Went into the office for the first time in 2 years, because I had to print out and bind some documents before shipping them off. In a company of more than 400 people, I saw 4. I could see going in once in a while, if I needed to. But I don't really need to. Since the last time I was in the office in February 2020, my entire team has dissolved, and I have been moved over to a different department in a different part of the building. But my cubicle with my name on it still stands alone in a vast dark room with nobody around. The next two years in corporate America are going to be very weird. I can't see people happily returning to the status quo... and yet all this expensive real estate is built on the idea of people having to come into a specific location to prove they are working... I just don't see people going back to that, if there are other options. I've already knocked back my schedule so I get off work at noon on Tuesday and Thursdays, so I can help care for my Dad as he travels the Alzheimers road. Sure, it's only 6 hours a week, but ... I'm still making a full salary and still getting all my work done easily. The rules of the game are changing. For the better, I feel. And Amazon warehouse workers won the right to organize a Union. Shit is changing for working stiffs.
My company is going to a hybrid approach with three days minimum in the office. That becomes effective Monday. I've been going in one or two days a week during their six week reintegration process. There were more in Monday than I saw the first week, but it's still really quiet. It feels like most of the company used the six weeks as covid status quo and stayed home. While I'd like to see a more generous policy, my boss said nobody is going to be checking, so be an adult and it'll work out. I heard from someone in my old job that their vice president said it's "must be present to win" about their more liberal long term work from home policy. I love working from home but think our clear hybrid policy is better than the unofficial one others will have. Unwritten expectations will turn away more good workers than hybrid will.
Either way, be prepared for your top performers to go somewhere else that will allow them to WFH and not treat them like second-class citizens for doing so. I see my company's commitment to a hybrid policy as fully suicidal.Unwritten expectations will turn away more good workers than hybrid will.
We've had an unexpected number of resignations in the past couple months. All are explainable with good opportunities opening up, and I think the number of open positions out there are putting more pressure on us than hybrid or WFH. And they all know if it didn't work out they'd be welcomed back with open arms.
My work was adamant we had to return to the offices as soon as we could. It's so strange seeing them try to sell it to us, after we adapted to remote working damn near seamlessly. My staff are the operations people supporting the teaching that goes on in our institution - they don't need to physically be there for anything, and haven't since our rapid adjustment in 2020. But no, the powers that be want us all to be on site, wearing masks in the empty offices, continue paying for parking/commuting as the price of living creeps up. Does my head in. I'm allowed to work from home when I need to, management perks, but I really hate doing that when I know none of my staff are offered that same flexibility.
I've started encouraging discussion about the situation. But my manager is super not keen on allowing WFH, so it's kind of under the table at the moment. Kiwis are allowed to travel overseas now finally, so one staff member has flown to the USA for a month, and I said she could work from home in the build up - lest she get Covid and have to cancel the trip. Sure enough my manager said no to working from home in the build up, so I told my staff she could do it anyway and we wouldn't tell anyone. She WFH, got on her flight and is enjoying herself. Nobody outside of our area knew and her work didn't alter in the slightest.
