Viewing profile — msisk6

Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks …

Looks and readability matter in writing. I always uses spaces on either side of the em-dash; looks too crowded otherwise to my eye. I've been doing doing it that way for so long I …

I grew up behind the bowling machines. My dad was a bowling machine mechanic and worked on machines all around the midwest. He often moon-lite as the on-duty mechanic during league…

There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider. My gran…

Same here; grew up in Joplin before escaping to move to California in 1988. It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little…

There are lots of things to test besides basic aerodynamics. And even for that sometimes you want real data to validate models before building the full size thing. Things that are …

I don't know fireworks that well, but these appeared to be the commercial type, with a large lift-charge that lights the sky up with a lightning style flash followed by a sky burst…

It'll be fine; the house is insured. ;) Luckily it's so wet here at the moment the fire risk is minimal.

Yeah, it really happened. But to be fair the little dog in question is prone to seizures and all the booming certainly set this one off. She was fine after things calmed down aroun…

I recently moved to the St. Louis area for a software job at Boeing. I'm actually in a nice quiet neighborhood in St. Charles right under the flight path for planes landing at Lamb…

These aluminum extrusions are called T-Slot, or as McMaster-Carr calls it, "T-Slotted Framing". Very common in industry; we have it everywhere on the Boeing factory floors. Not che…

Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, se…

Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very Texas. It's not the sort of thing I'd think would happen here. Sm…

A month or so back I was hanging out at the IT center waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (my Windows bootloader went "missing or invalid") when an engineer brought his laptop in…

Literally next door. Maybe one other building between Autodesk and the Bay Model. When I started in 1990, most of engineering at Autodesk was in 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way in Saus…

I haven't been there in awhile. Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place. Great to see i…

I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherbo…

Normally I wouldn't think the American public would be so shallow. But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside…

Yeah, on the Cummins the ECU is mounted on the intake side of the engine away from the exhaust and turbo and toward the front right under the fuel injection pump so it gets lots of…

My RAM truck with the Cummins diesel engine has the engine computer mounted on the engine block. You'd think the heat and exposure to the elements would make that a bad idea, but I…

Just use plain text files. Anything backed by a service is going to hurt over a long enough time frame. And it seems that time frame gets shorter every year. I still use email draf…

I wrote a ton of AutoLISP back in the day to do similar things to generate well logs for environmental and geotechnical reports. Fun stuff. In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and g…

Well, yeah. Both crypto and AI require places with cheap power to rack and stack compute and GPUs. It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the lo…

Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale …

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical …