In Defense Of My Junk Box: Married to An Engineer

Just about every electrical or mechanical engineer I know has some kind of junk box—a treasure trove of parts accumulated over the years, all saved with the hope they might come in handy someday. My own junk box started at a very early age. Too young to work a...

Justifying My AI Hobby By Finding Blaze A Forever Home

From my early teenage years, technology has always played a significant part in my life. Though I was late to the party, I joined the technology revolution as the world transitioned from vacuum tubes to transistors in 1963. By 1975, I found myself in the midst of the...

Maximizing Profit: Reliable Designs Or Frequent Repairs?

When I retired, my wife strongly suggested I put some of that newfound free time into cleaning rather than gaining another level in my current game. My trusty old vacuum cleaner, however, decided it wasn’t up to the increased workload and promptly broke a belt. Of...

From the Doghouse

A look at dogs having fun

Poser Gallery

My gallery of pictures I’ve created in Poser

Nature by Carol

A look at the less technical side of life

Terms and Conditions, a Caution

Terms and Conditions, a Caution

Every once in a while I read something that screams for a post. That’s the case with this news story, http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/02/tech/couple-fined-for-negative-review/. I’m not going to repeat all the details but it describes a couple who placed and order for a...

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Synergy And A New Beginning

Synergy And A New Beginning

Synergy is a great word that’s become a victim of its own sexiness. A few years ago it seemed to be an unwritten rule that this word must be used in corporate mission statements everywhere. I sure you’ve seen statements like "Utilizing the synergy of our multiple...

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Time Travel, We All Do It

Time Travel, We All Do It

Read enough science fiction and sooner or later the subject of time travel will come up. I think we all agree that time travel is not only possible, it's inevitable. We are always traveling forward in time at a more or less fixed rate. I say more or less because our...

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Random Posts

  • Musings On Why Organizations Fail and How You Can Prevent ItMusings On Why Organizations Fail and How You Can Prevent It
    Just after Easter, a friend told me about attending the last meeting of a club he had helped start almost 42 years ago. Their downfall was caused by a simple problem, nobody wanted to serve as officers. I suspect there were other factors too but considering the state of our government, we can certainly see […]
  • Opinionbypen Hits 10,000 ViewsOpinionbypen Hits 10,000 Views
    Sometime this last week, Opinionbypen had its 10,000th page view. For those of you who, like myself, love numbers, that’s an average of 556 views a month or 18 views a day.  I’m proud of that number because those are page views by real humans, not bots. If I counted visits from bots the number […]
  • I’m Stuck But I Have A Bold And Cunning PlanI’m Stuck But I Have A Bold And Cunning Plan
    Have you ever started something but try as you might you can’t finish it? It doesn’t matter if it’s a book that you hope will get better, a movie that always puts you to sleep or the first blog post of a new year, we all been in that position. Come to think of it, […]

Random Posts

  • Agility and Your DogAgility and Your Dog
    A long time ago we acquired a Chow because someone had abandoned her and her sister near our place as puppies. My wife found her  whimpering in the barn, hiding from a storm we were having. We called her Inka because she was completely black, including her tongue. We had several other dogs at the […]
  • UdacityUdacity
    When I signed up for CS101: Building a Search Engine at www.Udacity.com, I had no idea what to expect. I’ll admit what I really wanted to sign up for was CS373:Programming a Robotic Car. After a careful examination of the requirements for CS373, I realized I’d always wanted to build a search engine. Udacity is […]
  • Prusa MK3S, Built In Self Destruct Or Swiss Cheese Theory of FailurePrusa MK3S, Built In Self Destruct Or Swiss Cheese Theory of Failure
    I’m writing to warn all the Prusa MK3S owners about a built in self destruct mechanism in your printer. Avoiding it is easy, not avoiding it cost me over $100 and took my printer down for over a week. It all started when I started seeing bare copper traces on my heat bed. For those […]

Random Posts

  • How To Talk With An EngineerHow To Talk With An Engineer
    Last week when I described my current systems engineer position as being all about communications, I almost lost my wife to uncontrollable laughter. When she finally recovered, all she said, while still trying to catch her breath was, “how do you stay employed?” She has a point.  If you have an engineer in your life, you […]
  • My Experience With Ramsay Hunt SyndromeMy Experience With Ramsay Hunt Syndrome
    This is not something I wanted to write about but as I said in Questing, I’m trying to be more open and share my experiences. I told myself that once this was not a major factor in my life I would write about it. About 8 weeks ago I had a slight earache. Well, not […]
  • The Law of ResonanceThe Law of Resonance
    The Law of Resonance by Jeff Scholl The Law of Resonance is defined as, “Our life force will react to adjust on every stimulus or force that it is being exposed to within the body, mind, emotions or spirit. If the force of stimulus is stronger than the inner life force present, the bodies are […]

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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

  • On The Design Of My New Business CardOn The Design Of My New Business Card
    About 40 years ago, during a period of self-discovery, I chanced upon a handwriting analysis book. Naturally, I used the book to analyze my own handwriting. What hidden aspects of my personality might it reveal? We won’t go into the gritty details, but the picture it painted was not a …
  • How My Quest Took Me To Red Sneakers And ScrivenerHow My Quest Took Me To Red Sneakers And Scrivener
    In my plan for 2016 I mentioned that I was going to get serious about my writing. I shared a few of my stories on Amazon WriteOn and received a rather lackluster response. The overwhelming lack of response made it obvious I’m not a natural. Well, it’s not like I expected …
  • The Rise and Fall of a Power ZombieThe Rise and Fall of a Power Zombie
    We’ve all been told about the coming zombie apocalypse. We’ve seen the movies of the zombie hordes but the reality is here, now and it’s far uglier. Forget the mindless searching for brains and more brains. That particular species of zombies accidentally migrated to Washington D.C. and died of starvation. …
  • The Use and Misuse of Metrics, What Do They Mean?The Use and Misuse of Metrics, What Do They Mean?
    I was showing a book in my Kindle library to a fellow engineer this week when he noticed the time to the end of the chapter was two minutes and fifteen seconds. The book was interesting to him but the use of reading metrics was even more interesting, not because of …
  • BYOD, a Rallying Cry For RevolutionBYOD, a Rallying Cry For Revolution
    BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, is a relatively new term. It reflects the desire of employees to use their own tablet, iPad or Android device rather than using the device provided by their company. I’ve been here before and it’s nothing less than a revolution, not one of violence or …
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