Shame On Me

Posted on 29/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The latest book I am reading is called The Future. I’m only 50 pages into it, but something inside me says don’t waste more time. I have detected two themes emerging: Lesbianism and a Techno world of modern jargon that means nothing. There is a hint of a murder mystery as well. Now, I must decide if I should read further to determine if the story has any value or ignore my inner rule to not waste time on things that bore me and stop. I need this book to reach my goal of reading one book every week. Luckily, I always take out three books at a time, and I have two others on my desk that may appease my appetite more than The Future.

I violated my decision to pick only fiction books, and the two on my desk are real-life stories. The real reason I read is to entertain myself with something that keeps me away from the TV. I spend too many hours each night binging on series that amuse me. One of the current series is called “Shameless,” and it is shameless in every way it can be. The main character is an alcoholic who lives for booze. He has seven kids, six of whom live in the same small house. His wife, who is also an alcoholic and druggie who will party at a moment’s notice, has left him. His number one rule is to not work for a living and to drink from the time he wakes up until the time he collapses into a stupor at the end of the day. His relationship with Aunt Agnes tells how he gets money to drink. She was living on Social Security in a nursing home. Frank checked her out to save her money by caring for her at home. She dies while in his care, but he never reports it, and instead, he buries her in the backyard and continues to collect her pension for the past eleven years.

All his kids are characters in the story, and they all hate the father they call Frank. The oldest daughter, Fiona, is eighteen and takes care of the household and all her siblings, feeding them, clothing them, and advising them on life. This series has run for eleven years, and the kids are growing up. There are four brothers, and two girls. The oldest brother, whom they call Lip (short for Phillip), is genius smart. The next oldest brother is Ian, who is gay; the next in line is Carl, who is slightly demented and looking for trouble every chance he gets. Debbie is a twelve-year-old sister whose only goal in life is to become a woman and to have sex. Liam is the youngest child born black and proved by DNA tests to be Frank’s progeny. An older sister, Sammi, shows up later in the story, whom Frank fathered while very young, and none of his family is aware of her connection.

There are over fifty characters in this story, and they are all layered in their stories. Shameless was filmed in a Southside Chicago neighborhood with which I am familiar. It is just six miles from my old haunt of Burnside.

The complexity of this family and the plots involving their lives make it fascinating to watch. I limit my viewing to one episode daily but often stretch it into two episodes.

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I Spy

Posted on 27/10/2023 by Grumpa Joe

There is nothing I love more than a good spy novel. Yet, when I read too many end-to-end, they all sound the same, and I must return to starving them. Currently, I am reading Sisterhood, the Secret History of Women at the CIA. In today’s world, it is not unusual to find women in spy jobs, but back in the forties after WW2 women as spies was a well kept secret.

I just started reading this story, so I can’t speak to it in depth, but at this point, I am enjoying it.

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Still On Schedule

Posted on 21/10/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Every year, I set a goal to read four books per month, and I am happy to report that I am still on schedule. The most recent is titled “Life in Five Senses” by Gretchen Rubin. Ms Rubin is a remarkable writer with a vocabulary she is not afraid to use. Yet, her writing is completely readable, understandable, and entertaining. In this work, she does an outstanding job of reporting the results of her research to explore her five senses. In one experiment, she sets a goal to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art daily for a year. In another, she visits five delicatessens with her daughter and mother-in-law to explore different tastes. This is an easy trip for her because she lives in New York in Manhattan, where everything is in her immediate neighborhood. For me, this would be an all-day adventure involving driving over a hundred miles to five different towns near me. The same goes for visiting the Chicago Art Museum, which requires a forty-five-minute drive and a twenty-dollar parking fee. Nevertheless, I enjoyed her narrative of the many experiments and descriptions of how she involved her five senses. She also makes a great point that we too often overlook the small things in life that make it more exciting and enjoyable.

I recommend this book if you want to know where you stand in paying attention to your five senses.

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Sad, Sad, Sadder

Posted on 20/10/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The last book I read is The Adventurer’s Son, by Roman Dial. A true story about a man who lived his life on adventures to exotic places in search of answers to questions of biology. He raised his son and daughter to be much like him. At age twenty-eight, his son went on an adventure to the jungles of Central America, specifically the jungle in Costa Rica. Like most good sons, he messaged his father about his whereabouts and itinerary. He planned to spend four days in a specific region of the jungle, which was dense and also recommended to go with a guide. Being an experienced jungle hiker, he opted to go solo. The message he sent his parents was the last time they heard from him. He vanished. His father left immediately on a course to find him. The remainder of the story involves the search. For me, this story was a page-turner. I could not put it down. I rated it five stars on my reading list, and recommend it to anyone interested in biographies, adventures, and scientific discovery.