Scope Creep Because "better to put the bulky stuff back together first" i have been reworking the tool changer prior to the servos. The pneumatic design is largely done. We have now gotten to the point where the electricity has to hit stuff in the right place. I was busy building a break-out box where I could supply power, hit a switch, and trigger the appropriate valves prior to connecting it to the controller so that when I did connect it to the controller, I could troubleshoot the connection rather than the pneumatics. Compartmentalization yadda yadda. Which is where I went "well if I'm putting this break-out box in here I should probably connect the arm. Three of four sensors on the arm are bad. Worse, they're NAMUR sensors which: - Are explosion-proof - modulate amperage, rather than making or breaking a connection - are $300 ea Kern likely used NAMUR not because they expected their tool to operate in a volatile environment (the limit switches are just dumb-ass reed switches) but because they ran out of NPN ports on their Heidenhain TNC. I, on the other hand, have exactly zero provisions for NAMUR sensors. You can buy ridiculous little NPN hall-effect sensors? They're just Swiss, $70 ea and thunderously small. 3mm in diameter, in fact. Some of the adaptation is straightforward: Some of it is not. Conventional wisdom is you can't 3d-print ANSI threads. Conventional wisdom is not a redneck with an engineering degree and a SolidWorks license. when you don't have a CNC machine to work on your CNC machine New bearings from Italy, new grease, new sensors, we rebuilt the whole dumb little thing. What was that word, 'gesamtkunstwerk'? Our "watchmaking" now involves breadboarding and a hot melt glue gun: You mean you... don't have heat-shrink tubing for your label-maker? Yeah you'd be surprised by how little you use it So yeah. We've got a breadboarded, cheap-Thai-electronics indicator assembly built into our chimney, which terminates to a DB-9 rather than a bunch of random Dupont connectors like the original. We've been through three iterations of the chimney, will be printing the 4th in black'n'red to match the machine. It required revision of the mechanics, revision of the electrics, and approximately two weeks off'n'on of various and sundry skillz I've accumulated over a lifetime. I know one guy who could have done all this shit and he, like, helped develop USB so his electrical chops are by definition better than mine. but I can't even stare a Seiko in the face right now Bonus fun: in this hole are the leads from the spindle encoder. Yeah previous guy savaged 'em down below the ferrule 'cuz who needs to know how fast the spindle is going? The power connections are also frayed and bare; exactly what you want to plug into 2000W of 220V. So the spindle needs to go in for rebuilding just to deal with the electrical nonsense. Which means I need to build a crate and probably pay $5k. But a buddy recently signed a contract to buy a machine 8 years newer than mine for three hundred thousand dollars so it's economically the sensible thing to do. Especially when you've realized $900 profit on a fluke acquisition. And I guess that's the bottom line? It's sweat equity into a six figure machine that I got for Sherline prices. But if one more person asks me "when do you think you're going to be done with it?" I'm going to scream.
I'm in a real, real weird place. Home is great. Healthy, relatively wealthy (by whole world standards). Work is great. Challenging, but that's a good thing. Physically not so great. I've been walking. Probably need to lift or do something to further strengthen this aging bag of bones. Biking season is back too. Emotionally - I gotta figure some stuff out. I'm like... mid 40s, but I feel like I'm 25 and I find myself looking to people much younger than me for answers and approval on work stuff. It's weird. I do not have the confidence I feel like I should have at this point in my life and my career. I gotta figure some stuff out.
I'm now on my third post-covid-fatigue week. I now feel good enough to work a full day tomorrow, prolly for the first time in a month. The SO got a worse deal with a cold this week on top of the fatigue. We'll survive but it still sucks - this year I really wanted to leave health issues behind me but it's been the worst three months of health in a long time. On the bright side we are now actively looking at buying a house and made our first offer. We lowballed it and got a polite "nah" back, which is better than a GTFO. It's funny how buying a home is such a weird mix of excitement, fear and wargaming.
Got a stupid no name flu. Still never had the covid for some reason. Work has been fun - lots of new members at the makerspace, things are activating with the spring energy, planning all the summer projects, we have more and more training offerings and are slowly building up local notoriety. I feel things have evolved quite a bit since I joined a year ago. The daily dealings have been almost entirely in my court since my boss is busy with a grant application with a 5mil$ cap to develop 5000 squarefeet of new artist spaces. If we get it, we should start construction by next winter. In the meantime, we're also looking at buying out the whole building while real state prices are still affordable(ish). They have already increased by a few mil since we've started renting about 4 years ago... Did my first MIG welding class this weekend - and I was actually pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. I somehow expected it to be a LOT tougher. My welds are not the prettiest, but that's just practice. Maybe I'll do the TIG class later too. I need to think of a fun little sculpture or something I can build up from scrap metal at the space and can display at the country house - just for the practice! I bet I can even get it financed by our local burning man regional if i bring it over for the event. I need to get my ass in gear about actually learning the skills i've been talking about learning the past few years. I think I've been talking about the welding for the past 4-5 years! Can't believe it took me so long to pull the plug. Next up would be sewing! I also want to do a little bike touring, but have no idea where to start. I think the cost of the gear is what is stoping me right now, but I have never even researched if it's something I could rent.
MIG is stupid easy. It's a hot melt glue gun with protective equipment. Frankly the whole world has gotten easier now that you can buy an auto-darken visor for like $50. The only downside is vanishingly few people actually need to weld anything so the world ends up with awkward scrap-metal constructions scattered about. Know what sets an amateur and a professional apart? Intent. There's a Metal Supermarkets in Ottawa. They'll cut any steel you buy for like $100. They'll even give you the patterns - they had a cool velociraptor that fit on a 4x8 sheet. Then you get it powder-coated for another $150. Now, instead of a bunch of random junk welded into random, larger junk you have an actual public-works grade sculpture that people other than the welder can appreciate. - Signed, someone who went through 40lbs of 6011 and 10lbs of baling wire before he could legally buy cigarettes ALTERNATIVELY See this thing? It's the same as this thing. It uses hypodermic needles as jets, at least if you swap out the handpiece for something that isn't a useless Chinese chunk of shit. And if you have a hydrogen welder and silver solder, you can make peculiar assemblages of desktop garbage that you can call "art", which takes up a lot less room than peculiar assemblages of workshop garbage that you can call "art."
Space really isn’t an issue on my end, but for sure I’m not in the market for those rusty junk blobs I see in front yards that people call « art » My pile of junk welded together will look cool - if I manage to come up with something worthwhile. The metal coat rack we did in the class turned out alright :)
So far mine has been like symptom-lottery, changing every day: Day 1. Extra low energy Day 2. Muscle and joint soreness Day 3. Sore throat Day 4. Congested nose and snot Day 5. Gross wet coughing We'll see what tomorrow brings, but yesterday felt the worst, while I feel mostly recovered today apart from the coughing. I hope it's not one of these long sicknesses yall are talking about, it does feel like i'm cycling through the symptoms pretty fast. It's just sucky because today and yesterday were probably the nicest spring days we've had yet, would have loved to enjoy it more. I did go on a 2h walk with my mom this afternoon. But it's all rain going forward for the rest of the week. Supposed to be biblical tomorrow.
I also had this. I took a home covid test and not believing the negative results got a PCR test. Also negative. I was out cold for a full day and still coughing and blowing my nose ten days later. It took probably 15 days from first symptoms to feel mostly normal again.
Has to be. I did get the flu shot, but wasn't there talk that the 2021-22 vaccine would be difficult because the previous winter had so few cases due to masking and social distancing for COVID?
I had omicron in January. Bad cold symptoms for about a week, maybe less, but I was congested, especially at night, for several weeks. Annoying, but there are worse things. Interestingly, if you look at NYT's covid map, Washtenaw is the only county in Michigan experiencing a spike in cases right now: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/michigan-covid-cases.html I'm 80-90% certain it's because it's the only place where regular testing is still occuring. Basically everywhere else has dropped their covid protocols. As trump once said, "No testing, no covid."
Speaking as the owner of a healthcare facility - in the UK, mortality of Omicron BA.1is now lower than seasonal flu - In Japan, mortality of Omicron BA.1 is slightly higher than seasonal flu, but "Every hospital in Japan is required to notify the government of each case of novel coronavirus infection, including asymptomatic ones, whereas only around 5,000 hospitals are asked to do so with regard to the number of seasonal influenza patients." - That's overall, though - among unvaccinated people in the United States, the mortality rate is between 6 and 100x higher. - I know two (vaccinated and boosted) people who spent days in the hospital with Omicron. - Omicron continues to cause all sorts of nasty side effects during pregnancy. I don't wear a mask anymore except where it's required (healthcare facilities, public transportation). At the same time, we enforce our mask policy at the clinic because it's a healthcare facility, dumbass. I have also noticed that the 'essential workers' of the world around here have been a lot more reluctant to take off their masks, with (I believe) good reason. If I were swimming in the public's germs all day long I, too, would mask the hell up. As it is I'm among retail for like an hour or two a week. All that said, the root pathogen remains COrona VIrus Disease, Variant 2019. Influenza varies in its nastiness every year, too, and there are three or four dominant strains per season.
