings. Working on websites during lunch is bye-bye. No time for that anymore. posted by Dino at 1:34 AM (permanent link) Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Driving in Troy... and Beyond... 7:00 AM is not the time for 80-year olds to be adding to the congestion and insanity of driving through Sterling Heights and Troy. There is no excuse for somebody to be driving 30 mph on a two-lane Troy road! First off, people have somewhere to go! Secondly, and most important, the Troy S.M.A.R.T. system scans traffic at each intersection to determine traffic light switching. When you're in the left-hand-turn lane in Troy, you basically have 0.32 seconds to respond, or the S.M.A.R.T. system thinks there's nobody in line waiting to turn. If you're an 80-year old in the left-hand turn lane, 0.32 seconds isn't even a reasonable time to think, since 3/4 of your brain is probably asleep, or using every resource to just stay alive. The cascading effect becomes even more gruesome, as more and more cars pile up in line to turn left, causing traffic to backup even more on the two-lane road, which causes backups on the perpendicular veins, and so on and so forth. It becomes a nightmare, just because an 80-year old was looking for a Denny's. Secretary of State - Reflex & Judgement Testing My recommendation is that people undergo reflex and judgement testing. Based on the results, you may be restricted to drive only during non-rush-hour times. Most people will probably pass with flying colors, but for those that don't, they should only be allowed to drive between 10AM - 2PM and 7PM - 6AM. Furthermore, the judgement and reflex test should also test alcohol impairment. If you consume three beers in an hour, and are forced to take a breath-alyzer, you'll go directly to jail, since your blood alcohol will definitely be over the legal limit. To me that's absurd, because even after 12 beers, I can still take a quarter out of your hand, replace it with a nickel, before you even knew it was gone. I don't condone drunk driving one bit- I know when I cannot and should not drive. I'll challenge anybody to a reflex test after six beers... I'm sure I'll still be in the top 99 percentile. Games and Compulsive-Obsessive Disorder Well, I'm at it again: Neverwinter Nights. That game consumed me for a few weeks about two years ago. I remember I was so wrapped up with it, that I would actually come home for lunch to play (15 minutes there, 15 minutes back, and 30 minutes of play). I was inspired to finish it after trying out Temple of Elemental Evil. That game sucked so bad that I actually deleted it off of my system. It did, however, inspire me to finish Neverwinter Nights. How sick and demented am I? Let's see... I decided to do a little web work after I got home yesterday evening. I worked on a few things, then got sucked into NWN up until 8PM. Josh brought back some sushi, and I gorged myself with some grade-A raw fish. It was yummy. It was so yummy, that I layed down at 9PM and actually fell asleep. I woke up around 1AM, and went back on the computer to exit out of NWN, but I got fished in. Umm... I didn't even go back to bed! I stayed up and played from 1AM - 7AM! I'm sick! It is a damn good game, though, and can't stop thinking about it. I can't wait until the day is over. posted by Dino at 9:38 AM (permanent link) Saturday, November 15, 2003
Program Management With the new management reshuffling at Decoma, things were bound to change. New VP's, new Director's, new Business managers... life in Decoma is definitely different. SVE IT Manager? Who's that? From August '03 - November '03 it was me... Three full months of intense... ummm... stagnation? Boredom? Intellectual-dilution? Sure, I worked... some of the time, but the days of dog-eat-dog in the engineering or program management world were non-existent. I guess I'll call it a three month paid holiday, where it was optional to even come into work. SVE Program Manager? From November '03 - present, it's now me! I'm now a Program Manager for the GM account, currently working on a GM Grand Prix "Special Edition" spring special. Decoma is notorious for "sink or swim". I have never had a position in Decoma that didn't follow that credo. The GM team at Decoma is very nice. Most of the Program Managers are veterans, and several are actually ex-GM employees. I'm probably the youngest one in the group, where everybody else is at least 50, other than on of our plant General Managers, who's probably 40. Of all the OEM's that I've worked with (DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Mopar, and GM), General Motors is, by far, the best! When it comes to an automotive component program, GM program managers, engineers, and buyers actually get involved and don't pass the buck. When they say they're going to do something, they actually do it (many times right there and then via cell phone). They don't pass the buck. They actually work, and demand the same. It's actually quite refreshing to finally be working with an OEM that will actually work, instead of expecting their supplier to do all the work for them. Momentun Shift Going from SVE IT Manager to SVE Program Manager isn't a cake-walk. Right now I'm just trying to understand the GM system, as well as get to know the main players on the team. Add this learning curve to the actual work, and it gets to be a pretty busy week. And the longer days isn't what's affecting me the most right now. On the contrary. It's actually quite nice to be mentally stimulated for a change. The thing that's affecting me is the momentum and inertia shift in workload. Imagine going from doing very little per week, to working NONSTOP for nine hours per day. Nine hours per day of intense labor isn't a problem. Shit, in 2002 I worked an entire summer NONSTOP, without lunches! It's the inertia shock that's taxing my brain: basically going from an hour of intellectual stimulation with 1% corporate responsibility to nine hours of intellectual stimulation (coupled with ten phone calls per hour) with 200% corporate responsibility (Decoma AND SVE are now affected by my actions). They say you should be careful what you wish for. I was wishing that my intellectual stimulation at work would take a hike upward some day. It did that. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage, and not screw up Decoma's and SVE's reputation with GM. Being a program manager for Mopar is a joke. Being a program manager for GM is huge, as the stakes have changed. Decoma Corporate Worries... Let's see... Decoma Corporate had slight psychological problems that I had Decoma content living on my personal server. There's something in Decoma bylaw 1.4.3 that states Decoma content can not be distributed by Decoma employees, blah blah blah, without Decoma Corporate consent. Blah blah blah. I sure feel pretty un-f***'ing appreciated. My server, my personal time, and HOURS/DAYS/WEEKS/MONTHS of catagorizing, sorting, and uploading pictures in a system with automatic navigation, foldering and thumbnailing: http://dinofilias.com/cgi-bin/album/album.pl?album=11sve The only reason I even bothered to put those pictures up, was when I was managing Decoma's SEMA 2002 vehicles, sponsors that were donating content, were asking for pictures and proof-of-concept. I put the pictures on my site, instead of sending ten different suppliers an email-a-week, full of attachments. I just sent them a link and told them to check there often, as pictures were added as vehicles came closer to completion. Then Joel Dawson and I started putting other SEMA vehicles on the site, as well as benchmarking data, and other Decoma project vehicles built at the development center. It was a really nice album that many Decoma employees found useful. It doesn't meet Decoma Corporate guidelines. I don't blame them, but don't treat me like a pro-union mobster trying to bring unions into Decoma's non-union plants! This isn't espionage! This is called sacrifice, charity, and goodwill-- ALL on my dime! Everything I did was in the best-interest of Decoma! So, to cooperate, I backed up the directory, burned it to CD, and sent the CD to our Quality Manager. The pictures are coming off as soon as our VP of IT gives me the green light again. I password protected that directory for now (login: decoma, password: decoma). Sheesh. Miscellaneous & Miniscule... What else has been going on these last few weeks? Let's see... DVD playerI almost ran over my DVD player with my Jeep, since it was having problems playing current DVD's, as well as DTS audio. I decided to spare it and give it to Danielle's household. I bought a new Sony DVD player with a 5-DVD carrosel. It's the best DVD player (non-writable) that Sony offers, and it only cost me $151 at Best Buy! DVD players are cheap! This one reads DVD+/-R/RW (basically all formats). I've been backing up DVD movies with DVD XCopy like it's my job... labels, cases and all! SpeakersMy Klipsh KG 4.2 speakers are finally fixed! I'm almost embarrassed to say that one of my woofers was damaged (i.e. broke) for at least two years. After watching a little Saving Private Ryan in DTS audio, I realized that something was majorly wrong with the audio coming out of the right speakers. The bass was so bad, that the volume had to be taken down drastically to avoid the "popping". I finally decided to take apart the speakers and order a new woofer from Klipsh (or some authorized dealer). What I found wasn't all that bad... my speakers consist of an active and passive woofer. The active woofer is the actual bass woofer, magnet and all. The passive woofer is just a woofer... no magnet, no wires, no nuthin. It was the PASSIVE speaker that was busted! The cone had become unglued to the rear baffle or what the A/V Systems guy called "the spider". It took it to work, and asked one of the Development Center guys if he could glue it back together. A few shots of superglue (literally), and I was back in bidness. I threw the speaker back together, and the sound never felt so good! Rejoice! Now that's a closed life issue that's been on my books for years! Adrian's Visit Adrian the Lemming Slayer has come and gone. Our Aussie friend travelled from another hemisphere to visit with some of the folks and philosophers from df.com. He mainly stayed at Dan Glovak's house, but found that reading books and listening to poetry for days and days got old really quick! My pad offered some intellectually-dwarfing conveniences like cable-TV, telephone, electricity, television, and internet access. Adrian and I didn't do too much philosophizing about REBY/G, string theory, or the complexities of infinate space/time, and we found ourselves playing Grand Theft Auto Vice City, watching movies, or eating out. The two weeks he was here actually went by pretty fast. He's now off to New York, then Germany, then who-knows. I don't know who funds this guy. He must have a trust-fund or something, because he only works when he needs to. He definitely has earned the nickname, "The Transient". Filias.com Peter and I did some server maintenance tonight, eliminating several IP addresses that were not needed, and cleaning up our server a bit. We were supposed to also work on www.Michiganconcretehomes.com, but us Filias' definitely suffer from ADD and EDD (Easily-Distracted Disorder). We played video games, watched a little TV, had some chicken sausages, had a few laughs, etc. We basically both were doing our own thing in his computer room... me writing this, and Peter installing games and apps. I wonder when we'll do the mch.com stuff? Who knows? This stuff we did was better. And that's all for now. Hope everything is going well. I hope everybody has a great Opening Day this morning. Most OEM's have this day off as a holiday (what's this world coming to!?) posted by Dino at 3:25 AM (permanent link) Monday, November 03, 2003
Server Upgrade Correction I stand corrected. Server upgrade hasn't even happened. It's occurring at midnight tonight. Oh boy. I might have to take a week off of work to get things working right. I highly doubt that df.com will be operational for a few days. So get your posts in while the posting is good. We're upgrading from a Celeron 1.0GHz CPU to a Celeron 2.0GHz CPU. Our RAM is going from either 64MB or 128MB (not sure) of RAM to 512MB. The upgrade in RAM should be pretty significant to our server. It'll be exciting to compare the server stats before and after the upgrade. I wonder if the stats will keep history from our old server? posted by Dino at 3:16 PM (permanent link) Sunday, November 02, 2003
Server Upgrade For a couple hundred bucks (extortion, I know), we upgraded our CPU from 1 GHz to 2 GHz, and we upped our RAM from 64 MB to 128 MB (or it might be 128 MB to 256 MB... I forgot... I just know it was doubled). We actually had to upgrade our entire server. If we upgraded our current server via a la carte style, we'd be paying an additional $50/month. I did notice that our CPU load went down, but it was never really that high. It went down from 5% utilization to 3% utilization. Not sure why we even needed to do that. However, the main reason we upgraded was because of RAM. We were approaching 100% utilization between active, cache, and buffered RAM. I think we went down from 90% utilization to 88% utilization... didn't even really affect anything. I hope it makes a difference. Redhat Linux I bit the bullet and loaded the latest Redhat Linux on my spare 40 GB hard drive. It loaded and installed without incident. I was online in about 20 minutes with Mozilla. What's my take on the experience? Simple: why bother? Trying to load an ATI Radeon 9800 Linux driver requires a bachelor's degree in unix theory. I was never really successful at getting both monitors to work, but I was somewhat successful at getting the OS to recognize the 9800 driver (though it doesn't show up as an option on the display properties). Getting the latest updates was just as easy as Microsoft, though now I have two different kernels to choose from when booting into Linux (not too happy about that). Everything else is a chore, and quite frankly, almost not worth the effort. I suppose if you're broke, and can't afford a license of Windows, it's the best thing available. The only reason I'd ever install Linux and keep it going is to run the Apache webserver. I'm pretty used to Linux now, since our webserver in Dallas uses Apache. I think I might play with that for a while. But I don't ever see myself using Linux freeware office products to update my resume. Microsoft Windows, I hate to admit, is the best thing that ever happened to computing. posted by Dino at 9:42 PM (permanent link) |