As a father, I don’t know if I would drop everything to go into a jungle to hunt for my missing son. I certainly sympathize with the Dial family on the loss of their only son, but I’m not sure I would have gone to the trouble that this man and wife did to find their kid. The story is a sad one, and the ending is sadder.

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AI Is Coming

Posted on 30/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

I am reading a book titled “AI Super Powers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” by Kai-Fu Lee. It has captured my imagination as a good story about something technical. I am nearing the end, and the author is presenting how AI will begin to take over in the very near future (like 5 years). He extols the many benefits of automation and the sadness of lost jobs. I thought about it and must tell you that automation doesn’t come easy. I spent 40 years at a company that produced what the world likes to call “zip ties.” At first thought, one can believe that a zip tie is not complicated, so why wouldn’t it be easy to automate? The tie is merely a plastic strip with a molded tip and a locking head on the opposite end. The product’s geometry comprises thin sections and thick sections, sharp edges and soft edges, massive sections like the tie head and body, and tiny delicate sections like the locking mechanism inside the head. Next is the material used to mold the tie. All plastics are not the same. Some are easy to melt and mold but don’t stand up to the rigors of application; the plastic must be tough, flexible, and strong. The material we finally chose to use was Nylon 6-6, but it came with its own list of problems. To mold, the material had to be very dry, but in actual use, the molded product must contain water to make it tough, flexible, and easy to apply. The product will be stiff and brittle if left dry as molded.

Raw nylon came to us as a pellet in boxes or bags. We use a special machine to melt the pellets and then to send the melted plastic into a steel mold with the product’s shape cut into it. This requires a channel cut into the mold that extends to the cavity. To make money, we required the number of cavities in the mold to be more than one. When I first began at the company, our typical mold had sixteen cavities with a binary runner system designed to make each runner extend from the nozzle to the cavity to be the same distance. We melted and molded more nylon in the runner system than in the product. What that meant was a gross imbalance in the cost. We didn’t make money molding runners. A human manually removed each shot of sixteen parts and its runner from the mold. This operator was incentivized to process the maximum number of shots per minute.

The molded product had to be removed from the runner, moisture-conditioned, and packaged before being sent to a customer. Initially, another department did the moisturizing, packaging, and boxing. When I left the company forty years later, we had the entire process automated. As many as two hundred parts were molded at one time. The parts were degated, counted, and packaged into plastic bags of one hundred or one thousand ties. A single person performed quality checks and put ten packages of a thousand ties into a box. We stopped automating at that point because paying back the machinery was more expensive than allowing the existing QC person who tended to four machines to take the final step. What I am getting at here is that AI makes sense, but automating every process may not.

Another aspect was in mold, and molding machine maintenance. When the mold is subject to being squeezed together by a machine capable of applying a million pounds of force to keep it closed during injection, the tiny parts inside the cavity are stressed beyond imagination. The result is that when a tiny part breaks, the product from that cavity is junk, and the process has to shut down to fix the flat. We then turn to quick mold change and maintenance procedures to replace broken parts. All of this is the result of thousands of man-hours of development.

Even the author agrees that automating the human hand motion is not possible at this time nor in the foreseeable future. AI may be great at analyzing orders and finding trends, or it might even be great at finding trends in the molding process, but only with scads of data. It took an entire team of electrical and process engineers years to determine how and what to measure to predict or even see trends. Eventually, we measured the process and improved our product’s quality and consistency.

The Way We Did It in 1970

In the end, we learned that automation comes at a great cost and that the cost of maintaining the equipment continues as long as the process goes on. Changing the process becomes unthinkable once it is solid and running smoothly. When that finally happened, the powers to be decided there was an advantage to sending the whole kit and caboodle to places like Singapore, Costa Rica, and Mexico, where the labor costs are lower. Just to let you know, I left out China. That is because the wisdom of our owner was that he paid for developing his process, and he believed the Chinese should pay their way, too. We had a security system in place that rivaled the NSA and CIA to keep our competitors from stealing our technology.

In conclusion, I say this, bring it on AI we are ready for you, but are you smart enough to take on the challenge in front of you?

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, Manufacturing | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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