From the Doghouse
A look at dogs having fun
Poser Gallery
My gallery of pictures I’ve created in Poser
My Science Fiction and Fantasy stories
Stories I’ve written
Nature by Carol
A look at the less technical side of life
Re-occurring Bills, Do The Companies Just Not Get It?
It’s that time of the month again, the week most of my bills come due. Prior to retirement, I gave very little thought to making insurance payments as they were automatically extracted from my paycheck. Retirement brought monthly insurance bills. Just thinking about...
Solar Powered Wyze Cameras, An Engineering Evolution
As with most engineering projects, it started with a need. In my case, as soon as I got high-speed Internet, I eagerly added several cameras. I chose Wyze because they are affordable, don’t require a monthly subscription, and offer excellent picture quality. Wanting...
Have A Message? Viewing Conversation As A Value Transaction
I've embedded an audio version of this post. Of course, the voice is AI generated but please let me know how you feel about this feature. Thanks! Ever get out of a meeting thinking that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back? When you consider it, getting someone to...
Is Your Team Always Missing Deadlines? It Might Be You!
Perhaps it’s my background in electronic design speaking, but I’ve always regarded time as sacrosanct. Consider this: when you're designing a system that operates at 100 MHz, tolerating a signal that "usually" arrives on time is out of the question. Too late, or even...
Adjusting To Retirement After A Lifetime Of Employment, A Journey
For all the fears I had about retirement, I wasn't expecting the real problems. First, there was the insurance dilemma. It turns out that my wife was too young for Medicare, and there's no such thing as a family plan that covers both of us. I ended up juggling two...
Company Buyouts, Good For The Consumer?
You're justifiably proud of your waffle maker. It was a lesser-known brand, yet it cost half as much as its competitors, and its brilliant texture sensor guaranteed you got flawless waffles every time. Unfortunately, as soon as you plugged it in, someone mistook your...
Random Posts
A Plateau In Blogging, Which Direction From Here?When I was teaching fencing, my colleagues and I often observed an interesting phenomenon. If a student made it through the beginning classes, odds were good that they would usually stick with it for another six months. It was at that six month mark that students started to drop out again. It’s also around this […]
2023, I’m Very Glad To See It End2023 is now firmly in my rear view mirror and I have zero feelings of nostalgia. It was tough losing two of our beloved dogs to cancer. Sundae had been a part of our family for 14 years, leaving a significant void, and even though Hilde was with us for just under a year, her […]
The Plan, How My Wife Became a GamerIf you read my About section, you will see my comment about being the envy of Gamers everywhere by having a wife who games. This is very true. There’s nothing like having spent the last two hours painfully making your way to the boss mob, only to have your raid leader say, “Sorry, wife aggro” […]
Random Posts
Communication, Google and a Nexus 7Communications has always been an important issue for me. Over my career, I’ve had to fix more problems caused by poor communications than anything else. These problems can be caused by someone assuming that their audience is in possession of more information than their actions suggest or by not responding to the question. If I […]
A Futuristic Design Concept, REPTILEToday’s post doesn’t fall into any of my normal categories. It won’t educate you or make you think about an issue. It won’t give you a better idea of how to cope with an engineer (although you will see the imagination that my wife has to put up with). No, today I’m sharing a futuristic […]
Why Does A Request For Advice So Often Result In An Argument?If there’s anything that can cause conflict between my wife and me, it’s a misunderstanding of my role in life when she makes a request for advice. Hmm, I said that poorly, let me give an example. You’re sitting at your computer, trying to understand why your 3D printer is printing spaghetti instead of the […]
Random Posts
Why Are We Allowing The News Media To Manipulate Our Opinions?I know, I vowed no more political blogs but that was last year. This really isn’t about politics anyway. It’s about the manipulation of our society by the news media. I believe the divisiveness we see today is driven largely by this manipulation. Remember the recent headlines about a high school student harassing a Native […]
I’m Sick And Tired Of Hearing Politicians Say Follow The DataI’m fairly sure it’s a conspiracy but since no one else is warning you, I feel that it’s my duty to warn you about the highly toxic nature of tomatoes. We’re all fortunate that tomatoes are becoming less toxic over time but their deadly nature cannot be denied. Of course, I don’t expect you to […]
A CelebrationThis is my 20th post on this blog. I realize that raw numbers don’t really mean anything unless you attach importance to them but 20 is a significant number and I felt it should be celebrated. My big problem was how do you celebrate a blog? I’m sure there are some people out there who […]
From the Doghouse -It’s all about them
A look at dogs having fun!
Short Stories
With posts like these, ever wonder what kind of fiction I would write?
Random Posts
Creating An Alexa Podcast For OpinionByPen Using Amazon PollyIn my previous post I took you on my journey to add Amazon’s speech synthesizer Polly to Opinionbypen. I have to admit I did this as an excuse to play with some of the emerging technologies offered by Amazon. Although there were a few minor obstacles along the way, Amazon …
Space Heaters, They Need Lots of PowerIt’s winter again in Texas. Most of the time, unless you’re a farmer, that statement means very little to us but every once in a while it gets below freezing and we break out the space heaters. These little heaters are very useful in heating greenhouses, in heating parts of …
Re-occurring Bills, Do The Companies Just Not Get It?It’s that time of the month again, the week most of my bills come due. Prior to retirement, I gave very little thought to making insurance payments as they were automatically extracted from my paycheck. Retirement brought monthly insurance bills. Just thinking about the cost raises my blood pressure by …
What Idiot Designed This? In Defense Of EngineersEver try to fix something and ask yourself, “what idiot designed this?” It’s certainly happened to me often enough. Yeah, a few of those times it was one of my own designs but we’re not going to discuss those today. Before I get too far into this post let me …
History, How To Reduce Events Into Meaningless DataHistory, we know what that means, we’ve endured hours of study on the subject but we’re missing the point. Not only that but the scholars and teachers abandoned us long ago. I fully subscribe to the fact that history repeats itself and we can best understand our future by studying …