And therein lies the folly of the China 0 Covid strategy. We can probably expect the same seasonal variation with covid over time basically in perpetuity at this point. It will be annoying but manageable, as flu season is. Are they planning on locking down Shanghai for like 30 years? Just until Xi dies? What's the endgame? I can't access your FT link, but my basic point about confounders was there are so many things that go into the ultimate death rate, that at this point, it's probably impossible to account for all of them precisely. In the end it doesn't matter, because a low death rate is a low death rate, and hopefully on balance it will continue to wane. I also don't wear a mask unless it's mandatory at this point, and I can honestly say that the BA.2 variant is the first one that doesn't make me at all nervous. I think we've officially entered the endemic state and we'll just have to deal from now on.All that said, the root pathogen remains COrona VIrus Disease, Variant 2019. Influenza varies in its nastiness every year, too, and there are three or four dominant strains per season.
I finished rewatching Chernobyl last night. I figured it would be poignant in light of certain genocidal campaigns in and around the Near Abroad and I was correct. It is fundamentally a study in the tragedy of cronyism, in which a fundamentally unfair system rewards those who work the system best, not those who are best for the system. The most natural approach to disaster within a command economy is "do whatever you can RIGHT NOW to solve the problem RIGHT NOW." The whole of the structure is reactive. COVID zero gave China a PR win after a PR disaster; no apparatchik in their right mind is going to alter the flight plan. So what's going to happen is a lot of old people are going to die, which from a demographic standpoint is exactly what China needs to be competitive long-term. Not the sort of calculus you get to do in a free society but when you've normalized concentration camps? Yearly Fluvid shots at the local CVS makes a lot of sense in a capitalist economy. When you've got totalitarianism and Sinovac? You do whatever doesn't get you sent to a work camp.
I try not to blame the foot soldiers for how they act. Would I have the guts to tell Putin or Xi that their new clothes aren't what everyone says they are? We all like to think we'd be the hero, but let's face it: By definition the overwhelming majority of us are not. On a related topic, seems more and more like Putin's strategy from the beginning has been "get the gas; get the oil; get the coal; get the warn water ports," and his tactic was going to be to replace the Kyiv government to get what he wanted. But not he's decided that a better tactic is just to level everything he needs to level to force Ukraine to sue for peace. Biden's claim of a strategic loss for the Russians just looks wrong. A tactical loss for sure, because even Putin would rather accomplish his theft with killing as few people as possible. Who wouldn't? But his strategy seems very much intact. It's up to our government and our allies to make sure the strategic loss takes place, which can only happen when Russia tries to sell its ill-gotten gains. To give that groups of officers the space they need to show Vlad he's got no clothes is going to take a hell of a lot of encouragement from the West. Otherwise, he'll come away vindicated and even stronger than before.
45? Isn't that dead? I had one rough night of aches and fever. Now just mostly weak. A mild and very intermittent cough. I just took an antigen test this morning and the positive band was stronger than the control. Isolated, and hoping my wife and daughter dodge it.
With winter approaching, my parents have surprised me with a very nice early birthday present. They hired a pro gardener to take care of my large but overwhelming backyard. My partner and I have been in maintenance mode with it since we bought the place, but never really stamped our mark on it. This guy has come along, trimmed the hedges right back, dealt with the weeds, and took care of the massive compost pile that was sitting up the back, comprised mainly of things that are not degrading. He estimates about 5 years of stuff has been piled onto it and honestly I was just ignoring it as best i can; especially as we hadn't added to the pile since we took over ownership. It's now gone, and I have a nice large section like a blank canvas! First project, build an actual compost bin. Once spring hits, I'll be ready..